 Hello my friends, this is the 46th episode of Patterson in Pursuit. I am way overdue for some interview breakdowns. We're going back all the way to episode number 30 with my interview at Harvard with Dr. Janet Chiazzo talking about Buddhism. I really loved this conversation and often times when a Westerner holds Buddhist ideas, they do so in a very hippie-dippy way and Dr. Chiazzo is not hippie-dippy at all. She's totally down to earth, versed in philosophy, has a good sense of humor, very frank and blunt. So we really hit it off and can't wait to break it down for you. Before we start I want to give you an update. My wife and I are currently in Wanaka, New Zealand. We have left Auckland, we've flown into Queenstown which is on the South Island and then we've arrived in Wanaka and in a few days we are going to Christchurch. I'm doing an interview there and then we are flying to Sydney, Australia where I've got some interviews that, ooh, I just can't wait but I can't tell you about just yet. Also if you've been following along with the Jason Brennan crowdfunding review of Square One, this past week has been utterly insane. So Jason finished the review and it was exactly as I was hoping it would be. Very critical, very much not about the ideas and I wanted to use it as an example of some of the pettiness and even anti-intellectualism of some participants within academia and it didn't disappoint. But in only a matter of days it turned into this gigantic shit show because once I posted Brennan's review to my website, I did a video review on my YouTube channel. It was very, very, very critical and he didn't like that. So he went from mocking my ideas and mocking my person on Facebook and publicly to going into calling me a criminal and a plagiarist and a thief and I still was intellectual property and it was this really sad and unfortunate situation which, I mean if I'm going to be honest right, this was part of my point in taking on the project. It was just such an extreme example that it devolved into character assassination. So if you guys are interested in drama, then check out my YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Steve Patterson. Now you guys know because I talk about it all the time on the show that this kind of pettiness is one of the reasons why I have rejected the academic route, where I'm trying to capitalize on being a philosopher online, being able to do what I'm doing and there is a large and growing movement of us that recognize just how far off track academia has gone and just how poor of a monetary investment it is for anybody that's, you know, looking to go to college. Fortunately, the sponsor of the show Praxis is a company that is on the front line of this movement where their entire existence is based on taking people who are young, competent and enthusiastic, training them in three months and then placing them immediately at an apprenticeship where they get paid and they get real world job experience. So rather than trying to learn about the world by sitting in a classroom and reading a bunch of textbooks written by people who've never experienced the real world, have no idea how it operates, Praxis is a program that shortcuts that entire system and the net cost to participants is $0. And last I've seen the average salary of Praxis participants after completing their program is $50,000 a year. So in virtually every way, it is superior than going to college. I think there are very, very few exceptions. So that sounds like something that you're interested in. You want to join us in the real world. Then head over to stevedashpatterson.com slash praxis, P-R-A-X-I-S and see if the program is right for you. So I really hope you guys enjoy this breakdown with Dr. Janet Guillazzo talking about Buddhism. What I find and I hope is clear at this point is rational individuals are way, way, way too comfortable with dismissing ideas out of hand. I think in almost every circumstance it's because they don't understand the ideas. Buddhism is one of those cases. A religion in general, and Buddhism whether or not Buddhism is a religion is of course just a taxonomic question, but any of these big world view philosophies that aren't strictly scientific, a lot of people just poo poo straight off the bat and say there's nothing to learn here. I think this is a catastrophic mistake. Even if you don't agree with the ideas in Buddhism, you have to force yourself to understand them. You have to see their line of reasoning and understand it so that you know whether or not you're justified in rejecting the ideas. That's what I try to do with the interview and that's what I'm going to try to do with the breakdown is say look, there's actually a lot of meat here. There's a fantastic argument to be made. Even if like me, you don't agree with it. Enjoy. The self is a very important term in Buddhism and it's one of the sort of key doctrinal insistence that the self is generally a construct that we create and it doesn't refer to anything that exists independently in the world but rather it's dependent upon how we construct it and many things go into its construction. I really love this position and I think it's beautiful and if you guys have listened to my commentary on metaphysics about inanimate objects, this is just a beautiful natural corollary of that. In a nutshell, my argument, which I actually believe, is that what physically exists are base units of spacetime. Those units are arranged in particular ways and we reference particular arrangements of spacetime as objects. For example, I have a water bottle in front of me. It's not the case that there is such a thing as a objectively mind independently existing water bottle. It's that there are bits of matter which are arranged in a particular way that I simply reference as a water bottle. If I were not around, the water bottle itself wouldn't exist. So it is itself a concept. It is something that has a mind dependent existence. This is taking that idea and applying it to the self. It's saying that what I am, what I think I'm referencing, it's like referencing the water bottle in that when I'm conceiving of it, yeah, it kind of exists but if I stopped conceiving of it, it would stop existing. So the idea is that the self really isn't an independent thing which is why when you quiet your mind, they might say with meditation, you can experience what you actually are which is not a self. So I don't agree with this, but I think it's beautiful. And so one of the biggest points in all of Buddha's thought is that we need to be aware of this fact because the ensuing attachment we have to any idea or definition that we have of ourselves as a self gets in the way and leads to a lot of problems. In fact, it's one of our worst problems. So one area that I think people get confused by especially if they have a more rationalist disposition is when they're listening to or hearing, you know, Eastern mystics or Buddhists or Hindus a lot of times they say things like the mind will mislead you or they say, you know, you have to stop the questioning process they say things that sound very anti-intellectual and I used to hear these things and go, oh well that's the complete opposite of everything I stand for. This is ridiculous. Then I started looking a little bit deeper and you can't take their claims literally like that. So what she said is, you know, our conception of the self gives us all kinds of problems. In other words, because our concepts construct ourselves we construct the world we mistake the true nature of existence. The true nature of existence is without essence which is something we'll talk a little bit later in this interview. Your mind is tricking you into thinking that the things you come up with in your mind are independently existing phenomena. So the objects that you see the people that you conceive of as being like yourself all of this is kind of an illusion. And if you over intellectualize with the concepts that you've created you're going to be misleading yourself from the truth. So it's not anti-intellectualism or irrationalism just for its own sake. It's actually making a truth claim. It's saying the path towards enlightenment is not one spent in the world of your own artificial conceptual constructions. The path towards enlightenment is actually recognizing what your mind is doing which is in effect constructing the world and stopping that process and just being and seeing what is. Now in Hindu philosophy this goes one step farther I don't think maybe this isn't some Buddhist philosophy but I know in Hindu philosophy they say what actually is you'll discover is everything. So what you actually are is not a self separate from anything else but who are actually everything. Or as they might say all is one. Now if that's true that's a really big deal and it's beautiful and it's humbling I don't think it's true but it's something that before we refute or mock as being anti-intellectual we better understand what they're actually claiming. So the clearer we conceive of what our minds are actually doing I think the more accurate world view we have and the less likely we are to be tripped up by our own minds. I guess for me when I think of the self it has this very intimate connection with the mind, with consciousness but it's almost one layer deeper that there is it's not just the phenomena of consciousness it's my consciousness I feel like I'm this being with the who is experiencing these things it's not just the experience is happening it's that it's my experience that's the main part so that me part you're saying that's a construction can we dive a little more into that so what does it mean for something to be a construction is it an illusion is it something that doesn't actually exist is it something, is it a concept that we think actually has some kind of independent existence but really it doesn't no it is a concept and there are several things that is I'm floating in front of my class all the time I'm teaching my intro to Buddhism class and we're talking about all these questions but the my part of the my consciousness has a lot of different meanings and in what that my consists and what its status is with respect to consciousness could be quite different it's not obvious exactly what that means and Buddhists would say that yeah it doesn't there is no independent existence of this entity that would allow the genitive pronoun my to stand on its own other than an idea that we create or a way of explaining things to ourselves so I love it this is one of the things I find so fascinating by eastern philosophy is their conceptions of the self and the difficulty with conceptions of the self my own position which I am very reluctant and I don't like this conclusion but my own position is that if it is true that there is such a thing as the self that exists even when it is not being conceived that I think that forces you into something like the existence of a soul the existence of a person this is what I was talking about with the interview breakdown with professor Brahm about machines and consciousness but it is either the case that you have a self or you don't have a self there's no wiggle room here if the self is conceptually constructed then it is illusory but if the self is not conceptually constructed if when I'm referencing myself I'm actually referencing something that would exist without it being referenced or conceived then I think that pushes us unfortunately into something like the existence of a soul and that is the position that I am tentatively holding because it's very hard for me to accept the idea that what I'm referencing by the term I isn't or that it's illusory or non-existent or conceptually constructed it sure seems like I am a person and if I am a person that's a really difficult thing to wrap our heads around philosophically and it even seems like I'm a person that's the same person over time I know some people have different internal psychological experiences but they feel like they're completely different than they were 10 years ago or 20 years ago not me, I feel like since I had memories maybe for something I still feel like I'm the same person getting older, gaining experiences so that that internal psychological experience of the self for me is incredibly powerful I think that's one of the reasons it's so hard for me to shake this idea that I am something not, you know, maybe my illusion is very strong, that's just kind of hard to accept given my own internal experience and of course even when I say my own internal experience that seems to only make sense to me if we accept the existence of the self when I experience phenomena as I interact with the world I have developed this explanation for what's going on that I don't know how it can be compatible with what you've just presented is it seems like there is a point of perspective that I have my perspective, we can put that in quotation marks but I also believe that you or at least what I'm referencing when I use that term also have a perspective and it's the same it's very similar in the sense that there is this perspective and that perspective and they're not ultimately the same perspective doesn't that imply some kind of a self or at least some kind of a true metaphysical difference between the perspectives? No, not at all, for one thing your perspective is always changing and my perspective is always changing first of all and that's a really important part of this the sort of logical proof that is given about the self is that it's always changing, it doesn't remain the same and so at the minimum you have to say that such conception is a shorthand for what in fact is always in flux and so once it's always in flux going back to Aristotle something that's always in flux undermines its ability to have an essence the main Buddhist critique is about this notion of essence this is directly related to square one, the book that I just released I have a section on this idea of universal flux and this is one of the most interesting parts of our conversation in my opinion is how central the idea is of flux the argument goes essentially that if things are always changing then at any point they aren't really one particular way they're always turning into something else and therefore you don't have essence this I think is fundamentally backwards, in order to have change you must have essence, you have to have change in order for anything to be changing so my conception of flux is you might have things changing over time so time one you have bits of matter arranged in a particular way time two you have bits of matter arranged in another way then there is change over those times but at any given instant the thing is exactly what it is it has essence now it's really really interesting is where infinity plays into the mix as you'll hear shortly so then I ask her what appears to be true differences in perspective between her conscious perspective and my conscious perspective if that's artificial does that imply that really there's only one consciousness that has artificial divisions between it so would you say then the claim could be something like this that what exists is not a bunch of selves with fundamentally different perspectives that there's one type of thing that's out there one type of consciousness and it's artificially broken up between we're not going there either so that would be to hypothesize a one consciousness so any the the aim, the target that the Buddhists are aiming at is the hypothesization or the essentialization so be it one big thing or a bunch of little individual ones the problem with all of it is not to see that every single one of those things is constructed from out of many different parts and those are constantly shifting and the way that we name them depends on what particular perspective we're taking in any one particular moment which itself is always changing and so there are there's energy, there's phenomena, things are happening but none of them have an essential identity or essential essence so this is really the central part of our conversation and arguably of Buddhism so when you say things are happening but if they don't have an identity then they're not really things, right? No, that's the whole point is that things don't need an identity in order to be there so what are you referencing when you use the term things? I'm always referencing it from whatever particular angle that I'm taking so you need to give things identity and common human communication and you do that all the time but those again are products of our conceptions our set of concepts our set of constructions and they don't necessarily belong to the thing as such so there is no thing per se No, everything's in flux everything's constantly changing so that right there is where Dr. Yatze and I have to part ways to make sense to say that things don't need identity in fact as is one of the central parts of my book all existent things must necessarily be identical with themselves in order to exist you must be some way you might even say to exist is to be some way in whatever way that you are that's the way that you are you have self-identity so the Buddhist teaching is denying the existence really of true identity or what it's saying is insofar as there is identity it is only conceptual identity and not actual identity it is illusory identity and not real identity and this is kind of diametrically opposed to my own position and now here's a little tidbit that I just love this idea which you're about to hear even though it just came out briefly it is absolutely central I'm going to talk a lot about it but there is everything but there's not one particular thing there's not an everything either so you're just moving to making this one big thing in the sky so no there isn't the universe is infinite okay so as you just throw it in there the universe is infinite it comes up later and I talk about it a lot how I think infinity is the cause of a great deal of confusion in the world it is central to these claims in Buddhism so for that something is it does it have any constituent parts to it but each of those parts themselves are made up of constituent parts down to an infinite regress so there's no base anything alright now I'm going to play that again for you so for that something is it does it have any constituent parts to it but each of those parts themselves are made up of constituent parts down to an infinite regress so there's no base anything no isn't this interesting that though it may not appear so at first glance and a pillar you might even say the pillar of this central buddhist teaching about the non-identity is infinity and as I have said in my writing and elsewhere infinity is I consider it to be logic the idea that you could complete an infinity or have an actual infinity or an actual infinite regress is logically contradictory precisely because you run into these type of errors the claim is that things exist they have constituent parts to them but those constituent parts have constituent parts have constituent parts if you follow that logic it means that really there are no constituent parts there are no fundamental actual constituent parts you kind of go all the way down and it dissolves into nothingness now usually I would be making that argument to say well therefore it must be the case that if you have an object with constituent parts it must be constructed from fundamental indivisible base units because otherwise you run into a logical contradiction and she's using it to say no this is actually the truth of the matter is that this is why things don't have identity is because infinity so for those of you who wonder why I talk about infinity a lot this is one of the reasons and it's fascinating that it comes in Buddhism we're talking about infinity as it correlates to Buddhist metaphysics and really the central idea that every part contains within it an infinite regress which I think is logically contradictory so let me present to you an alternative hypothesis that to the extent anything has a constituent part it must have fundamental base units in the physical world that means there is a fundamental base unit of spacetime if we're talking about let's say for example there are cells that would imply that the self is some kind of a simple indivisible base unit if we're talking in mathematics this comes up all the time when we're talking about distances if we're talking about everything from circles and talking about calculus in all of our calculations there is a implied base unit otherwise you get nonsense especially comes up in geometry so anywhere that you have anything it is either the case that you have simple substances if simple base units or you have constructions of those base units that's it there's no infinitely large or infinitely small thing because that would deny that the thing has identity which is logically impossible so now we transition into the second part of the conversation which I asked because I know there's a lot of westerners who like to import eastern philosophy into their world views to try to argue for the existence of irrational positions and they use cryptic eastern paradoxical phrases to try to say look the reality is contradictory so I wanted to give her a softball and ask her about how we should understand how Buddhists use paradoxes are we supposed to take paradoxes literally or are we supposed to solve the paradoxes what is the Buddhist take on paradox or even logical contradiction like are these things that are meant to get at a deeper premise to get us to realize our constructions about the world or do they accept look there are some paradoxes that are actually there we just kind of have to deal with it it's the former for logic specifically would you say in Buddhist thinking there is any acceptance of actual logical contradiction you can make a logical contradiction you can make it all the time it depends what it means and how you're using it so if I say something like I exist and I don't exist you can say that but it doesn't make any sense so then we're not going to bother with stuff that makes no sense you can say that I love the matter of fact well that makes no sense and it's damn true makes absolutely no sense and every utterance depends on its rhetorical context and what you're trying to do with it and how you're using it and so any one single utterance taken out of context can be interpreted in a lot of different ways and that's another major part it's very similar to what I've already been saying that our notion of ourself it depends on what perspective we take on it and the same thing for language so that you certainly can construct a paradox but what's the status of that paradox is it an artificial game or whatever I mean the thing about paradox in certain kinds of Buddhist texts it is the former of the two options you gave that a seeming paradox requires us to maybe move to another level to understand certain assumptions that we're bringing to that paradox yes I think that that makes a great deal of sense and I can you know refer also to the law of the excluded middle which is like saying you know either I exist or I don't exist I've actually worked on this topic a little bit and the law of the excluded middle depends on a faulty presumption that there's a clear dividing line between exist and doesn't exist or yes and no and it's a bifurcated line which yeah that's a paradox if you accept that assumption but if you don't accept that assumption the whole thing falls away so would you say something like that specifically on the law of the excluded middle that it presupposes identity or it presupposes that the boundaries exactly the meaningfulness and absoluteness of boundaries yes that's right absolutely so in my conversations that I've had with a lot of people especially maybe if they haven't heard this perspective the idea that in eastern philosophy they embrace actual logical contradiction this is just this is just an error it's not no not at all no right the you know they're not idiots you know they're again I love for frankness like actual logical contradictions come on they're not idiots I appreciate that perspective and it's an interesting point about the law of the excluded middle this is also something I cover briefly in my book I do think it's the case that the law of the excluded middle is a foundational law of logic but I think it's actually fairly simple there are no gradients of existence we only get gray types of existence with if we're ambiguous with language so this is an example I give in square one I say you know the sentence I am wearing two shoes and a top hat right now it's like well is that true or is it false law of the excluded middle it's either true or false you could say if we were going to be that ambiguous you could say well it's half true because I'm wearing two shoes but I'm not wearing a hat that works in colloquial language but if we're going to be really strict about it it's just simply a false claim a proposition like that contains two parts that I am wearing two shoes and I am wearing a top hat and if both of those aren't true then the proposition simply false or an example to talk about an existent thing is there exists a cat with black hair and an elephant snout now we wouldn't say that that type of thing half exists because there are black cats out there though they don't have elephant snouts we would just say no those type of things don't exist we could say each individual property of a thing exists and those properties that don't exist don't exist so that's the only place that we get vagueness I don't think it makes any sense whatsoever to say in a literal way that there is something or some property that is somewhere between existent and non existent that it's somehow half existent that's just a function of language not metaphysical reality I could say the last thing I asked her has to do again with this conception of boundaries I've seriously entertained the idea that all boundaries are artificial but then I run into one example that I'll be damned if it's not a case of what I consider to be a genuine boundary in the world and this is how she handles my question okay so the last question that I want to ask you is going back to the consciousness and also has to do with this seeming distinction between things that theory that there is a seems to be a unique difference between the contents of my awareness the contents of my consciousness the feelings that I'm having and yours is that a objective distinction of any if I had a theorize of any meaningful objective distinction that isn't relative that seems to be absolute and talking about something in the world that would be right up there probably number one it seems to be that you know even my perspective even from the sense of like I'm looking at you from this side of the table you're looking at me from that side of the table though the actual awareness isn't that something that would be a non-relative distinction well that's one of the hardest things for anybody to explain is the so-called existence of other minds and that was a debate that was taken up in Buddhist philosophy and I don't think was satisfactorily dealt with okay so that's not a fully satisfactory answer so I ask it again in a different way okay so let me ask you maybe this is a better way of phrasing it are there any is the claim that distinctions between things are relative is that a an absolute claim is that saying there is no circumstance in which you have a true absolute distinction between things that isn't a construction yeah because whatever the thing is itself can be deconstructed so would this be a circumstance then with the existence of other minds where it would seem like that distinction is not conceptual or constructed it seems like we're talking about a sense separate the distinction is separate from our minds our conception of it would that be an example of a I'm not so sure because you're trying to pose them as opposites and I'm not sure they're opposites and I think it would be really important first of all to think about the question of your mind versus what's in my purse so I think we're mixing two different problems one of them has to do with the nature of consciousness and one of them has to do with the nature of things and absolute difference okay so she's very uncomfortable with this idea that there are absolute non-relative differences between things and I think again this is one of the central ideas in Buddhism and in fact this is the reason that I'm not a Buddhist I'm not a Hindu is because I do think there are absolute distinctions between things namely the ones that I'm talking about but I give her even another more difficult example of what appear to be genuine things but what if I say okay forget differences in consciousness what have I say the contents of my own perception I'm talking about my visual field there is kind of a tan blob here and there's kind of a blue blob there in my visual field now they have some constructed relationships so for example if this that blob is over here that blob is over there that only makes sense kind of as a together as they're relative to one another but the actual feeling or the actual like qualitative experience of these things seems to be different seems to be meaningfully different that it wouldn't be a construction haven't we found like a non-relative distinction in my own conscious experience say the difference between the experience of blue and tan for example that's a much faster way of thinking yeah so they're different but they're on a continuum with each other the continuum being color color okay and that's where we had in the conversation if I had a little bit more time maybe I would have said okay the experience of blue and the taste of cherries or something I think if we push the envelope here we can find absolute distinctions between phenomena the feeling of seeing blue and the tasting of cherries have some genuine absolute qualitative difference between them if that's true that implies that this is non-relative it's a non-relative distinction so again I love the idea especially in Hinduism of this idea that all is one that all divisions are arbitrary but I believe it's false I think there are some meaningful divisions in the world I think there's I don't think that I am you I don't think that I am everything I think that I am something who has boundaries and even if neither of us are conceiving of those boundaries I still believe those boundaries exist not to mention what I also conceive of being is actual boundaries between base units of physical reality so clumps of matter over here and clumps of matter over there have meaningful absolute distinctions and boundaries between them that are non-conceptual so I really love the aesthetic beauty and power of thinking of boundaries this way as the mystical perspective but I am not persuaded because I think some boundaries do exist now the trouble is if boundaries do exist and if boundaries of the self exist well then you still got a heck of a difficult problem that I'm trying to solve which is how can you make sense of that and right now the most powerful theoretical explanation I have for the boundaries of the self is what philosophers and theologians call the soul you can conceive of the soul as being a bounded person where my person ends is the boundary of my soul sounds ridiculous and doesn't sound particularly scientific but unfortunately I think it's what follows if it is true that I am something and not merely an illusion so that is all for today I hope you guys enjoyed this interview breakdown I'm still behind on these other breakdowns I might do a couple more in a row this next month is going to be pretty smashing so get ready for a spectacular march talking about mathematics and infinities with some special guests that I'll reveal shortly alright that's all for today have a great week