You’re exploring ideas you find interesting, taking the exploration seriously and giving it real effort. I respect that. However, the way you write gives the impression of trying to preserve some sort of sacred mystery about the ideas you’re exploring, instead of trying to resolve your own confusions and thereby replace the mystery with deepened understanding when you can attain such.
For example: I’m not sure what it is about the concept of intrinsic nature that got you thinking about this, but you correctly notice that this is not a concept that actually helps explain anything, and doesn’t accurately describe the nature of the world you live in. Congratulations! Yes, really. But then you dwell on this in ways that don’t seem to add anything further except a vibe of mysterianism.
I’m not sure what your goal is in writing this, but for your own explorations, consider that there are a lot of other directions you could choose to take your developing understanding and use it to build on itself. Ways that acknowledge you’ve dissolved the concept and asked what’s next. For a few examples:
You might ask, well, what is the emptiness like? Actually, for the past near-century now, that’s a question of physics! The void is pregnant with infinite possibilities. By which I mean, not something mysterious, but that a vacuum has a precise structure, which gives rise to the laws of physics, which lets us calculate the behavior of all sorts of other things, and when we run the experiments, the calculations are right, because the models of vacuum structure are pointing at something inherent in the nature of the real world. As our models describe it, the void spontaneously gives rise to virtual particles, which is how forces are conveyed across space. The void interacts with matter—for example, you can see this in the Casimir effect, where conductive plates change the allowed quantization of the electromagnetic field, which changes the field’s zero-point energy, which creates a force between the plates. Emptiness is fascinating, not as a deep and abiding mystery, but about the behavior of reality. It mediates a complex web of interactions. The interactions themselves exist. Other physicists are asking where the structure came from, what space and time are made of, or what might replace them as deeper descriptions of the reality which the quantum spacetime vacuum description tries to model.
You might ask, well, what does it all mean now that we know it’s empty? This is a different kind of question, but if you’re wondering about meaning and value and how or whether a concept like “water” can have meaning in a world where “intrinsic nature” is not a thing, have you tried reading the blog Meaningness? There are a lot of reasons I recommend it. One is to help find a way out of the nihilism that for many often follows the realization that things lack intrinsic nature or meaning. Another is to highlight that oftentimes, the answer to a deep question depends entirely on the reasons someone is asking it in the first place. In other words, the answer (and the meaning) arise from the complex web of interactions that gives rise to a mind that has a reason for asking a question using a particular set of words, and the same set of words can call for a different answer when posed by a different mind. This isn’t fundamentally mysterious. For example, the answer to “Where do babies come from?” is different depending on whether the asker is a toddler, an obstetrician, or a new hire at an infant daycare center, as well as whether the answerer is a mom, a kindergartener, or a med student . But there’s a lot to explore in how it cashes out in practice.
You might also ask, why did I (or why do others) think intrinsic nature is real, or important? What did I think I was getting out of it, do I still think I need that, and if so, where am I getting it now? If not, what changed, what dependencies in my mind resulted in the change, how do I feel about that, and how do I want to react to that? What else in my mind is downstream of those things and should also change in response? If you don’t clarify the stakes, the reasons you’re having the discussion or exploring the idea, then what comes out is likely to look like nonsense to anyone who isn’t you, and any actually useful insight is likely to be lost even to future-you.
A little example how one can apply this. I have near to zero expectation about this post being understood or liked (not that it doesn’t matter at all, I’m serious enough to elaborate the concepts as best I can, but beyond this it’s not under my control). I also know that disappointment is dependent upon expectation so they are both empty of intrinsic nature. Therefore, I’m not anxious about people liking that text, nor I’m disappointed if it’s being disliked. In that case I see that disappointment and expectation are both empty. So I’m free from both!
What if it wasn’t so? And my expectation was high (i.e. I would approach it like it had intrinsic value). I would be disappointed because of low karma. But how to get rid of that disappointment? It is to see that it’s empty. How? To analyze that it depends on the expectation, and if I can let go of my expectation, I will be free from the disappointment.
And how does one let go of the expectation (or any negative feeling)? There are many ways. First, by observing one’s mind impartially and seeing it clearly for what it is (what in Buddhism is called vipassana meditation). Second, I can imagine myself on my deathbed and ask the question, “How important would it be then?” Third, I can apply a technique like The Sedona Method. In this way I can see through my constructs on the conceptual level and the level of feeling and be free from them.
That’s how the concept of emptiness might be used in practice.
Ok, that all makes sense, and yes I’m very familiar with vipassana meditation. FWIW I credit MCTB2 with about 30% of how I got out of a 12 year long depression.
Depression is a real challenge. It’s difficult to explain what it is until you’ve been through one. I’ve found the method of self-inquiry to be of help (e.g. “Who is depressed/suffering/cannot move?”, “Well, I am.”, “Where does this I come from?” and keep looking for the source of the “I”).
It is postulated that self-inquiry helps to deconstruct the “I” and as a result to pacify two subnetworks (of the DMN) that are responsible for building the images of “self in time” and “self and other” (as most thoughts are build around them). So it helps in reducing self-rumination and thoughts which are supporting the depressive state. There is a nice video on that topic—dealing with thoughts by Gary Weber.
Thank you for your thoughtful and detailed comment!
It wasn’t meant to sound mysterious. The way I see it is that our process of thinking by default creates intrinsic entities and processes (whether we are aware of it or not) and almost becomes metaphysical with respect to our inbuilt ontology. In simple terms, we give too much credit to “how things really are”. And I attempt to question that in order to deconstruct such an attitude (not only on conceptual level, but at the level of feeling). It’s the same idea Wittgenstein expressed in the Tractatus:
6.371 The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. 6.372 Thus people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages. And in fact both are right and both are wrong: though the view of the ancients is clearer in so far as they have a clear and acknowledged terminus, while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained.
Why am I writing this? In part, when I want to understand something better I try to express that to other people. It helps to consolidate thinking. So I it’s out of self-interest. In part, I really find thinking about it interesting so there is an impulse to share it with others (the interesting part). In part, I’ve figured out that by contemplating such matters makes me grasp my concepts and feelings about the world less. It leads my thinking to pacification. So I thought maybe it will also lead someone else thinking to the same result if they contemplate emptiness of phenomena.
I wholeheartedly agree with that point. And it’s indeed what the concept of emptiness points to, that there is no such thing as “empty space” or “just nothing”, but, “The void is pregnant with infinite possibilities.” It’s the conceptual understanding of emptiness which helps us to unravel our grasping for something tangible and real. And indeed that’s the question of physics. But one can marvel at that even outside of the physical perspective.
I haven’t seen the blog you’ve mentioned, I’ll check it out. I liked your examples. The concept of emptiness is exactly directed to our meaning making process. How does it help to contemplate that? If we set absolute meaning and expectation to our life we suffer. We turn nihilistic when we expect life to have intrinsic meaning with regard to our values and become disappointed when we are faced with the way things are. In order to be free from that we have to question if meaning that was built really does have that intrinsic nature or it’s just conventional. Contemplating emptiness helps us to disassemble our beliefs and release our absolute expectations not only on conceptual level but on the level of feeling. It also helps us to be free from the nihilistic stance. As we take ourselves and our meaning making less seriously (in a good sense). We can see that our previously set intrinsic meaning was empty to begin with, so there is no reason to despair because of that. And by seeing that all meaning is conventional, we can let go grasping for sand castles and make the best of it.
I agree that these are all useful questions to ask. And I keep them in mind. Maybe, it doesn’t transfer through the text.
One more reason I wanted to share this is to start a conversation on emptiness (not necessarily between myself and other people, but for people just to stop for a moment and ponder this, like you did!) I think when we’re contemplating something abstract, we’re releasing our attention from purely pragmatic and material matters and enter some other space or mode of thinking which helps us to disentangle with our worries of everyday life. To put it simply we stop thinking about politics, wars, catastrophes, etc. and think about something entirely different. Which brings a release to thinking.
I like another related Daoist concept of “worth of worthless” or “usefulness of useless knowledge” (reference to Abraham Flexner’s article). If we only think about issues of the day or only about practical matters, our thinking is caught in the loop of worries and concerns. If we start and think about seemingly unrelated to anything matters, first, we relax as nothing is at stake (we can be silly if we like), and second, we might find solutions to our problems we couldn’t have predicted. It serves as a link or a bridge between seemingly unrelated areas of our experience. Maybe I will develop this theme into another post or maybe LW is not the place for such reflection.
Having said all this, I wanted it to be an open question and an exploration into emptiness and the self. What does emptiness mean? What do I really know? What is the ground of my experience? What does it mean to be empty of the self? Who am I? etc. Not “transferring profound truths”. To start a reflection (as it worked in your case). Whether or not some people find it interesting or useful that’s for them to decide. I personally find contemplation over emptiness useful as it disentangles my thinking from everyday matters and helps to release stress. But it also has a light touch to it which is not unlike John Cage’s piece 4′33.
And (probably most importantly) to highlight that having an insight into emptiness may open the door to awakening.
To finish this with another Wittgenstein quote:
6.54 My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)
I think it’s always good to have more presentations of ideas from different perspectives. I would say that a lot of what you’re describing is covered in the Mysterious Answers part of the Map and Territory sequence and the A Human’s Guide to Words part of the Machine in the Ghost sequence . One thing that gets mentioned many times, I think in the posts but definitely in the comments, is a set of anecdotes from “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” which, if you haven’t read it, is a great lighthearted description of some of these kinds of not-actually-science that get passed off as science.
Also, respectfully, Wittgenstein moved in rarified circles and in that quote was a describing (and correctly criticizing) a much higher standard of understanding than most elite college graduates have, let alone the rest of society. You can tell, because the ‘modern system’ gave way to the postmodern system, whose pioneers mostly correctly diagnosed the problem and were then promptly misunderstood in all sorts of useless, destructive, and ridiculous ways.
Yes, I’m only re-quoting Wittgenstein from another book (Jay Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way), so my understanding is only approximate in that case, I could not process the Tractatus as it’s way over my head. And I’ll check the sequences.
You’re exploring ideas you find interesting, taking the exploration seriously and giving it real effort. I respect that. However, the way you write gives the impression of trying to preserve some sort of sacred mystery about the ideas you’re exploring, instead of trying to resolve your own confusions and thereby replace the mystery with deepened understanding when you can attain such.
For example: I’m not sure what it is about the concept of intrinsic nature that got you thinking about this, but you correctly notice that this is not a concept that actually helps explain anything, and doesn’t accurately describe the nature of the world you live in. Congratulations! Yes, really. But then you dwell on this in ways that don’t seem to add anything further except a vibe of mysterianism.
I’m not sure what your goal is in writing this, but for your own explorations, consider that there are a lot of other directions you could choose to take your developing understanding and use it to build on itself. Ways that acknowledge you’ve dissolved the concept and asked what’s next. For a few examples:
You might ask, well, what is the emptiness like? Actually, for the past near-century now, that’s a question of physics! The void is pregnant with infinite possibilities. By which I mean, not something mysterious, but that a vacuum has a precise structure, which gives rise to the laws of physics, which lets us calculate the behavior of all sorts of other things, and when we run the experiments, the calculations are right, because the models of vacuum structure are pointing at something inherent in the nature of the real world. As our models describe it, the void spontaneously gives rise to virtual particles, which is how forces are conveyed across space. The void interacts with matter—for example, you can see this in the Casimir effect, where conductive plates change the allowed quantization of the electromagnetic field, which changes the field’s zero-point energy, which creates a force between the plates. Emptiness is fascinating, not as a deep and abiding mystery, but about the behavior of reality. It mediates a complex web of interactions. The interactions themselves exist. Other physicists are asking where the structure came from, what space and time are made of, or what might replace them as deeper descriptions of the reality which the quantum spacetime vacuum description tries to model.
You might ask, well, what does it all mean now that we know it’s empty? This is a different kind of question, but if you’re wondering about meaning and value and how or whether a concept like “water” can have meaning in a world where “intrinsic nature” is not a thing, have you tried reading the blog Meaningness? There are a lot of reasons I recommend it. One is to help find a way out of the nihilism that for many often follows the realization that things lack intrinsic nature or meaning. Another is to highlight that oftentimes, the answer to a deep question depends entirely on the reasons someone is asking it in the first place. In other words, the answer (and the meaning) arise from the complex web of interactions that gives rise to a mind that has a reason for asking a question using a particular set of words, and the same set of words can call for a different answer when posed by a different mind. This isn’t fundamentally mysterious. For example, the answer to “Where do babies come from?” is different depending on whether the asker is a toddler, an obstetrician, or a new hire at an infant daycare center, as well as whether the answerer is a mom, a kindergartener, or a med student . But there’s a lot to explore in how it cashes out in practice.
You might also ask, why did I (or why do others) think intrinsic nature is real, or important? What did I think I was getting out of it, do I still think I need that, and if so, where am I getting it now? If not, what changed, what dependencies in my mind resulted in the change, how do I feel about that, and how do I want to react to that? What else in my mind is downstream of those things and should also change in response? If you don’t clarify the stakes, the reasons you’re having the discussion or exploring the idea, then what comes out is likely to look like nonsense to anyone who isn’t you, and any actually useful insight is likely to be lost even to future-you.
A little example how one can apply this. I have near to zero expectation about this post being understood or liked (not that it doesn’t matter at all, I’m serious enough to elaborate the concepts as best I can, but beyond this it’s not under my control). I also know that disappointment is dependent upon expectation so they are both empty of intrinsic nature. Therefore, I’m not anxious about people liking that text, nor I’m disappointed if it’s being disliked. In that case I see that disappointment and expectation are both empty. So I’m free from both!
What if it wasn’t so? And my expectation was high (i.e. I would approach it like it had intrinsic value). I would be disappointed because of low karma. But how to get rid of that disappointment? It is to see that it’s empty. How? To analyze that it depends on the expectation, and if I can let go of my expectation, I will be free from the disappointment.
And how does one let go of the expectation (or any negative feeling)? There are many ways. First, by observing one’s mind impartially and seeing it clearly for what it is (what in Buddhism is called vipassana meditation). Second, I can imagine myself on my deathbed and ask the question, “How important would it be then?” Third, I can apply a technique like The Sedona Method. In this way I can see through my constructs on the conceptual level and the level of feeling and be free from them.
That’s how the concept of emptiness might be used in practice.
Ok, that all makes sense, and yes I’m very familiar with vipassana meditation. FWIW I credit MCTB2 with about 30% of how I got out of a 12 year long depression.
Depression is a real challenge. It’s difficult to explain what it is until you’ve been through one. I’ve found the method of self-inquiry to be of help (e.g. “Who is depressed/suffering/cannot move?”, “Well, I am.”, “Where does this I come from?” and keep looking for the source of the “I”).
It is postulated that self-inquiry helps to deconstruct the “I” and as a result to pacify two subnetworks (of the DMN) that are responsible for building the images of “self in time” and “self and other” (as most thoughts are build around them). So it helps in reducing self-rumination and thoughts which are supporting the depressive state. There is a nice video on that topic—dealing with thoughts by Gary Weber.
Thank you for your thoughtful and detailed comment!
It wasn’t meant to sound mysterious. The way I see it is that our process of thinking by default creates intrinsic entities and processes (whether we are aware of it or not) and almost becomes metaphysical with respect to our inbuilt ontology. In simple terms, we give too much credit to “how things really are”. And I attempt to question that in order to deconstruct such an attitude (not only on conceptual level, but at the level of feeling). It’s the same idea Wittgenstein expressed in the Tractatus:
Why am I writing this? In part, when I want to understand something better I try to express that to other people. It helps to consolidate thinking. So I it’s out of self-interest. In part, I really find thinking about it interesting so there is an impulse to share it with others (the interesting part). In part, I’ve figured out that by contemplating such matters makes me grasp my concepts and feelings about the world less. It leads my thinking to pacification. So I thought maybe it will also lead someone else thinking to the same result if they contemplate emptiness of phenomena.
I wholeheartedly agree with that point. And it’s indeed what the concept of emptiness points to, that there is no such thing as “empty space” or “just nothing”, but, “The void is pregnant with infinite possibilities.” It’s the conceptual understanding of emptiness which helps us to unravel our grasping for something tangible and real. And indeed that’s the question of physics. But one can marvel at that even outside of the physical perspective.
I haven’t seen the blog you’ve mentioned, I’ll check it out. I liked your examples. The concept of emptiness is exactly directed to our meaning making process. How does it help to contemplate that? If we set absolute meaning and expectation to our life we suffer. We turn nihilistic when we expect life to have intrinsic meaning with regard to our values and become disappointed when we are faced with the way things are.
In order to be free from that we have to question if meaning that was built really does have that intrinsic nature or it’s just conventional. Contemplating emptiness helps us to disassemble our beliefs and release our absolute expectations not only on conceptual level but on the level of feeling.
It also helps us to be free from the nihilistic stance. As we take ourselves and our meaning making less seriously (in a good sense). We can see that our previously set intrinsic meaning was empty to begin with, so there is no reason to despair because of that. And by seeing that all meaning is conventional, we can let go grasping for sand castles and make the best of it.
I agree that these are all useful questions to ask. And I keep them in mind. Maybe, it doesn’t transfer through the text.
One more reason I wanted to share this is to start a conversation on emptiness (not necessarily between myself and other people, but for people just to stop for a moment and ponder this, like you did!) I think when we’re contemplating something abstract, we’re releasing our attention from purely pragmatic and material matters and enter some other space or mode of thinking which helps us to disentangle with our worries of everyday life. To put it simply we stop thinking about politics, wars, catastrophes, etc. and think about something entirely different. Which brings a release to thinking.
I like another related Daoist concept of “worth of worthless” or “usefulness of useless knowledge” (reference to Abraham Flexner’s article). If we only think about issues of the day or only about practical matters, our thinking is caught in the loop of worries and concerns. If we start and think about seemingly unrelated to anything matters, first, we relax as nothing is at stake (we can be silly if we like), and second, we might find solutions to our problems we couldn’t have predicted. It serves as a link or a bridge between seemingly unrelated areas of our experience. Maybe I will develop this theme into another post or maybe LW is not the place for such reflection.
Having said all this, I wanted it to be an open question and an exploration into emptiness and the self. What does emptiness mean? What do I really know? What is the ground of my experience? What does it mean to be empty of the self? Who am I? etc. Not “transferring profound truths”. To start a reflection (as it worked in your case). Whether or not some people find it interesting or useful that’s for them to decide. I personally find contemplation over emptiness useful as it disentangles my thinking from everyday matters and helps to release stress. But it also has a light touch to it which is not unlike John Cage’s piece 4′33.
And (probably most importantly) to highlight that having an insight into emptiness may open the door to awakening.
To finish this with another Wittgenstein quote:
I think it’s always good to have more presentations of ideas from different perspectives. I would say that a lot of what you’re describing is covered in the Mysterious Answers part of the Map and Territory sequence and the A Human’s Guide to Words part of the Machine in the Ghost sequence . One thing that gets mentioned many times, I think in the posts but definitely in the comments, is a set of anecdotes from “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” which, if you haven’t read it, is a great lighthearted description of some of these kinds of not-actually-science that get passed off as science.
Also, respectfully, Wittgenstein moved in rarified circles and in that quote was a describing (and correctly criticizing) a much higher standard of understanding than most elite college graduates have, let alone the rest of society. You can tell, because the ‘modern system’ gave way to the postmodern system, whose pioneers mostly correctly diagnosed the problem and were then promptly misunderstood in all sorts of useless, destructive, and ridiculous ways.
Yes, I’m only re-quoting Wittgenstein from another book (Jay Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way), so my understanding is only approximate in that case, I could not process the Tractatus as it’s way over my head. And I’ll check the sequences.