Mereological Nihilism: The World is a Nothing/Something

[31Uriel]

The great philosopher Rene Descartes pointed out: Cogito, ergo sum. If I doubt that I exist, who does the doubting? It's me. Although it can only be said that I exist as thinking thing. Can quarks, leptons etc. think? No, therefore composed things exist.

[31Uriel]

The great philosopher Rene Descartes pointed out: Cogito, ergo sum. If I doubt that I exist, who does the doubting? It's me. Although it can only be said that I exist as thinking thing. Can quarks, leptons etc. think? No, therefore composed things exist.

[yogawiki]

I agree with @perfectlygonebeyond, Grupp is wearing the wrong trousers to be a "true" philosopher...

[mrsbrown333]

thanks, i now have a name for what i am feeling now.

[perfectlygonebeyond]

First, this video leaves me wondering just what it means for a particle to be an immaterial point. Secondly, in researching a bit about Grupp, I find that I can't take him seriously as a philosopher because his attitude and disposition is unbecoming of one. Third, mereological nihilism, as pingala points out, fails to answer very basic questions. One question: How can these dimensionless points add up to anything macroscopic? Or, what about the reality and nature of the space between them?

[pingala10]

Mereological Nihilism is closer to dignaga's Pramāṇa-samuccaya, but fails to address basic questions about reality and composition. It ignores dependent origination of the world and works on independent framework. In Reality Compositions are done through tight and loose coupling, Tight couplings give rise to aggregations and forms. It is these aggregations which are captured by our perception through concious and unconcious imagination.

[Arodinme6]

In the film, "I ♥ Huckabees", Vauban's nihilistic philosophy claims that everything is disconnected by misery, tragedy, or meaninglessness and though we may be happy, we are brought back to sadness by these means because those are the "physical laws".

Now, if we said atomic theory supported Vauban's philosophy because atoms have no meaning, are disconnected from other atoms, & suffer from tragic collisions, can we say she is validated by science or coincidence?

I say the same of Buddhism

[opensourcebuddhism]

She is an existentialist clearly. One's own existence is the subject of such. No one can evaluate another's experience. It is experientialism. One can refute it no more than one can refute Berkeley's idealism. One can "not like it" but that is another story. You seem to think that Anglo-American empiricism is the only philosophy. You are not alone, but in the world at large, definitely a minority perspective. It seems naive to continental Europeans and Indians and Chinese.

[Arodinme6]

I treat Vauban's existentialism the same as theological Buddhism's MN because I see both as subjective evaluations of reality based on preconceived tenants of the ideology which at most share coincidence with science and logic.

I favor logic and science because, in assessing any claim, if it cannot show empirical evidence (science) or be shown valid under the assumption of its premises (logic), then I have no reason in believing it. It's a deficit to Continentalism to not reason similarly.

[opensourcebuddhism]

That's fine. Glad you are able to find "objective truth" so readily apparent. Perhaps the world will one day catch up to you. I only see my existence in relationship with others, so your "objective" truth will always elude me. I envy you your absolute truth, just as I envy the fundamentalist Christian who claims the same knowledge of "absolute truth". My world is apparently more mysterious, uncanny and unbelievable than yours. Hats off, modern Muhammad!

James

[Jcolinsol]

"But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it."

-Gautama Buddha

So, he advocated the scientific method, thousands of years before the Europeans got around to it. There is nothing coincidental about it.

Science is useful, so long as you recognize that it is only a best guess.

[Arodinme6]

Itself, I think these "spiritual philosophies" are bankrupt without any evidence from science or logic. So many claim that there is a link, such as in the video, but it's not so much different from Creationism or other crap, as I will show later.

If this video had the disclaimer, "We use the term 'mereological nihilism' differently as it is thought of in the academic field of philosophy to denote our own independent thoughts with the same words-sounds", then I'd be better off about this vid.

[opensourcebuddhism]

I have never heard this term used before in academic philosophy. Please cite a source. These are new ideas and physics has always been part of philosophy, along with chemistry and astronony, geometry....

[Arodinme6]

Though it's a bit technical (as it should be in this case, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy does an amazing job at covering many philosophical topics, movements, and people. For MN, just go google "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy", go on to their page, and search for "Mereology" and scroll down until you hit the section "4.3 Composition, Existence, and Identity". Everything from there down refers to MN.

[opensourcebuddhism]

I have no doubt but that the entry will tell me nothing is determinable. Bit busy these days, but I can guess. Glad you live in such a certain world. Join the majority! From Bin Laden to Bush, they are certain. I am uncertain, and in this I rest my case with Socrates....

James

[Arodinme6]

"I am uncertain, and in this I rest my case with Socrates...."

You sound certain about that :)

Socrates stands with the tradition of logic and truth, for he once said that "the unexamined life is not worth living", something you might come to if you ever leave the spiritual irrationality so common to bin Laden, Bush, and Buddha.

[Arodinme6]

Also on the issue of gods in Buddhism, you can check out an article by Austin Cline called "Gods in Buddhism".

The only reason I bother with this is because it seems like every field of metaphysics is being hijacked by New Age/Existential pomos that make it so hard to find the philosophy behind the term. Just doing a google search on "metaphysics" will hardly yield any information on the branch of philosophy, but rather some spiritual Otherness that is linked with quantum energy ideas, etc.

[opensourcebuddhism]

Cline should be discussing the original term istadevata (asnskrit) or yidam (tibetan)- a "desired deity" or "mind impression." They are not "real" like Jehovah, but acknowledged as real in the same sense as a unicorn. A product of one's own mind. Sorry, you won't find a creator deity in any kind of Buddhism.

[Arodinme6]

Well, then I guess we disagree on the soundness of the article. But do you have any source that I can look up that claims iin all Buddhist traditions there are no gods?

I would find this odd since Buddhism is an off-shoot of the polytheistic religion Hinduism...

[opensourcebuddhism]

Buddhism is a rebellion against the old brahminism of hindu tradition. Might as well call Marxism and offshoot of Protestantism. Maybe you could in fact!

[Arodinme6]

By the way, just because you can speak of something does not necessarily mean that it exists. A clear example would be the sentence "The Invisible Pink Unicorn exists." We can conceive of each word but not of some words existing as qualities of others (ex. "pink exists" is fine while "invisible pink unicorn" is not).

It's a quality of our psycholinguistic faculty called "displacement" that allows us to take objects of cognition and combine them without having sensed them in the first place.

[opensourcebuddhism]

Actually,

Anything of which one may speak, does not exist. If you can tell me where the boundary between fire and the fuel exists, I will agree they are separate entities. Since you cannot, then having no boundaries, they are not separate entities. If they are not separate, then the words that describe them are fictions just as is your unicorn.

James

[Arodinme6]

"Anything of which one may speak, does not exist."

So if Buddhism exists, then one must not speak it. But at least one does speak it, such as the Dali Lama or reportedly, Buddha himself. Therefore, Buddhism does not exist.

Modus tollens + your claim quoted above = PWN

[opensourcebuddhism]

Your missing Wittgenstein's and the Buddhist's own similar understanding of language: a series of tropes, points of the consciousness. You neglect the reductio ad absurdam in favor of deduction. If the boundary between entities cannot be shown apart from conceptually, and everything is inter-related - which it must be or we couldn't know of anything else - then there are no independently existing entities. "The Dao that can be spoken is not the unmanifest Dao". Similar thinking in Buddhism.

[Arodinme6]

Though I can't so much on Buddha, Wittgenstein was an atomic theorist in the philosophy of language (just read the first couple of pages of the Tractatus), which is diametrically opposed to MN.

And I hope you don't seriously think I - or any other rational being - would take a RAA as a premise: there's a reason why it's called "reasoning from the absurd".

[opensourcebuddhism]

You are reading the "early Wittgenstein." Read his Investigations - he rejects logical atomism and sets the stage for more pomo language theory you seem not to endure. Who is right? the younger or more sagely, elder Wittgenstein? I agree more with the latter.

[Arodinme6]

In PI, Wittgenstein does reject the logical atomism found in the Tractatus, but only as he expressed a disdain for deriving word meaning from atomic "facts or objects". Yet, the later Wittgenstein still holds to the atomic view in PI by claiming that there are units called "language games" in which the meaning of a word is used, rather than defined.

Anyways, plurality is not a quality of MN because plurality serves as a generalization of objects. MN no likey common propertEz.

[Arodinme6]

By the way, he uses arguments to make his points (which are pathetic). Subsequently, in light of MN, he is committing himself to proof by contradiction.

In case you can't see why, here is a def. of an argument: a series of statements in which one, called the conclusion, is affirmed on the basis of the others, called the premises. Remember that MN holds that causality and generality do not exist? Well, arguments proposes cauality in warrant and generality in meaning.

Fuck Buddha :)

[opensourcebuddhism]

Yeah, shallow, shallow man,

When you use such language as "Fuck Buddha" we know you are not a philosopher. Still, I respond. Do you not get it? In ordinary language I can obviously speak of "round squares" and "crooked lines". Language conceals as much as displays. Sorry the world is so literally true for you. Must be horrifying to live in your world. I imagine "Bush was a great president" to be part of your vocabulary some how. Makes sense as a statement, no?

James

[Arodinme6]

When does profanity necessarily cause someone to be a non-philosopher? Just imagine that shitty reasoning: if a philosopher were to state something philosophical followed by profanity, then they cease to be a philosopher! You obviously don't hold people like Voltaire and Nietzsche in high regard then, though most of philosophical academia do. Hm, I wonder who is right?

You don't seem to understand language. It's sequential because there are predetermined forms and sounds for a given entity.

[Arodinme6]

By the way, these "pin-points" are of an atomless mereology (aka mereological nihilism). Buddhism, which is atomic because it holds causality and common identity to exist, is in stark contrast to mereological nihilism.

Mereological nihilism holds that causality and generality do not exist because this would require an identity of something to be generalized and sequenced outside of itself, against the law of identity.

[opensourcebuddhism]

Oh!

Just another guy who thinks Buddhism hangs on scripture like the monotheisms do. I bet you are in for a surprise. Why not see the vid on Nagarjuna, Mahayana Buddhism's number one man - see a Buddhist refutation of atoms, sequencing, time, causation. You guys read on intro bit about early Buddhist theories and think you know all about Buddhism. I think you are in for a surprise!

James

[Arodinme6]

1. Buddhism does contain gods, specifically that of Tibetan Buddhism (ex. Yama).

2. Then he is not a Buddhist just as a denier of the 6 days of creation is not a Christian. The fact that Buddhists use scripture to try making a point is itself a pure exposed example of how stark the difference is between Buddhism and mereological nihilism.

Mereological nihilism is opposed to language (which scriptures are composed of) because language holds causality and common identity.

PWN.

[opensourcebuddhism]

well,

if you knew the term yidam or istadevata you would realize that the Buddhist "gods" are, to translate, "mind impressions" (tibetan) and "wished-for divinities (sanskrit). the deities are metaphorical in our western sense of that term, but metaphor is yet reality for mahayana buddhists. absolutely every tradition that exists, from shamanism to science, understand the "ultimate" to be beyond language. i guess you think your words sum it all up, don't you? Too bad...shallow philosophy.

[Arodinme6]

In Tibetian Buddhism, Yama is known as the "God of Death". Yama is also a manifestation of the Buddha of Wisdom, Manjusri.

[Arodinme6]

Too bad mereological nihilism refutes Buddhism since Buddhism is sequential.

But nice try on mixing religion with philosophy! What next, science? Oh, too late.

Maybe Buddhist theologians should focus more on coincidences with its scripture and causality with scripture. A bet these Buddhist theologians would be in for a surprise :)

[opensourcebuddhism]

The distinction between science and religion is incredibly artificial. Doesn't work for Buddhism at all. No God, you see.

Science is yet another tradition. Buddhism exactly shares the experiential, logical focus of science. Buddhism is a science of consciousness, a psychology, in spite of more seeming "mythic" elements.

James

[Arodinme6]

1. The distinction between science and religion is not artificial because there are two fundamentally different qualities of both: the natural and the supernatural.

2. Buddhism is not identical to science. For example, the notion of reincarnation is not a testable hypothesis.

[opensourcebuddhism]

ok pal,

you enter my world. then what is confucianism since it has no supernatural focus? or philosophical daoism? or are the chinese alone in the world in not being "religious"? your narrow definition of "religion" then means as well that marxism is "science" right? anything rejecting the supernatural is then, science? you continue in your dialogue to assert buddhism holds to sequentialist atomism and do not seem to have consulted the nagarjuna works. he is the source of the majority

[opensourcebuddhism]

mahayana rejection of same. you think the fundamentals of existence can be expressed in language? in any given classroom, the ultimate level of reality exists as "bosons" in the room. the "truth" projected can only be individually and communally perspectivally true. there is no way around this. or are the color-blind right to deny the exist of imperceptible "red" colors"? were they the majority, there would be no "red" in the world right?

[originalgrin]

...because the idea of an entity that can't be divided any smaller, and has no parts or structure seems like magic and doesn't make any more sense to me than infinite divisibility. Perhaps there is something wrong with both mereological positions...even Grupp's assessment of material constitution in the end seems rather simplistic. Maybe reality and the objects "in" it aren't things that can be ultimately divided as if with a cookie cutter.

[originalgrin]

I once visited Grupp's website and walked away more confused than enlightened. Probably because he makes big claims but (it seems) refuses to write an "essay" less than 200 hundred pages long. Sorry, but if you can't summarize you're position in a reasonably sized essay, maybe you don't have a very strong position to start. I am greatly interested in the issue of atomism and would be interested in hearing more about what it means for there to exist these "pin-points" of energy....