Jay Garfield: Buddhist objections to idealism

First of all, just thank you so much for meeting with me again.

Not a problem. Um, yeah, as I said last time, I got so much out of your course, and then I've been re-watching the last conversation we had together and got so much out of that as well. Uh, highlighted how little I know, which is always a great thing to discover, obviously. The last call was a debate between you and Bernardo Castro. Um, it quickly transpired that not only do you have very different views about um the ultimate nature of reality, but also even how to approach the question. Um, and so, and just to say before we go in, I'm not a professional philosopher, so this conversation will be probably at a much slower pace, which I'm hoping will make it beneficial to other people who also aren't professional philosophers, and they can uh keep up and uh at at the level of my understanding. Um, and yeah, maybe before we dive into some a couple of big questions which maybe frame the conversation, uh, which is your view on the point of this kind of conversation in the first place, the the point of doing philosophy and the potential benefit of this philosophical view in particular?

Well, I think the point of doing philosophy is that philosophy can be fundamentally transformative. Um, it can reshape the way that we understand reality; it can reshape the way that we understand ourselves and who we are; it can reshape the way we understand our relationships to other people; and it can transform our reactive attitudes. Um, can make us either more angry or less angry, depending on the kind of philosophy we do; more patient or less patient, perhaps, depending on the kind of philosophy we do. But as cognitive beings and as beings whose cognition is so saturated with language and whose um existence is so um essentially social, by talking with one another, by reading, by thinking, by debating, um we develop a far deeper understanding and transform who we are. So that's why we do philosophy.

Why think about the self and the person? Well, um, those are some of the most important issues we could possibly think about: What kind of being are we? Um, how should we live our lives? Um, what kind of reactions, habitual reactions, make sense, and which ones are harmful, and so forth. And so I don't think it's necessarily just a kind of idle speculative exercise, though one could approach it that way perhaps and enjoy enjoy it as much as one enjoys doing crossword puzzles or sudokus. But I think that it's also um useful as a mechanism for self-transformation and self-investigation.

And my understanding of the—which again is very limited, just to acknowledge it up front—my understanding of the Buddhist perspective on this is that suffering is essentially linked to some kind of clinging, which is again linked to the wrong view of how things are, how things exist. And these teachings on emptiness, when perceived correctly, automatically or are correlated with a reduction in clinging and hence a reduction in suffering. Is that your view as well, or do you…?

Yeah, that's the hope, so. Um, let me spell it out in maybe a little bit more detail than that, not much, but just to make sure we have all the little pieces of the puzzle in place. Um, all of this is coming from the second noble truth, the truth of the origin of suffering. Um, and the account there is that the two proximal causes of suffering, the immediate causes, are attachment and aversion. Um, we either suffer because we don't get what we want, right? Um, and we also sometimes suffer from the fact that we've got what we don't want. Um, the first one's kind of the basis of the blues, and the second one is the basis of country music. Um, so sometimes you've got stuff you don't want, and that makes you suffer—like headaches and too much work to do and Republican administrations and things like that. Um, and that that g leads to aversion, which leads to suffering; and sometimes you can't get what you do want—pleasure, friendship, happiness in life, success in your projects—and that leads to suffering as well.

Now, the Buddhist diagnosis of attachment and aversion is that, as egocentric attitudes, these both derive from a whole complex of what's usually called something like primal confusion, sometimes ignorance, but I think ignorance isn't the right term for this. We want to think about it as a fundamental confusion about the nature of reality, and that fundamental confusion has a number of different dimensions. One dimension is a dimension um that you refer to, you know, seeing things as non-empty versus empty; that is, thinking that things have their properties intrinsically—the things we want are intrinsically valuable, the things to which we're averse are intrinsically unpleasant. Um, and one can reduce the attachment and the aversion by seeing these things as uh less reified and seeing their consequences as less important, but that's only a piece of it. Another piece is the piece that's often called self-grasping; that is, thinking of myself as having a kind of core uh special identity, subjectivity, and agency, and hence not thinking of myself as an interdependent part of the world, but seeing myself as the subject of the world, as somebody who acts on the world. Um, and you hear this even in very sophisticated conversation where people will talk about the relationship between the brain and the world or the uh—and you wonder, well, last I heard, brains were in the world—but there's this immediate kind of um autistic subconscious tendency to pull ourselves away from the world and then to see everything else in response to us. So it's often called the two-fold self-grasping of I and mine: I grasp myself as this particular individual, and everything else only as it pertains to me. So I think of my enemies, my friends, my views, somebody else's views, and so forth, and develop attachment and aversion as a response to that as well, because when we posit ourselves as selves, we end up cultivating a great deal of attachment to who we are and then, depending upon the relation in which we see things to ourselves, further attachment or else aversion.

So the um the point that I really wanted to make there is that while you're absolutely right in the broad characterization, if what we're talking about is ourselves and persons in the metaphysics of identity, that has a very special role in the context of primal confusion, and that's because we tend to uh center the world on ourselves, and that's something that is useful to displace. And by doing that, the Buddhist sensibility is that we can really fundamentally transform our affective and behavioral lives as well—not reacting out of an egoistic self-concern but acting out of a recognition of interdependence and belonging, seeing ourselves not as agents who act on the world but as beings in the world.

And framed within this idea of one of the purposes of philosophy as transformational and a reduction of suffering, would you say that well, as long as someone has a philosophy that is doing that for them in that moment, that's good enough? Or because obviously um uh the debate you and Bernardo had was quite rigorous, and that tradition goes back a long time where people felt it was important to get this right.

Yes, that's right. Is it important to get it right in the same way as it can feel important to win a game of chess? Or is it important because oh, getting it right will ultimately reduce a layer of suffering that wouldn't be reduced if we don't get it right? Does the does the question make sense?

It does, and it's the latter. Um, we're not getting it right to score points, and it's not that anything roughly in the ballpark, anything that reduces some suffering, is enough. Um, because the Buddhist analysis is that our life is entirely permeated by suffering. Um, it might be worth talking a bit about that a little bit because we jumped right into the second truth and we left out the first truth. Um, and the first truth is the truth that the world is permeated by suffering. Now, that suffering in turn is um described in three different ways or three or classified in three different ways is the better way to put it. The most obvious kind and one that's, you know, perfectly common is what we call evident suffering—the suffering that's really obvious to us—and that includes things like headaches and sore throats; it includes getting old and it includes being tired; it includes, you know, being bored or having somebody annoy you or shout at you; um, being stuck in traffic, being stuck in an airplane—all of those things, those are just the ordinary slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Um, and the world is deeply permeated with that, right? Um, people are suffering terribly in many ways. I mean, think about people in Gaza or people in Ukraine or in Sudan, but you can also think about people in, you know, the United States or the United Kingdom; you can think about people who are cold or hot, people who are poor, people who are dying, uh people whose children are dying, people who know somebody whose house was consumed by fire, people whose house was consumed by fire—all of those are sources of suffering. And so the Buddha's beginning insight was that suffering isn't just an occasional thing that we sometimes encounter but that we are encountering it all the time, even at that level of suffering. Now, sometimes my students say, "Oh, that's just such a downer." And it's not really true, because sometimes I feel really happy, you know, I'm with my friends and having a good time or watching a good movie or, you know, smoking some good dope or whatever it is that makes you have a good time. And the response to that—it's a very very nice one—um is that this shows us that even pleasure in samsara is a source of suffering. The 8th-century Buddhist philosopher Shantideva puts it really beautifully; he says pleasure in samsara, in the ordinary world, is like licking honey from a razor blade. Um, and it's a really nice um nice point to make, because here's what you want to say to somebody who says, "Hey, don't tell me I'm always suffering; I'm really happy right now." You say, "Well, do you not know what's happening in Sudan? Do you not know what's happening in Gaza? Do you not know how many people are dying really awful deaths right now?" Um, you have a choice: You either care about that, in which case, even if you're not noticing it, you're suffering because you're sad and you're sympathetic; or else you don't care at all about that, and if you don't care about that at all, then you're suffering from being an um—which is a kind of technical way of saying you're suffering from not being the kind of person you really want to be. Um, and so that level of just ordinary suffering, the Buddha argued, is everywhere in our existence.

Second level of suffering, one that underlies that one, um is the suffering of change, suffering of transformation, and that's the fact that everything that we enjoy decays after a while um or becomes a source even of of suffering. So, you know, think about youth; it's a really nice thing, but trust me, it decays, um and you become an old guy, and then you start hurting a lot. Um, beauty, it decays too; friendships break up, relationships break up; um, good economies turn sour; um, jobs that are great at first become boring after a while; that first scoop of ice cream when you pull that, you know, 2-L tub of ice cream out of the freezer at late at night tastes really good, but by the time you get to the bottom it's kind of sickening. Um, so this is all part of the suffering of change—that things don't remain intrinsically pleasurable; they start that way maybe, but they don't they don't end up that way, and even when they appear to be, they may themselves be real sources of suffering. But the third one is the really important one here, and that's the suffering of pervasive condition, and that refers to the fact that we are not in control of our own lives. Um, we might be doing everything we can to stay healthy, and a drunk driver might kill us one day. Um, we might have, you know, do everything we can to lead a really productive life, and then we discover that through a stupid error we did something that caused tremendous harm to people. Um, we live in a world in which we have very limited control over our futures. Um, a geneticist, a doctor of mine, once said that our most important responsibility is to choose our grandparents carefully. Um, that might be right; that's how we can make sure that we become the kinds of people we want to and lead the kinds of lives we want, but it's damn difficult to do. And it's that suffering of pervasive conditioning, that being out of control and subject to causes and conditions all the time, that's really kind of in the background of all of this. So if we think of ourselves as autonomous agents, as selves who are different from the world, who aren't causally connected to the world, then we're going to constantly suffer from the disjuncture between what we think we are and what we actually are. So that anything short of dislodging the illusion of selfhood, the illusion of autonomy, the illusion of independence, anything short of that is going to leave that fundamental level of suffering in place.

And um, my—again, I'm uh I'm also a beginner, let's say, in idealism or Advaita, but I've been exposed to it more, let's say I'm a little bit more familiar with it. Um, so just to frame everything I say, if it sounds like I'm I'm not making myself out to be an authority, I'm just um expressing my understanding of it at this point. My my understanding of um uh that that kind of mind-only idealism is that it also it also negates a kind of personal selfhood. At the most, I could say I am an epiphenomenal arising in a in a large vast expanse of consciousness, but there's no me here controlling what's happening. In other words, it speaks to the same kind of suffering you're speaking to.

Yep. But if I've understood you, um, the especially the Prasangika approach to this sees consciousness as also something that's empty, to be seen through, that is dependent, that doesn't have inherent existence, etc., etc. Are you saying that there's a level of suffering almost that comes with people, comes for people who take this mind-only view from the Prasanga view again? And feel free to reframe my question if you feel like it could be reformulated.

Sure, that makes more sense. No, that's really useful, and in fact, your question is interestingly ambiguous between two questions, um, and I just want to pull them apart for a minute because it might be fun to think about both of them. I'm not sure. One, the way you you began formulating it was about Advaita Vedanta and the distinction between the Buddhist perspective and the Advaita perspective. The second one, when you started using the term mind-only, that's a term that's often used to denote a particular school of Buddhist philosophy, the Yogachara-Chittamatra view. Now, the interesting thing is that the opponents of the Yogachara within Buddhism often call it crypto-Advaita, and lots of orthodox Indian philosophers who are critical of the Advaitans charge them with being crypto-Buddhists, by which they mean mind-only Buddhists. So there is a tradition of thinking about Yogachara and Advaita in the same way, but Yogachara and Advaita are also subtly and importantly different, despite a lot of overlap in outlook. Um, and so I want to be careful when I use the word mind-only; I I'll be using it in reference to the Buddhist Chittamatra-Yogachara school. Um, and if I'm using Advaita, I'd—we talk about the Advaita school specifically. The the biggest difference between them, and it really is an important difference, um, is the question of um our relationship to Brahman or some Atman. It's important to Advaita that what—where the Advaita comes from—is our union with Brahman or a kind of cosmic self or cosmic soul. Um, whereas in Yogachara, like in any Buddhist schools, there is no Atman, right? These are Anatta, no-self schools. And so when Yogachara talk about reality being constituted by mind-only, they're making a phenomenological point, not a metaphysical point. The Advaita Vedantins are talking about the fundamental nature of reality—that reality really is Brahman, and that the apparent reality of interdependent things and personal and personal selves, as you pointed out correctly, is Maya, that's illusion. So it all relies on a Mayatva distinction or an illusion-reality distinction that distinguishes the world as it appears to us from the unitary reality or the non-dual reality of Brahman. Um, the Yogachara school is also grounded on the idea that all of our experience is illusion, and that's where the deep parallel comes in. Um, and remember that in in any Indian context when we talk about illusion, we talk about Maya, we're always talking about the difference between the way something exists and the way it appears; we're not talking about the appearance of the non-existent; we're talking about a disjuncture between appearance and reality. So when we take classic examples like the rope and the snake and we say the rope appears to me to be a snake in the dim light, it's important that it's a rope, an actual rope, that that appears to be a snake. When we talk about a mirage as being an illusion, we don't mean there are no mirages; we mean that mirages are refraction patterns of light um that appear to be water. So in the context of Advaita Vedanta, we have a world that appears to be existent but is in fact nothing but the manifestation or the play of Brahman. In the Yogachara perspective, on the other hand, um the illusion is described slightly differently. The um illusion under which we lead our lives is that there's a firm subject-object duality, with my subjectivity on one side and the object on another. So far it sounds like like Advaita. Um, but that part of that subject-object duality is this reflexive attitude that the world that appears to me, that appears in my consciousness, is a faithful copy of an external world. And when we think about that, that really is how we experience things. So when I'm looking at you right now, you know, represented on my computer screen, I'm thinking, okay, that's what a mirror looks like; now I finally know what he looks like. Um, and that's what is real looks like. Um, but Yogachara point out: All we're ever getting is the world as it shows up, mediated by our particular kind of sensory consciousness and sense organs. My dog, who's sitting right behind me, may look at this screen and have a completely different understanding of what's going on here. He's got different color vision; he hasn't learned to project pixels into people yet, um, and things like that. And so now if we were to ask the really dumb question, who sees the world correctly, me or my dog, we recognize how wrong that is. There's a world as it shows up for me and a world as it shows up for my dog, a different world as it shows up for different kinds of beings or for people with different sensory faculties. So the Yogachara position is that the um the illusion is the illusion of the independence of our consciousness on the world and vice versa, whereas in fact we have a non-dual total immersion in the world. And the sense in which it's mind-only is the sense in which the only thing we have access to is how the world shows up in our minds, not anything beyond that. So it's a slightly different project from Advaita Vedanta; they share, there's many overlaps and insights, but this one is focusing specifically on our experience, not on the nature of the world. And so—and it's developing in the context of a Buddhist system in which mind and external world are empty of any intrinsic existence, whereas for Advaita, Brahman is anything but empty; it's the fullness of existence. And so there's a fundamental difference in the mode of existence of Brahman and Maya.

So that I wanted to start out by kind of drawing that that set of distinctions so that that things make sense. And so I guess what I would say is yes, the Madhyamaka position is a different one from the Advaita position, and from the Madhyamaka position we're setting ourselves up for trouble um in Advaita because we're setting ourselves up to deprecate the status of the actual empirical world that we live in, um to not take it seriously enough and to take our um our inner existence too seriously. Um, and so to draw this massive distinction between consciousness and everything else, and that leads us to a kind of attachment to our conscious states, to the view that we're kind of immediately involved with them, and the deprecation of the external world is something that we can just kind of let go of and not think about too much. And a lot of Buddhists worry that what that will do is lead to a lack of ethical consciousness because we fail to see ourselves as actually connected to the people around us, actually connected to the environment around us, and are able to say that's just an illusion, let's get to the important stuff, that's Brahman.

Yeah, so if I can circle back to that in a in a moment, I have something to ask about that. Um, but just to drop in that question again, it it seems to me, unless I've misunderstood, all three schools agree that there's no personal inherent self that's separate from an external world in some way. But you're saying there's the danger in some views of a reduction in empathy or the suffering or existence of other experiences, even though if there's no separate individual self over there, there is an experience, there is suffering, and a more complete understanding would evolve an empathy for that experience.

That's right. And the term that um is used in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition is that that's the phenomenon of negating too much. It's one thing to say of my good friends that they don't exist intrinsically, that they aren't selves, that they're persons; it's another thing to say they don't actually exist at all and they're not worth worrying about.

Makes sense to…?

Yeah, total sense. Yeah, it it could, you know, like most—I don't know, most—probably like many people uh in the modern age where I haven't uh developed my thinking within a strict lineage or school—has been a mishmash of teachers and different YouTube videos and, you know, who knows what else—in my my own exploration. Um, the uh flavor of—the reason I've kept switching terms is because normally call it non-duality, but you said all schools have non-duality, so maybe I'll I'll park this question and just check: I understand non-duality in the—well, I have an understand—my understanding of non-duality in the Advaita sense is there's no—it appears like things appear to consciousness, but they're one.

That's right. What does it mean in the Prasangika or Madhyamaka context?

Good. In the Madhyamaka context, what it means is really two things: On the metaphysical level, it means that we as thinkers, we as agents, we as perceivers, don't stand outside of the world looking at it, acting on it, thinking about it, but rather we're simply part of the world. And so that when I'm thinking about—when when I'm perceiving you, the apparent duality—which really is there, that here I am and then I've got this kind of uh—and that you exist only as my object—is falsified by the fact that the Amir I'm seeing is an Amir uh represented in my consciousness, and that my seeing involves a complicated causal interaction between us, mediated by the internet and various bits of software and things like that, but that there's not a fundamental ontological difference between us; I'm no realer than you are. Um, so that's the metaphysical end of the non-duality—that we're all part of the same dependently originated manifold of interdependent phenomena. The um epistemological side of that um is one that takes us closer now to the to the insights of Advaita, um, and that is that when I experience you, I experience a duality of subject and object. So what I experience is immediacy with respect to my own self-knowledge, but mediation with my respect to my knowledge of you, and I experience you as existing outside the you that I perceive, as existing outside of my consciousness, and that I'm just registering you as you are. And what I'm forgetting is that what's going on now is the Amir who I'm um of whom I'm aware is one that's constructed in my brain in response to um our conversation and auditory stimulation, the video stimulation from my screen, um the way my nerves work, the way my eyes work, the way my ears work. And so what I'm experiencing is obviously an experience, um which I'm confusing with a direct registering of somebody outside of me. And so that's—that there's a non-duality in my experience that I don't always notice or even maybe sometimes ever notice, um and replace it with a duality. And so Yogachara argues that we can cultivate um a deeper appreciation and understanding of our own…

Experience by appreciating it that non-duality. So to come back to the, um, what I was—I was saying earlier, my personal experience of, um, of contemplating and deepening into this idea of, uh, which might not be exactly Indian Advaita, and it might not be exactly the other flavors, but my, um, understanding of it has been okay, uh, existence is a is a movement in a greater mind, and the subject that I am is that same subject. Henceforth, the experience that you're having, as I deepened into that way of looking, let's say, the experience that you're having, and the experience that people in Gaza are having, and the people in other places are having, are my experiences. And so my my personal evolution with that was, um, an increase in empathy. It wasn't the the danger that you were pointing out didn't seem to come about in this instance, although I can see how I have met people who have taken that route of, like, well, it's all just illusion, and they don't even take care of their own bodies as they might have otherwise. But, um, yeah, so just wondering if you have a comment or reflection on that.

No, I think that's a good thing. I think that all of these traditions are, in fact, capable, you know, if if handled with the right deal of care, um, in uh, making us better people, um, reducing our suffering and improving us as agents, um, to reduce suffering. Um, so I'm not personally, you know, in deprecating the Advaita tradition—hell, I work on that tradition and have enormous respect for colleagues there—um, or, you know, elevating the Buddhist tradition over it. Um, I was only sort of talking about how canonically, uh, Buddhists would say, yeah, we're similar to those guys in these respects, but here's what we worry about, right? And from the Buddhist perspective, the worry in Advaita is always that it deprecates the conventional and reifies an ultimate mind. I mean, the other is a metaphysical issue, right? And that is that Buddhists really don't think it makes sense to talk about, um, a single ultimate mind, um, because they think that that, um, eludes, um, the tremendous difference between the perspectives of individual sentient beings in the world, um, and that it's hard to make sense of that. Now that's, you know, that is a fight that Advaitans and Buddhists have been having for the last roughly 2,000 years. But, um, the Buddhists always say, yeah, yeah, yeah, the Advaitans get Anatta right on the personal level, but then they get it wrong on the cosmic level. And they kind and the Advaitans said, "Yeah, but don't you think they're a, you know, these these Buddhas?" And the Buddhists say, "Yeah, yeah, but we just think they're ordinary sentient beings who have accomplished a lot, not that we're all identical to one of them." So you get fights going back and forth that way.

Uh-huh. And the concern from the Buddhist side is mainly an ethical one of, okay, the danger of that view is that it can end up with, uh, less ethical perspectives or less ethical behavior potentially.

Yeah, that's the big one. That's the bottom line. I mean, it's all they're pointing out that it gets there because of a metaphysical mistake. So there's also a metaphysical issue, but the real concern here is ethical, and is the claim on that side that it that it is a metaphysical mistake, and there's some kind of that can be proven in some way.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um, because, um, it requires, um, from the Buddhist standpoint, um, when we start really talking about Brahman, um, we've got to give Brahman two, um, contradictory qualities. One quality—and just to check, can we say Brahman is synonymous with what in English we might say ultimate consciousness?

Or?

Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah, that's just the Sanskrit term for the ultimate consciousness. Okay, just we could just do it in English and talk about ultimate consciousness, um, if.

Yeah, if which makes it easier, right? Um, just if if this ends up being released and people watch it who are less familiar with Sanskrit terms and.

Yeah, yeah, there's no reason why everybody should have to know Sanskrit terms. Um, probably it's a good idea not to, um, as my friend Richard Hayes, who's a great Sanskritist, once said, "Anybody smart enough to learn Sanskrit should be too smart to waste their life learning Sanskrit." He was joking, of course, but anyway, um, so, uh, fundamental cosmic consciousness, um, the Buddhists argue that to take it seriously you're giving it simultaneously two contradictory properties, um, one is the property of being an unchangeable, completely substantially real, um, independent and indescribable unity, and the second is saying, "Oh, yes, but in manifesting it manifests in time and constantly changing and subject to causes and conditions, um, and in multiplicity." And by the way, when we say that Brahman is, um, indescribable but is also the same as all these describable phenomena, hey, we're also describing it and contradicting ourselves. And so the Buddhists say that you're trying to have a particular kind of cosmic cake, um, and eat it bit by bit too, namely you're trying to have its kind of unity and immutability, but also its manifestation and particularity and change, which underlies its unity and immutability, and they argue that that's just that's just a deep metaphysical confusion. Either decide that you're in a complex interdependent world or decide that you're in a single unity, but if you decide that one then you'd better not posit any real change; you better not posit, um, distinction between sentient beings and so forth. And if you want this one, then you've got to get rid of intrinsic reality of everything, including Brahman.

So this is this is perfect because you set me up to ask a question that I've been wanting to hear the Buddhist perspective talk about for a long time, uh, because I'm sure you're familiar with the metaphor of, uh, gold and jewelry or waves and water, in which—and again, just I know that you know this, but just so anyone listening can, uh, very briefly follow along—uh, water, if I've understood it, water is used as a metaphor for, obviously, um, waves need water to exist, but water can continue to exist even when waves subside. Yeah, and so we can think of waves as an excitation of water, and water can take on many different configurations and many different patterns, but at no point is it anything other than water. So it's used as a metaphor for, okay, how can something be unchanging yet appear as so much change? The metaphor is waves and water, like, well, the water aspect of it, the consciousness aspect, that's always there, unchanging; nothing's really happened to the waterness of water, yet its movement shows up as waves, which at no point affect how much or how little or how watery the water is. So I'm sure this has come up in these debates before, and I but I haven't yet heard it, uh, addressed, so I'd love for you to do that now, um, and maybe to also just pin in, in case it's relevant in the last conversation we had, and I don't know if this has been part of the Buddhist debate, but or or if it's personal to you, you were saying you're very comfortable with contradiction, that that paradox is kind of allowed in your worldview, so it might be two different answers: your answer being comfortable with contradiction, uh, and the Buddhist one, which sounded like, well, we're not comfortable with that contradiction; you're kind of trying to say two things: it doesn't change and yet it clearly does.

Yeah, yeah, good. Um, lots of questions there. Um, do me a favor: if I manage to lose track of one and forget, you keep me honest.

I'll do my best.

The first one is about the, uh, the water and and waves metaphor, um, and like almost every important metaphor in the Indian philosophical tradition, the fun thing is that it appears both in Buddhist and non-Buddhist schools to make different points, um, and I'm just kind of footnoting that one occurs in the Yoga school as an analysis of how thought occurs in consciousness, um, but you're right, in the Advaita Vedanta school it's making a very different point. The Buddhists respond to that this way: they say, yes, um, you can take that metaphor of water as some kind of an ontological basis of the things that occur in it, but that basis, because things occur in it, is in fact constantly changing, um, so it's now water with one set of properties, now water with another set of properties, and Buddhists are kind of early believers in Leibniz's law, that is the identity of indiscernibles and the indiscernibility of identicals. So the view that if two things two things are identical, of course, then they're one thing if and only if they share all of their properties, right? So, for instance, we think about what we call identical twins; they're not literally identical; there are two of them, right? One of them is a few minutes older than another one; one of them is sitting to the left and the other one sitting to the right. And because they have different properties, they be they are different; they're different individuals. Um, but then we can talk about identity that is much stronger than that, and what I'd call real identity, so that if we say, um, you know, His Majesty King Charles, um, is the monarch of the United Kingdom, we're not saying he's a lot like the monarch of thei of the United Kingdom; that he looks just like the monarch of the United Kingdom, but that he it really just two names for the same thing. With identical twins, there are two things that share a lot of properties with monarchs and and and their the person who, uh, instantiates that; there's one thing described in two different ways. Now the Buddhists point out that in order to get that kind of unity and identity that you want out of Brahman, what you have to have is all the successive stages and manifestations of Brahman being identical to one another; they're not; they're similar, just as waves a wa the water without the waves is similar to water that's chopped up with waves; they're different moments of that water, um, and the difference is what you have to attend to. So what you lose is the indivisibility of Brahman; you lose the unity because the Brahman you've now got now is a changing Brahman; it's kind of what you might think of as a committee or a succession of Brahmans, and that's not what you wanted. Um, so that's how Buddhists respond to that deployment of that example.

Interestingly, when you see Yoga and Buddhists deploy that same example, and they talk about, um, our kind of fundamental levels of consciousness being like the water, um, that they're that are so deep that we can't see the bottom, but then when it's stirred by wind waves appear, and we become aware of the waves, those are our thoughts; they're not saying that that deep ocean is not changing; they're saying that that deep ocean or unconscious mind isn't accessible to introspection, but only when things get stirred up do we start thinking about what we're thinking and who we are. So it's a kind of very different use of that same metaphor.

Now you also pointed out that I'm somebody who's comfortable with contradictions, and a lot of, um, Indian philosophers, including a lot of Buddhist philosophers, are not. Now, footnote: some Buddhist philosophers are very comfortable with contradictions and some aren't, so throughout history.

Or is that more a modern phenomenon?

Yeah, um, especially from about the first century or BC on, um, so that when you look at classical Buddhist thought, I'm going to give you—I want to use these two terms very carefully: classical Buddhist logic and medieval Buddhist logic. Classical Buddhist logic is structured by what's—I'm going to use one Sanskrit term and then I'll then I will, uh, define it—what's called the *catuskoti*, or four corners. So it's a kind of lattice structure; like if people know a little bit of topology, um, it's like a Hasse diagram of, um, a diamond, um, so that we've got the truest thing is just things that are just true; we've also got things that are just false, but we've got things that are true and false, and things that are neither true nor false. And so whenever Buddhists try to go in in this classical period, try to understand the possible positions that we might need to consider, they always consider the possibility that a position is correct, that it's incorrect, both, and neither; or that say things exist, don't exist, both, or neither. Um, that same kind of representation of logical space, again a footnote, is the one that gets used in contemporary relevant logics and paraconsistent logics, and those are often the ones used in computer database reasoning. So weirdly, that classical Indian philosophy was rejuvenated in the middle of the 20th century and has become very influential in the 21st century.

Was the classical predate the medieval or the other way around?

Yeah, yeah, so now we're talking first, second century, but then what happens around the third, fourth century, um, Buddhists and non-Buddhists are involved in a lot of productive interchange, and they need kind of rules of the road for debate, and Indian philosophers kind of decide that the rules for the road for debate are the Nyaya logic, which Nyaya is one of the orthodox schools, and that's a school that does not tolerate contradiction at all; it's a category of logic that's very consistent, and that gets taken up in the Buddhist world by the people often called the logicians; I prefer epistemologists; the epistemological school of Dignāga, Dharmakīrti, and their followers, and that becomes dominant through medieval Buddhism, kind of till the end of Buddhism in India. So we're talking from about the third or fourth century to about the, uh, ninth or tenth century, and um, that's the, uh, the logic that kind of moves into Tibet. Um, that earlier paradox-tolerating logic, though, gets carried off into China, um, where when Daoists, who were also big believers in paradox and contradiction, saw it, they said, wow, uh, we know how to talk to you guys. And so when you look at Chan tradition or the Zen tradition, you see a certain love of paradox that you don't find in the, um, in the South Asian tradition and the Central Asian tradition. A group of us wrote a book about this recently, by the way; I'll try to sell the book now, called *Can't Be Said: Paradox and Contradiction in East Asian Thought*, um, and it sort of talks about this history of the, uh, embrace of contradiction and paradox. Having said all of that, though, I want to come back to your original question, um, and just so just so I can like piece together another, um, part of the puzzle of history: Kāṣyapa and Prasangika.

They're accepting contradiction, or they're not?

Kāṣyapa does not, um, does not at all.

Nāgārjuna, um, who Kāṣyapa takes himself to be following, I think was acceptance of the possibility. Interesting; he uses the *catuskoti* all the time.

Great. Okay, so yeah, carry on with.

Doesn't doesn't like contradictions; that's not to say he doesn't isn't committed to them, but he he would be bothered by that fact. Um, but then if we get to somebody like Mikyö Dorje or Wangchuk Dorje, Tibetan philosophers in the Kagyu tradition who are following the Indian Mahāmudrā tradition, um, coming after Tsongkhapa, they are very happy with contradictions, very happy with paradox. So both of those strains we find in, um, in Tibetan thought, largely depending on how much people like the Dharmakīrti and Dignāga logic. Kāṣyapa likes it a lot; there's no contradictions. Mikyö, Wangchuk, um, they really like—they really don't like it; think it was a mistake, and they kind of go back to the earlier view. So that's still around.

Um, yeah, sorry, I interrupted what you.

Oh, that's fine, that's fine. I just didn't want to try to lose all of these great questions. So the the last one I think I had to come to was this one: um, when classical, um, and and medieval Indian philosophers are engaging with Vedānta and accuse it with a contradictory, um, understanding of Brahman, um, you could understand the for the rhetorical force of that accusation in two different ways: one is a lot of these these guys are people who had already rejected the idea of contradictions being true, but sometimes you yourself might think contradictions, um, can be true, but your opponent in an argument doesn't, so you want to say to them, look, you can't accept your own position because look, I'm going to show you your position commits you to contradictions, and you say there are no contradictions. So even though like I'd be kind of happy with that, you shouldn't accept that because of your logical principles. And I think the latter is what's often happening in these debates because they're debating with people who have a consistent logic; they say, "Look, if you really want to be consistent, you can't maintain this position."

Mhm. And so just, uh, again from my, uh, more or less naive view, it doesn't seem troubling, and I think I probably intuitively prefer consistency and non-contradiction, but you'll get over it.

Yeah, yeah, maybe things will change very soon. Yeah, I'm very inconsistent in other areas of my life, but let's find out. Um, it doesn't it doesn't bother me to think, again, if I come back to that water-wave analogy, to say, okay, there's an aspect of reality that never changes, and there's an aspect that does, and similar to water and wave, and it is just a metaphor; it doesn't map on exactly to reality, but it can help me scaffold to, like, oh, well, maybe reality, similarly, um, is non-dual; clearly water isn't separate from waves; you can't take the, um, the wave out of the water; you can't take, uh, the movements of consciousness, which you could consider all kinds of thought or all kind of like a dream, out of its substrate; yet the dreamness aspect, the kind of fundamental aspect of it, never changes, and yet it's full of change, and that apparent paradox I'm comfortable with if I lean on that metaphor of water and waves.

Yeah.

Um, to do that, though, um, I'm sort of taking the Buddhist side on this one now to keep the debate going, um, to do that you have to ignore relational properties, um, because no matter what you say about properties that remain the same rel—as long as you're in a domain of change, relational properties are going to constantly change, so that, um, things get older; it's now the water that was once that wave; now it's the water that was once both of those waves; and so once you introduce relational properties, um, then then you're in trouble, um, and so then it turns out that things really do, since they have different attributes, different properties at different times, they're different things. That's why Buddhists will argue, for instance—this is getting back to our beginning—at no self, that when we try to think of ourselves as selves, what we're grabbing on to is an unchanging core, but even if we thought that it didn't change in any other respect, we can say that there was a time we think I've got a self, that that was the self of a 5-year-old, and now it's the self of a 70-year-old. So to and to be the self of a 5-year-old or to be the self of a 70-year-old, those are different properties, so the same thing can't be both of those, so it's actually not the same thing, but a causal descendant of that earlier thing. And so you could say the same thing about the substratum of waves or substratum of consciousness: the moment you make room, the Buddhists will say, for the evolution of consciousness, then the substratum itself is constantly evolving in terms at least of its relational properties.

It could be I haven't understood you, um, but it's it feels to me I can agree with that and still sense there's something in the water aspect of the water which is constantly waving that is just water. Like if I if I honed in on what about the water has changed, well, its movement has changed, and it never stops changing, um, right? And that's to say that that water that's moving—this is the Buddhist—that that bit of water that's moving, any of it, um, is not the water that it was a moment ago; it's different because its properties have changed. And so the Buddhists are leaning very heavily on the importance of impermanence and temporality to say that once you appreciate the reality of impermanence, then you recognize that change is always change in identity; okay, similarity is retained, of course, and what is retained similarity that is and causal connectedness is is there, but that what we're seeing is a sequence of similar causally connected events and phenomena, not a single substratum that gets different properties at different times without itself changing, because to have different properties at different times is to change. And then I—this is, uh, this is hearsay now; this is not something I've understood or experienced—but I have physicist friends who tell me time is in question, and I have Buddhist meditation friends, meditator friends, who say, okay, in deep meditation you might have an insight which calls into question the nature of time, which I imagine would call into the nature call into question the nature of change, because I imagine change and time are required, so, um, was that, uh, is that relevant to what you're saying here, which is the the negation of a substrate of consciousness that has an aspect to it that never changes is negated through this idea of, well, there's constant change, but if time is negated, does that argument fall down, or is there a different argument that comes up to replace it?

No, it doesn't fall down at all. Patanjali considers this quite explicitly in, um, his *Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way*, when he argues for the emptiness of time, he says, here's what you don't want to do: you don't want to think of time, um, as an independent phenomenon that's prior to objects and is is the container of events, like the Newtonian scheme, um, rather you can only think of time as a system of relations between phenomena, um, and that's of course what we're discovering as we look at the way that time is emergent in general relativity and quantum gravity. Carlo Rovelli's work on that is really especially nice, and he ties it explicitly to the Buddhist analysis.

Okay, great. Um, just that not even time is permanent, and you can say, well, gee, who would have thought? So well, the answer is, say, Newton and most of us, um, intuitively, but when you recognize to say, well, time is permanent, you realize immediately how stupid that was, because that would mean it existed for all time, but now you've got a different time in which time is existing, and you're off on a regress, whereas if you say time is impermanent, and you seem to mean that it's changing in time, which doesn't make any sense, um, so time is neither impermanent nor permanent; well, time isn't the kind of thing to exist then, since anything that exists is either permanent or impermanent. So existence is the wrong way to think about time; instead, think of it as a structure of relations, but it's that structure of relations in virtue of which everything in time is impermanent, and that's how to think about all phenomena, right? From from.

Yeah, from a Buddhist perspective.

Yeah. Okay, brilliant. I can tell I think when I listen back to this conversation, some of this will start to to filter in. I can.

It's It's funny because I used to think of understanding as something that once I get it, I've got it. Uh, I used to be a dancer, um, but I've realized it's much more like dancing, where I might get a move one day and then it's gone the next, but it's a bit easier to re to to find it again, and I can feel like the clouds parting in my mind just briefly, oh, I think I might one day understand this.

That's a perfect metaphor, um, and also like dancing, I think that it's both cognitive and somatic at the same time, um, and requires a certain kind of spontaneity to manifest; as long as it's labored, it's not what you want; it's only when it becomes spontaneous and part of you that it's real understanding. That takes time. Um, so I have a few more questions if that's okay; I don't know how you are for time today.

And I'm I'm nicely unconstrained right now; leisurely.

Okay, well, in that case, I'll ask a more personal question, which I'm fairly confident comes up for more people than just me, which is, um, this is challenging, uh, you know, like dancing, it's it's hard, and um, I grapple with the these ideas and feel like I sometimes almost get them, uh, and then I'll find someone who appears to me much more, um, I think it's fair to say probably more intelligent, but certainly more has spent more time and more years investigating, who totally disagrees, uh, with the view that I'm just starting to understand. And similar to what you said at the beginning, well, I have two motivations: one, it's kind of fun to think, so sometimes it is entertainment, granted, uh, but also it has at times seemed like a route to, uh, suffer less, hopefully cause less harm, maybe increase well-being and flourishing in life, etc. But it's one of many directions that I could put my.

Efforts in life. In like, let's say maybe I live 80 years, where do I put my energy? Um, it feels like I could easily keep at just this subject for a lifetime of like, okay, who's got it more right, the Advaitans or the Buddhists? And you know, do you have any general comments on—not everyone's going to, including myself, probably not going to become a professional philosopher. I'm going to do my do my best. Um, yeah, and I want to have a good life, reduce suffering for myself and others, um, and increase well-being. Yeah, do you have any—

I think that's a wonderful question. I want to come at it in two different ways. I mean, one is, um, should everybody be a philosopher? And, and the, of course, the answer is no. And I want to talk about why not, um, beyond the obvious. Um, and the second question though is, can philosophical reflection be, um, helpful to everybody? And I think the answer to that is very different. I think the answer to that is yes.

Um, the thing about human beings, we are what I call elsewhere the hypersocial great ape. And by hypersocial, I don't just mean that we're really, really social, like more social than chimpanzees or bonobos, um, but I mean that we're the ape that really actively constructs its own social niche. Um, and then that niche actively shapes us to continue constructing that niche. There's this wonderful feedback between our social nature and the societies we create. And then, of course, only people with a really great social nature will make it in those societies; they become more social, and we get this hypersocial spiral. Um, because of that, we end up creating very complicated societies, and very complicated societies need massive collective skill sets. And massive collective skill sets, when you've got finite beings with only so much time to learn and only certain abilities and talents, mean that there's got to be specialization. Some people are heart surgeons, and some people are psychiatrists; some people are plumbers, and some people are electricians; and some people are philosophers, and some are historians, and some are artists, and some are art critics. And you just need all of those roles. And most of them are difficult enough that you need to devote a lifetime to, to them to become really good at them, and also to be able to do the other thing that's our job, which is to train the next generation to do them too, so that things don't crumble when, when we're gone.

Um, so some people are inclined to, um, philosophy as a vocation, and some people are not. Fortunately, very few are, because you don't need that many philosophers actually. Um, some people are inclined to plumbing as an, as a vocation and attracted to it, and fortunately not everybody is, or there would be too many plumbers, and nobody would make any money being a plumber, right? So we need to have just the right number of people in society to meet the needs, and not everybody has to be a philosopher. I think that's fine.

Um, on the other hand, um, philosophy is one of those, um, fruits of our highly sophisticated, um, hypersocial life that enables human reflection, um, and enables us to use thought to, and and conversation—two things we're really good at—to become better human beings, to become happier, and to feed back ideas for happiness into society. Um, and that means that anybody, you know, whether we're a heart surgeon or a plumber or an artist or a poet or, um, a philosopher or a mathematician, anybody, um, is capable of thinking about what it is to be human, of what it is to lead a good life, and capable, by thinking of about that, to actually become better human beings and to lead better lives. I really believe that. I think that philosophical reflection can be a useful ingredient in everybody's life, just as exercise can be, just as appreciation of the arts can be, just as political engagement can be. There each, each of these is important for different reasons, but philosophy is in that mix. So my hope is that the things that people like me who teach and who write and think about philosophy do, my hope is always that what we do gets out of our study into the public domain and is useful to people who aren't doing just what we do, just as if you had a whole bunch of plumbers, none of whom did any work on anything but stuff owned by other plumbers, then you'd have a lot of people whose houses wouldn't work real well, and some very poor plumbers. Um, same thing is true of philosophers; if other people don't, you know, listen to us, then you're going to have a very unreflective society and people who have wasted their lives.

Um, so, you know, what we're doing right now, for instance, talking in a format that is intended for anybody, not just professional philosophers, um, is a useful thing, kind of thing to do. And I think it's important for philosophy to be articulated in a way that enables people to appreciate it. I'd say the same thing for art, for poetry, for music, and plumbing. And it should be bene—these all should be beneficial not just to the experts and the practitioners, but to the world as a whole. That's why we specialize. And so the gift that I've been given, which is a huge gift, um, of a life that I've been able to spend thinking about philosophy, teaching philosophy, writing philosophy, um, comes with the obligation to try to make some of that reflection, um, and teaching and writing beneficial to people who aren't just philosophers; otherwise, I'm kind of a freeloader.

Well, I again, I very much appreciate this conversation with you, and, um, as I mentioned in an email to you, I had been more familiar with, uh, Advaita, uh, teachings, and then through contact with, uh, Buddhist friends, been exposed more to these emptiness teachings, and then through your course and the course that you recommended, uh, with Guy Newman, um, yeah, I did discover, as I contemplated how things only, you know, to my level only exist in relation to other things, there's no essence there, I did find—not universally and not at all times—but there were occasions where I felt more forgiving towards someone, uh, because I saw them as less intrinsically the way my immediate judgment, um, might have characterized them, or I was less upset by a certain, certain circumstance because I saw it as transient and not inherently existing and dependent on so many, um, other circumstances. So just to kind of slot that in as a piece of gratitude and, and—

Isn't that a nice thing? Isn't that amazing thing?

Yeah. And what you just said was maybe the most important thing. I just want to pause and draw attention to that. You said gratitude. I think one of the really cool things about noticing interdependence is that it allows us to put down pride and replace it with gratitude, um, and to recognize that anything that we understand or accomplish is because somebody else figured that out and taught it to us or helped us develop the skills to do that. And, um, that's true whether it's, you know, a sports performance or a musical performance or an idea that we understand or whatever, right? I mean, that's really cool. And I like the fact that you use that with gratitude.

Thank you. Yeah, very, uh, very much. Um, and it's just this amazing time now where so many teachings are available on YouTube, along with almost infinite distraction. Um, but, yeah, I'll—we do what we can to keep the ratings on, on these videos high.

Okay. So if it's okay, I'll ask you some more questions on, uh, uh, where Advaita and, uh, the view on Buddhism that you represent overlaps, um, what, uh, and maybe I'll give my again very brief recapitulation of what I understood from your and Guy's courses, which is, um, things only—to say things are empty is to say they're empty of inherent existence, and the only way things exist are, um, dependent on their parts, dependent on causes and conditions, dependent on designation or imputation. In, and to take this chair that I'm sitting on as an example, it's a wooden chair, uh, it, it doesn't exist independently from its legs and its base, so it depends on its parts. Um, the reason I know you know all this, I'm just saying it so you can correct if there's a gross mis—for me to hear it again. Okay, uh, there's certain causes of its existence; someone had to cut down a tree, someone had to cut it up, had to fashion it into a chair. Um, it wouldn't exist in this room without the room, so there's causes and conditions to its existence. And then importantly and more subtly, uh, it requires humans to invent this concept called chair—as objects we sit on—and designate this as being an object that we sit on versus something that we, um, I don't know, for a termite it would be food, and for an elephant it would be at best a footstool. So it exists, um, dependent on those three conditions. And if I understood, everything exists dependent on those three conditions, and then to get to my point and question, so it sounds like everything—and this is where I might be gobbling and m, mashing the teachings—because everything exists dependent partly on imputation, nothing exists outside of a conscious act or happening. I know you didn't like the word consciousness, right? Trying to find a way phrasing it without saying consciousness. It requires a perception for things to exist. Is that close, or have I then taken the—

It's very close, right up until the ve—I mean, it's all right, right up to the very end, and the inference, um, that because, um, conceptual imputation is an important condition for the existence of entities, it doesn't follow that an entity exists only so long as it's being imputed. Um, what it means is that when we take something to be a thing of a particular kind, that's because of our imputation. So it's a different dimension of interdependence, and you might call it the, the dimension, the dimension in which, um, things come to exist as things because they, they have to exist as something of a kind, and the kinds begin with us, but it doesn't mean that if, you know, you turn out the lights and everybody leaves your room, the chair pops out of existence because, um, what we have there is something that, you know, is of the kind that we've designated as a chair. I don't need to go around designating each chair, but for any of those to exist as a chair, there has to have been a kind designated. So the feeling of the chair exists only when I'm feeling it, right?

Yeah, absolutely. The colors of the chair exist when I'm perceiving them. What about the chair—and again, maybe I, I don't know if your view, personal view, maps on 100% to Prasanga, so maybe I should be asking—

In this respect it does. Yeah.

So in the Prasanga view, what about the chair continues to exist when I leave the room and no one's thinking about this chair?

Well, remember, um, the entire representation of the world we have is a representation of interdependent things and things of kind. And when we designate something as a chair, we're designating it as a chair because we think it's the kind of thing that doesn't just exist for a few moments, right? But that's going to keep existing and be there when we come back, right? And that was there all along. So that if somebody said, "Hey, where is there a chair?" You could have said, "There's one up in my study." And you would have been right. I mean, imagine two different furniture stores, okay? Um, so we've got, you know, the Majamaka furniture store on one corner and the Advaita furniture—that's not even fair because Advaitans don't believe this—but the, the—You get them half price at the Advaita. Yeah, the B—the Barkleyian idealist furniture store and, um, the—the Prasanga furniture store. You ask—you say—they sell these great chairs because these chairs, um, they guarantee are going to hang around even when you're not there. But the Barkleyian store tells you a different chair; it tells you a chair that pops into existence the moment you look at it and disappears from existence when you turn your back, right?

Um, now the curious thing, of course, is in your ordinary life you won't be able to tell which sto—which store the furniture came from, because it's kind of like the refrigerator problem, right? Um, but if you ask exactly what do we take chairs to be, the answer is we take them to be the kind we buy at the Majamaka store, not to be the kind of thing we buy at, at the Barkley store, right? I mean, again, that's despite the fact that if I gave you two, two chairs, one of which was a Barkley chair and one a Majamaka chair, nobody would ever be able to tell the difference between the two, which is pretty weird.

Yeah. Yeah, like I—well, um, wouldn't say I'm 100% comfortable with it, but I've contemplated a lot, uh, to the point where I now—If I was to leave the room and no one was—it's that old tree in the forest thing. I'd have to—again, if someone said the chair exists, continues to exist when no one's experiencing it, I'd have to ask, what do you mean?

Well, here's what they might mean. Um, it's still exert—still exerting the same gravitational field; it's got the same mass, that it does, the same location, um, the same, you know, all the same properties. And here's what they might say: part of what we think about the world, um, part of what we think is conventionally true about the world, and that's the only kind of truth we have, are the truths of physics and chemistry. And if you thought that it was a Barkley chair, you'd have to explain how physically and chemically it disappeared and reconstituted all the time, and we don't have any theories that make sense of that. Dependent origination is not a case-by-case thing; we don't sort of think about a chair, then we think about the piano, then we think about the table, now let's think about the book—we're thinking about, as I said, an entire ensemble that's physically and cognitively connected, and it's hard to make sense of that ensemble on the Barkleyian, uh, view. Now if you said, well, you know, hard to make sense of it, but guess what, that's right, because think about what the world would look like to you that way, and it looks to you, and there's no—there's no difference, we want to say, right? But our explan—ability to explain things would fall apart completely, and dependent origination is about explicability. I think that's where, um, this analytical idealism view that Bernardo was proposing, which I don't know if it's the same as Barkley or other philosophers, um, where what exists independently from me is, is other—is other movements in subjectivity which appear so—in the same way, like I—if I was to turn off this screen, I would get that, um, these pixels that appear as J would disappear, and like they really have gone, but the subjectivity that we call J, which is dependent, and there is no like essence there that would continue to exist without me experiencing—absolutely—on my screen.

Um, so again, I don't know—I don't know Barkley, but from the idealist view that I've understood, the chair would continue to exist as a subjective, uh, movement in the mind of universal consciousness or mind at large or whatever, but it wouldn't exist as a set of like—chemistry is how it shows up when measured in a particular way—in the same way that you show up on my Zoom screen in this way, but to your dog you'd show up as main—as a collection of cloud of smells, and to—

Does that address that apparent problem of—

I don't think so, um, because what it doesn't—doesn't address is the kind of network of explicability that we expect, um, from conventional reality. So notice that if you take that kind of—I'll call it a neo-Advaitan or crypto-Advaitan—idealistic route, then you have to not only do all the physics and chemistry, but you have to explain why the laws of physics and chemistry, um, predict that chairs remain where they are and don't decompose that much, um, and indeed they do, but that they don't predict that they disappear and then reappear, and we can't figure out how to do chemistry and physics in a way consistent with that. Dependent origination is not a case-by-case thing; we don't sort of think about a chair, then we think about the piano, then we think about the table—now let's think about the book. We're thinking about, as I said, an entire ensemble that's physically and cognitively connected, and it's hard to make sense of that ensemble on the Barkleyian, uh, view. Now if you said, well, you know, hard to make sense of it, but guess what, that's right, because think about what the world would look like to you that way, and it looks to you, and there's no, there's no difference, we want to say, right? But our explan—ability to explain things would fall apart completely, and dependent origination is about explicability. I think that's where, um, this analytical idealism view that Bernardo was proposing, which I don't know if it's the same as Barkley or other philosophers, um, where what exists independently from me is, is other—is other movements in subjectivity which appear so—in the same way, like I—if I was to turn off this screen, I would get that, um, these pixels that appear as J would disappear, and like they really have gone, but the subjectivity that we call J, which is dependent, and there is no like essence there that would continue to exist without me experiencing—absolutely—on my screen.

So again, I don't know—I don't know Barkley, but from the idealist view that I've understood, the chair would continue to exist as a subjective, uh, movement in the mind of universal consciousness or mind at large or whatever, but it wouldn't exist as a set of like—chemistry is how it shows up when measured in a particular way—in the same way that you show up on my Zoom screen in this way, but to your dog you'd show up as main—as a collection of cloud of smells, and to—

One of the things that, that personally attracts me about the Buddhist philosophical view is this naturalism it has, right? This idea that it, it takes the deliverances of nature, um, I mean, like the sort of deliverance of science or picture of nature to be roughly correct, right? Um, and not to be, um, itself something that we leave—we leave aside. Um, so when we talk about causal, um, dependent origination, we're talking about dependent origination as the sciences understand it, right? Um, there's a reason why when we plant a mango seed we get a mango tree, and when we plant a barley seed we get barley, um, and there's a whole network of science that explains that, and that whole network of science predicts that chairs stay put when we close the room—close the door and leave the room—and, um, you'd have to give up a lot, um, a lot of explanatory power, a lot of that, um, cohesion that makes sense of dependent origination, um, if you take the strong idealist view.

Uh, yeah, and here, here we'll bump up against the limits of my understanding, but in my understanding we don't have to lose the, um, ability of science to, uh, make observations, uh, create frameworks called theories to that observe the patterns of the behavior of what we observe, uh, and then make predictions, um, in the same way that we can observe certain patterns in—let's say if we take, um, if we just take something that is pure mind, which is like my emotions and my thoughts—I can observe the certain patterns that continue, whereas if I think about all the horrible things that someone said to me, I will fairly consistently start to feel negative emotions towards them, so there's certain patterns there that I, I can see, and there might be the same things that happen out in nature that are just outside of human minds or cognition that are much more consistent than that—that they happen on much longer time scales—and we call those physics, and we call those chemistry, and whatever.

Yeah, but it—in essence what they—or what they are when they're not being observed, when they're not being represented on the dashboard of my perception, um, is a form of subjectivity in the same way that your thoughts don't exist as physical entities unless you think they do.

Well, I think that we explain them, you know, both cognitively and physically, and they certainly have physical substrates, um, the thoughts do.

Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think that's what nervous systems are about, and societies and languages that enable those thoughts, and yeah.

Um, I, I, I think that a thoroughgoing naturalism is the best way to make sense of the world. So you're right that you could imagine having a kind of transcendent psychology that explained not only our, the regularities of our moods, but why chairs pop in and out of existence, um, but then I would just sort of say, okay, let's put the money on the table, um, are you going to bet on the deliverances of contemporary physical science or of a promised transcendent psychology for how you actually understand the world, um, and, you know, to put it even stronger, if you're trying to figure out how to build a bridge or an automobile or to do some surgery, do you want to rely on the science that we have or to say, "No, no, no, I've got a better idea—in the future we're going to have this transcendent psychology that will explain why things emerge only from consciousness—don't do anything until then." Um, I kind of think that there's so much good reason to be realistic about the science that we have, and that doesn't just mean having confidence in the observations; that means taking seriously the explanatory force, and the explanatory force of a theory according to which there are persistent, continuous, uh, philosophical objects is a hell of a lot better than the explanatory force of any, um, idealistic psychology. And, and as you know, the attraction to a lot of idealists is that, uh, it seems to bridge the, the hard problem or the explanatory gap between—so because I remember in the last call you said you don't see the hard problem as a hard problem, so maybe could you say what you mean by physical, and maybe you could reiterate what you meant when you—I've done this several times, haven't I, where I've kind of thrown three questions at you, but you've consistently, uh, done really well with answering all of them, and a fourth one that I didn't notice was there, um, but I noticed you just said, uh, that you think your thoughts are underpinned by a physical substrate. Yeah, so perhaps when you say, uh, what you mean by something being physical, you could say what you mean in that context, because what I had understood from you in the last conversation was that you didn't feel the need to reduce everything, right? Like a lower substrate that some—that that thought or financial transactions, um, don't need to be reducible to—

That's right. Not reducible.

Not reducible. So, and I think the idea of reduction is really crazy, but as I said, not reducible, but supervenient, um, and the supervenience base I think is important. So here's a way to make the point: I want you to imagine—

Are you about to explain supervenience, because I do—

I am. That's exactly what I'm about to do. Okay, really want to draw that distinction, um, and then I'll be able to talk about the kind of naturalism that I think makes sense, um, in a way that's a little bit more precise, and I can do this without it being very technical. Um, imagine two worlds, right? That's already weird, but let's just do it. Um, the actual Earth and another Earth, right? That's—and imagine that other Earth is molecule for molecule, event for event, moment by moment identical to this Earth, so that if you were magically transported there you couldn't even tell that you were on a different planet, right? Everything the same, everything. So they're the same physically; the same physical objects move about in the same places. If I hand a $1 note to a shopkeeper on Earth, then twin J hands a $1 shop—$1 note to a shopkeeper on Twin Earth, and so forth. All we do is describe it physically; they're physically identical. Now I ask you a question: do you think that they are financially identical? Do you think that if there's a fiscal deficit, um, in the United States in one, uh, world, there's going to be a deficit in the United States in the other world? I think everybody would say, "Of course." I mean, if you can't tell the difference—you can't at the physical level—you can't tell the difference at that level. And then I say, all right, suppose there was a painting on this earth that was really beautiful, um, say the Mona Lisa—is it also beautiful on that earth? Sure, nothing is different. So if it's beautiful here, it's beautiful there. If I'm thinking to myself on this earth, the Mona Lisa is beautiful, and the US is running a huge deficit, is Jay on that earth thinking the Mona Lisa is beautiful and the United States is running a deficit? He is, after all—he's saying the same things; everything's the same. Now if you believe all of that, you believe in supervenience; you believe that two worlds that are identical globally physically are identical globally financially, identical globally psychologically. Now that doesn't mean that in either of those worlds we can reduce a psychological event or an economic event to physical events. So let's make that really clear. Um, if we take the event of paying $1 for something, there are a lot of different ways to do that. I could hand a $1 bill to somebody; I could do an electronic funds transfer; I could write a check; I could handle four 25-cent pieces to somebody; I could tell somebody I promise you I'll pay you tomorrow—all kinds of things we can do, and those are very different physically. So if you asked physically what is it to pay somebody $1, the answer is there is no physical redescription of that. Similarly, I think there's no physical redescription of what it is to believe that the earth is round. Um, I think we can have that belief in many, many ways, or to believe that lasagna tastes good, um, I think we can believe that in many, many ways, um, but so I don't think there's a reduction of the psychological to the physical or of the economic to the physical, but what I do believe is that if you fix all the physical facts, you fix the psychological facts, and you have fixed the financial facts, and that's what we mean by supervenience. Now it's important to see that—

Supervenience. Even if the supervenience goes in one direction, it doesn't follow—does not follow at all—that that makes what happens at the so-called higher levels, the supervening levels, non-existent or unimportant or explanatorily impotent. Because you could have important regularities and phenomena that go in both directions, right? Um, and explanations that go in both directions. But it is to say that at an ontological level, we think that there is a kind of direction of supervenience, a direction in which: fix these facts, you fix those facts. Note that fixing the economic facts wouldn't fix the physical facts, because there's so many different ways in which the same economic facts could be realized. Um, so when I talk about a naturalism in the Buddhist worldview that attracts me, it's the naturalism that says that we don't have to have two kinds of stuff—mind stuff and body stuff. We don't have to have, you know, mysterious um mental events and mysterious physical events. And that the descriptions that we—our understanding of the way that things that are non-physical, like financial transactions or thoughts—are instantiated in physical systems doesn't involve any mystery. It sometimes might be, you know, tricky to understand, but not—not no big mystery. Because it's the—the big mystery, the so-called hard problem, comes from thinking that there are these completely ontologically autonomous psychological facts that are somehow connected to physical facts, and no way to understand that. But just as every economic event has to be some kind of physical event, um, every kind of cognitive event has to be some kind of physical event. It's just that there's no single physical event that every kind of cognitive event is. What's the physical event? Just so I follow. Um, I get it if I give you some gold and you give me like a a house. But what if I just say I'll pay you tomorrow? Yeah, you—um, those are both ways of—and very good deals on buying a house. Um, so—um, the—so if I if I pay you with a $1 bill, the first thing to notice is my handing that $1 note to you—sorry, I switched to American English—that one, my handing that $1 note to you is not the entirety of that in which the transaction consists. There's a lot of other stuff too. There's the fact of the uh that that dollar was minted in the US mint and not drawn carefully in my basement, um, in which case I wasn't handing you a dollar, I was handing you a counterfeit dollar. There's the fact that the Federal Reserve continues to stand behind the US currency, at least for the next two days. Um, there's the fact that we have a practice of, you know, using paper currency as a as a way of of purchasing and so forth. And if I if you do it by saying, "Don't worry, Jay, I'll pay you tomorrow," then that's supervening on a whole lot of different facts, right? Facts about, you know, my views about your credibility, right? Um, and maybe facts about your history. But in each case, there's this very broad supervenience base of lots of things that feed into that, but the later one doesn't sound so physical—all physical, right? But if I just say it's not physical—supervenient on physical—um, again, in any two worlds where you have done exactly the same things in your past, you're going to be just as credible. And if part of what purchasing on an IOU is is credibility, then it's supervening on all the stuff that you've done. Um, when I decide I will take your word that you're going to pay me a dollar tomorrow if I hand my house over today, um, then presumably I'm, you know, reflecting upon your past behavior, not kind of looking into your soul, because all I've got is your past behavior. That's what gives you your credit rating. And—and just hypothetically—if you are a very trusting person, or I just show up and I say, "Uh, would you like my house?" Mhm. And you say, "Yeah." And I'm like, "Okay, you're now the owner of that house." Even better. That. Yeah, but it just keeps getting better. Um, there's no obvious physical exchange happening. No, but sounds have been made; you've said things; um, I've heard those sounds; things have happened in my ears; things have happened in my brain; things happened in your brain. Moreover, we—this—all of this supervenes on the entirety of, you know, the English-speaking world, because of course it's the way that words like "house" and "you can have" and so forth are used that make all of that. Again, fix all of those facts—that in any two worlds where you say, "Fine, you can have my house," I come to own your house. So it sounds like an argument that requires there be a physical correlate for every thought. Yeah, so instantiation base, which might be vast, it doesn't identify thoughts with brain states; it identifies thoughts with whole very large patterns of physical activity. Yeah, just like to identify a dollar note with being worth $1 requires you to talk about a whole lot more than ink and paper. You've got to think about mints and currencies and things like that. In each case, we don't say, "My gosh, there's a hard problem about money; how is it that something that isn't intrinsically worth—there's less than a dollar's worth of paper and ink on that paper, but somehow it's worth a dollar?" Or, you know, even worse, there's exactly as much ink and paper in a $1 note and a $20 note, but one's worth 20 times as much as the other one. Now we have a hard problem—the hard problem of money—to figure out where that value is. No, no, no. We know exactly how to figure out where that value is. We talk about how economics works, and we presume that every economic phenomenon is physically instantiated in some complex way or other. And I think the same thing is true about thought, experience, sensation. And if we were to discover some thoughts had no correlate in physical—observable physical universe, would that put a hole in it? Would, but I don't know how you could possibly describe that, and I don't know anybody believes that really. Because if you really do take that thought experiment with which we began and think of two physically completely identical worlds, and I said to you, "But here's the difference: somebody thinks something in this world that they—that—and thinks something different in that world," you'd be really puzzled, right? I mean, it wouldn't have any physical—there would be no difference in causes, no difference in effects; everybody would say exactly the same thing. They—you know—what possibly reason—possible reason could you have to to believe that? And here's something just to test that thought experiment. Yeah, I could—I could conceive of, like, let's say Air in uh planet B um being upset to be called planet B. He—he thinks it's planet A, but never mind—having a dream uh that he forgets that is in the morning different from the dream that I have that I forget in the morning, and everything else being exactly the same. Yeah, but—but you have to remember—you have to also imagine that, you know, during that time when you and twin Air are having those dreams, you're having different dreams, but there's nothing physically—nothing that explains physically or—why those are different dreams. And I just want to say I can't even imagine what that would—what that would mean. That just seems bizarre to me. If—I mean, obviously I'm not a neuroscientist or—but there are lots of, like, you—we're—it's tricky to find where memory is in the brain, and people have wild experiences on psychedelics and near-death experiences where most of the brain seems to like not be functioning or—or—or certainly not functioning in a way that—yeah, the correlations between mental activity and what's discoverable—which it might just be a matter of time—and in—you might be right, like in 50 years we'll find every particular nuance of thought has a correlate in—in the chemistry. But I don't think that's true. I don't think that's true, just as I don't think being worth a dollar has a correlative in the ink and paper on $1 notes. I see. Okay, so it could show up differently—could show differently. Here's one way to think about it: when we talk about thoughts and content and so forth, um, we're often thinking relationally; we're also thinking hermeneutically; we're—we're interpreting um ourselves in various ways. And is that what hermeneutics are—to interpret? Yeah, yeah. We're thinking in terms of interpretation. So as you and I are talking, we're both presuming that the other is speaking English, and we're interpreting the words in the context of the way that they're used in English. When sometimes we switch to Sanskrit, we assume that that word is being used in the same way as it's used by other people who are talking about Sanskrit terms and so forth. Um, so when we do that, we're constantly engaged in interpretation. And when I think to myself, "Hm, Air's got some seriously idealistic sentiments," um, what I'm doing is interpreting your behavior and your discussion and attributing to you a belief. And when you say, "Jay sounds like a really weird hardcore physicalist," um, you're interpreting um my beliefs—my what I'm saying and so forth—and getting an interpretation of who I am. Um, interpretations are not the identification of physical phenomena, but they're grounded in physical phenomena. So when I interpret a movie and I say, "Well, it's very sad," um, and he's—this—this uh director is really reflecting on the transiency of life and uh the difficulty of philosophy caused by political oppression, I'm not saying if you really analyze that celluloid really carefully you're going to find these—a correlate in that celluloid of sadness and the dangers of of autocracies. Saying that's the best reading to give all of this, um, and that relies on huge backgrounds. And I think in general that's what our psychological life looks like to us and to others—it's the result of an interpretation. So I haven't understood this one yet. Um, maybe uh on listening to it again I will. So I just wanted to admit that I haven't understood this yet, um, and I might be wrong, and there might be other resources that—well, even if you're wrong, what you're saying is comprehensible to yourself, so there's a way of understanding it which I haven't got yet. Um, so just to admit that, uh, but I don't want to spend more time on it uh cuz I'm sure either listening to it again or there might be other resources and courses you can send which um might go through it. Uh, but maybe just to finish on uh one last question to round this bit off. Sure. Um, and as part of what I'm struggling with—which is—it still sounds like there's physical stuff and there's mental stuff. No, I won't—no, stop right there. I don't think there's stuff. Right there's physical descriptions of the world, and there's psychological or economic descriptions of the world. They're all descriptions of the same world using different kinds of perspectives. Um, and the psychological—the economic—supervene on the physical level; that is, fix things at the physical level, you're going to fix it up there. But that doesn't mean there's different kinds of stuff—one kind of stuff—just stuff. Because the stuff that I know exists are feelings, thoughts, perceptions, colors, tastes. Yeah, you do. Which if I take them in totality, like, what do they have in common? Well, they're all experiences. Yeah. My sense is that whilst it's very uh intuitive to anyone above the age of two or three—I don't know when sense object permanency kicks in—that the chair exists when I leave the room, I still see that as something inferred—that it has some kind of physical thing which I don't know what it is. Um, I can't even imagine it because it isn't an experience. Yet I say that—I think you probably know by now what I'm—I'm getting at—it kind of seems to evoke another way of being in the world that isn't experience that I don't have access to. So when you say there aren't two kinds of stuff, it sounds idealist—it kind—it sounds inclined towards idealism, because we know that experience is—experiences exist, and we infer that physical objects continue to exist outside of experience. Yeah. Yep. Where am I misunderstanding you? Where is the—You're suggesting that experiences exist as a different kind of stuff, and I think experiences are just events in the world, like the scrapings of chairs—like the—No, I—I thought—I thought what you were saying is when I leave the room and there's no one else in the room, the chair continues to exist, but it doesn't exist as the feelings I have about the chair; it doesn't exist as—it doesn't exist because the chair is not a collection of experiences. Um, the chair is something that—one of which—one has a collection of experiences, but it's not that collection. Um, it's an object that we designate based on a bunch of experiences, a bunch of conventions and things, but it's not those experiences. But it doesn't exist separately from imputation and designation, right? It doesn't—That's right. That's right. But imputation and designation designate a physical object on the basis of a set of experiences that we've had and a set of conceptions of what physical objects are. And—sorry to interrupt—but just—just—just so you hone right in on my—where I'm not understanding you—you said we—it's a designation on experiences of a physical object, but what do you mean by physical object? Because all I have are the experiences. As you can see, I'm kind of steeping this like uh—Yeah, I think you actually have—I mean, the exper—your experiences are what mediate your knowledge of the physical object. Remember what you're doing right now. I think—I think they—I think that what's giving—making it hard for you to understand this, um, to the extent that it is hard, um, is that you are suggesting that the things that we posit—the things that we take to exist in our world—are nothing more than the evidence that we have for them, whereas I want to say that the experience that we have that mediates our interaction with the world—that gives us evidence for the reality of things in the world—gives us evidence through theories, through understanding, through inference of things that exist beyond that. And that those things become the—those—those physical objects—those non-mental objects—if you want—what I mean by that is objects described in a non-mental vocabulary um are best explained by physical science um in—as things that have existence at times when they're not even seen—when they're not heard and so forth. The fact that we—that our data are punctal and in—and uh non-continuous doesn't mean that they are data for the existence of punctal, non-continuous things. And where I get stuck is because I know that I—experiences exist, and you're saying—you're not saying physical things have a different kind of existence—there's only one kind of existence—and you're saying they exist outside of any experience, so that's where I'm like, "How can it be both?" And maybe this is because you're comfortable with contradiction—how can it be both? Nothing contradictory here. Nothing contradictory. Physical objects um interact with us causally to give rise to experiences. Um, experiences are not, you know, special non-physical things; they're what happens to physical organisms like us when we engage with other physical organisms—other physical objects—nothing—nothing mysterious about that. But we're not always engaging with them. Um, but the best explanation of their ability to give us the experiences that they do when they interact is in terms of sciences that require that they continue existing even when they're not interacting with us. Nothing is curious about that. I—I'm not—nothing I've said has meant to be an attack on science or to—Oh no, I'm not—I know—to imply that we shouldn't take science seriously. I'm just trying to say that as we take the science more seriously—as the background of what we're doing when we think of things as physical objects—then it becomes harder and harder to um give those physical objects a non-continuous identity, since our best science presupposes and requires a continuous identity. We don't have a physics of um of objects that pop in and out of existence depending on whether we're looking at them. We don't have a chemistry or a biology of um systems or organisms that are constantly popping in and out of existence. Those require a certain kind of continuity, and that's part of what we get along with our picture of the world—is a picture of how the world hangs together um to be explained. Okay, let me um continue to contemplate that over—yeah. Um, is there—as—all—I mean, these conversations never end, and perhaps you'll have capacity to do a followup one day, um, but it's been close to two hours, so I just want to finish with some gratitude and also—again—yeah, it's been just fantastic to have this opportunity to dialogue with you, and—Well, thank you. The gratitude goes both ways. I really have enjoyed this conversation enormously. Likewise. Thank you for the opportunity just to be able to share these ideas with a larger audience in a really congenial way. Thank you so much. Is there anything else that uh you feel would be useful to say to frame some of what we've spoken about or—um—Well, just to remember that no matter what our metaphysical or epistemological views are, the rubber hits the road when it gets to ethics, um, and how we think about one another and how we treat one another, and um that's what to take most seriously. Great. Thank you, Jay, so much. Um, what's next for you? Your—it's a Sunday, I guess—and a Sunday, and uh I've got one more week before I begin teaching in my very last semester of teaching, so I'm going to be doing—visiting some friends, doing a few chores, but mostly getting ready for my swan song semester. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, so I retire in a few months. Yeah, amazing to be part of it. Okay. Thank you so much, and um I could cut it there if you're not comfortable with this question being on record, okay, uh but just a personal curiosity because uh I'm Jewish; I used to be in yeshiva; and the only other place where I see people rock forward and back in study and debate was—that I just didn't have the—like—oh, is this the only thing that made me think I wonder if Jay's Jewish, because sometimes you—we share more than you think. I'm Jewish and got started in yeshiva too. Okay, that makes sense of that—yeah—mannerism. Great. Cool. Again, thank you so much, and um take care. Bye. Byebye.