I like what this post is trying to do more than I like this post. (I still gave it a +4.)
That is, I think that LW has been flirting with meditation and similar practices for years, and this sort of ‘non-mystical explanation’ is essential to make sure that we know what we’re talking about, instead of just vibing. I’m glad to see more of it.
I think that no-self is a useful concept, and had written a (shorter, not attempting to be fully non-mystical) post on the subject several months before. I find myself sort of frustrated that there isn’t a clear sentence that I can point to, which identifies what no-self is, like “no-self is the observation that the ‘self’ can be reduced to constituent parts instead of being ontologically basic.”
But when I imagine Kaj reading the previous paragraph, well, can’t he point out that there’s actually a class of insights here, rather than just a single concept? For example, I didn’t include in that sentence that you can introspect into the process by which your mind generates your perception of self, or the way in which a sense of self is critical to the planning apparatus, or so on. I’m making the mistake he describes in the second paragraph, of pointing to something and saying “this is enlightenment” instead of thinking about the different enlightenments.
Even after that (imagined) response, I still have some sense that something is backwards. The section heading (“Early insights into no-self”) seems appropriate, but the post title (“a non-mystical explanation”) seems like overreach. The explanation is there, in bits and pieces, but it reads somewhat more like an apology for not having a real explanation.
[For example, the ‘many insights’ framing makes more sense to me if we have a map or a list of those insights, which I think we don’t have (or, even if some Buddhist experts have it, it’s not at all clear we’d trust their ontology or epistemology). To be fair, I think we haven’t build that map/list for rationality either, but doing that seems like an important task for the field as a whole.]
I find myself sort of frustrated that there isn’t a clear sentence that I can point to, which identifies what no-self is, like “no-self is the observation that the ‘self’ can be reduced to constituent parts instead of being ontologically basic.”
When I read this, my thought was “huh, wasn’t there one?” and then I looked at my post and realized that well, kind of—the sentence I was thinking of was the one in bold:
Likewise, Daniel Ingram, meditation teacher and author of the widely-read book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha,writes that (emphasis mine):
The original Pali term, anatta, means literally “not-self”. This same term is also rendered by other authors in other ways, some of which can be extremely problematic, such as egolessness, a terribly problematic term, since ego as understood in the Western psychological sense is not the referent of the conception of “self” targeted in Buddhism. Another problematic rendering of this term is “emptiness”. Emptiness, for all its mysterious-sounding connotations, means that reality is empty of, devoid of, or lacking a permanent, separate, independent, acausal, autonomous self. It doesn’t mean that reality is not there, but that reality is not there in the way it may appear to us to be.
If I had to give a one-sentence definition of what exactly no-self is, I might point to Ingram’s definition there (which I think incidentally corresponds to saying that the self is a network 1 rather than network 2 kind of thing). But yeah, my post never actually quite said “this is also my definition of no-self, if I had to give one”, it just said “here’s how Ingram talks about no-self”.
Another thing that I don’t quite like about that definition is that it looks like it’s saying “not and” which is not quite the thing? Like I can look at that and go “oh, okay, my separate independent acausal autonomous self can be in reality, because it’s impermanent.” Instead I want it to be something like “the self is temporary instead of permanent, embedded instead of separate, dependent instead of independent, causal instead of acausal, <> instead of autonomous” (where I’m not quite sure what Ingram is hoping to contrast autonomous with).
Also, since I’m thinking about this, one of the things that I like about “observation” / think is a big part of Buddhist thinking that is useful to clearly explain to people, is that this is (as I understand it) not an axiom that you use to build your model of the world, but a hypothesis that you are encouraged to check for yourself (in the same way that we might have physics students measure the amount of time it takes for objects to drop, and (ideally) not really expect them to believe our numbers without checking them themselves). “You think your self isn’t made of parts? Maybe you should pay attention to X, and see if you still think that afterwards.”
Note that Ingram’s sentence there is characterizing emptiness (suññata), which is a strict generalization of no-self (anatta). (In particular, it weaves in impermance, and means to apply universally to any structure in our map, not merely to selves.)
One way of looking at those various contrasts you pull out is in terms of various ordering relations. There’s a temporal order (where everything in our map has predecessors and successors, rather than being eternal), an ontological order (where everything in our map has parts and is a part of other things, rather than being indivisible or disconnected), and a causal order (where everything has causes and conditions, rather than being autonomous).
Regarding your latter paragraph, the Buddhist keyword for this attribute of dharmas is “ehipassika”, translating as “inviting you to come see for yourself”.
I like what this post is trying to do more than I like this post. (I still gave it a +4.)
That is, I think that LW has been flirting with meditation and similar practices for years, and this sort of ‘non-mystical explanation’ is essential to make sure that we know what we’re talking about, instead of just vibing. I’m glad to see more of it.
I think that no-self is a useful concept, and had written a (shorter, not attempting to be fully non-mystical) post on the subject several months before. I find myself sort of frustrated that there isn’t a clear sentence that I can point to, which identifies what no-self is, like “no-self is the observation that the ‘self’ can be reduced to constituent parts instead of being ontologically basic.”
But when I imagine Kaj reading the previous paragraph, well, can’t he point out that there’s actually a class of insights here, rather than just a single concept? For example, I didn’t include in that sentence that you can introspect into the process by which your mind generates your perception of self, or the way in which a sense of self is critical to the planning apparatus, or so on. I’m making the mistake he describes in the second paragraph, of pointing to something and saying “this is enlightenment” instead of thinking about the different enlightenments.
Even after that (imagined) response, I still have some sense that something is backwards. The section heading (“Early insights into no-self”) seems appropriate, but the post title (“a non-mystical explanation”) seems like overreach. The explanation is there, in bits and pieces, but it reads somewhat more like an apology for not having a real explanation.
[For example, the ‘many insights’ framing makes more sense to me if we have a map or a list of those insights, which I think we don’t have (or, even if some Buddhist experts have it, it’s not at all clear we’d trust their ontology or epistemology). To be fair, I think we haven’t build that map/list for rationality either, but doing that seems like an important task for the field as a whole.]
Thanks, this is fair.
When I read this, my thought was “huh, wasn’t there one?” and then I looked at my post and realized that well, kind of—the sentence I was thinking of was the one in bold:
If I had to give a one-sentence definition of what exactly no-self is, I might point to Ingram’s definition there (which I think incidentally corresponds to saying that the self is a network 1 rather than network 2 kind of thing). But yeah, my post never actually quite said “this is also my definition of no-self, if I had to give one”, it just said “here’s how Ingram talks about no-self”.
Another thing that I don’t quite like about that definition is that it looks like it’s saying “not and” which is not quite the thing? Like I can look at that and go “oh, okay, my separate independent acausal autonomous self can be in reality, because it’s impermanent.” Instead I want it to be something like “the self is temporary instead of permanent, embedded instead of separate, dependent instead of independent, causal instead of acausal, <> instead of autonomous” (where I’m not quite sure what Ingram is hoping to contrast autonomous with).
Also, since I’m thinking about this, one of the things that I like about “observation” / think is a big part of Buddhist thinking that is useful to clearly explain to people, is that this is (as I understand it) not an axiom that you use to build your model of the world, but a hypothesis that you are encouraged to check for yourself (in the same way that we might have physics students measure the amount of time it takes for objects to drop, and (ideally) not really expect them to believe our numbers without checking them themselves). “You think your self isn’t made of parts? Maybe you should pay attention to X, and see if you still think that afterwards.”
Note that Ingram’s sentence there is characterizing emptiness (suññata), which is a strict generalization of no-self (anatta). (In particular, it weaves in impermance, and means to apply universally to any structure in our map, not merely to selves.)
One way of looking at those various contrasts you pull out is in terms of various ordering relations. There’s a temporal order (where everything in our map has predecessors and successors, rather than being eternal), an ontological order (where everything in our map has parts and is a part of other things, rather than being indivisible or disconnected), and a causal order (where everything has causes and conditions, rather than being autonomous).
Regarding your latter paragraph, the Buddhist keyword for this attribute of dharmas is “ehipassika”, translating as “inviting you to come see for yourself”.