I have no knowledge of, but only a conception of God.
Author: Warren Tang
I write about linguistics and philosophy. I also write poetry and take photographs.
Rationalism and Empiricism (not Rationalism versus Empiricism)
The dispute between rationalism and empiricism concerns the extent to which we are dependent upon sense experience in our effort to gain knowledge. Rationalists claim that there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience. Empiricists claim that sense experience is the ultimate source of all our concepts and knowledge.
From Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.
I agree with Rationalists that concepts and knowledge can be gained independently of sense experience, insofar as there is nothing outside of space-object-time. Some kind of knowledge must exist first of space-object-time before other kinds of concepts and knowledge can come into being independently.
Empiricist are therefore right to claim also that sense experience is the source of all our concepts and knowledge, insofar as rational concepts and knowledge depends on the first source of sense experience.
There are therefore two sources of knowledge – sense experience and reasoning. Rationality must come from the first instance of sense experience, be it a lifetime of one second or one hundred years. Without that “spark” there are no rational concepts and knowledge.
11 years of sustained blogging
Today is this blog’s 11th birthday. My first blog post was entitled Text and Scrutiny. It reminds me of what I was and still am interested in – Buddhism and philosophy. Lately, I have been working on equivalent ideas in Western philosophy to Buddhism. And I can see I will be writing a lot more on this in the future. Hopefully you will join me on this adventure.
(Update: I have turned back on comments as default again. I don’t remember when I turned it off but life was sure easier without it.)
Towards a Buddhist Materialism
I have come to the conclusion that nothing exists except for the physical world. The mind is a product of an object, namely an body. A personality is a product of the mind. This evidentially converges with the Buddhist concept of non-self (anatta). To me, what is called the ‘self’ is not what it seems. It may be considered a kind of illusion.
Why do I doubt God?
If there is a god and he is to be believed in by me, it should be about God and me, and nothing more. Yet when Christianity begins to tell me that it is alright to be heterosexual and have children but not homosexual and love someone of the same sex I begin to wonder what has sexuality have to do with my faith in him. The link between family values and Christianity is an uncomfortable one for me.
I have a wife and two children. I could not be a better model for Christian family virtue. Yet, that is not the point. The other constrains that Christianity places on the christian is what turns me away from Christianity. It makes me ask the hard questions about Christianity, and whether it is about The Church and the community and not about the god as such.
The Buddha, Buddhism and the Buddhist community do not place such burdens on the practitioner. It is all about my practice and my relationship to Buddhism. Nothing more, nothing less. It does not tell me not to believe in other faiths or other systems of thinking, but to ask whether these things are true in their own right. I chose to be a Buddhist, I chose Buddhism for its openness, its lack of bias to other thinking.
Homosexuality is not wrong in the Buddhist view. Sexual misconduct, be it perpetrated as heterosexual or homosexual acts, is wrong. There is no bias towards one religion like Christianity demands and discrimination against something irrelevant to faith like homosexuality. I cannot believe in a god which asks me of this. And I doubt a true god would demand such. My only conclusion then is that the values are that of the people and not of the god itself.
Sensation and Perception
In psychology there is differentiation between sensation and perception. Sensation is the reception of signal alone. Nothing about this signal is analysed. Perception is the stimuli analysed within the brain to make sense of it.
So Buddhism makes sense to call the mind (or brain) the sixth organ that brings together all the information into a coherent whole. To not distinguish an organ as Western thinking has done has been a disservice to their understanding. The reasoning behind this is partly due to the belief in the soul and by extension the mind. Western science and philosophy has had a tough time reconciling the mind in relation to everything else.
For Buddhism there is no mystery to the mind. It has no higher place separate from the rest of physiology. It is as much part of and impermanent as everything else.
Why people misunderstand the Buddhist concept of karma?
You often hear people say in English things like, “He will get what he deserves”, or “What goes around comes around”. And often you hear these same people say, “He has bad karma”. But that is not what is meant by karma, at least not in the Buddhist sense.
Firstly, karma (or kamma in Pali) which means ‘work’ or ‘deed’ in sanskrit should not to be confused with kama (as in The Kama Sutra) which means ‘desire’. They are not variant spellings of the same word but two separate words with separate meanings. Furthermore, the concept of kama is related to Hinduism and not Buddhism.
Secondly, it should also be understood that karma is a term used in Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, with all three religions having different meanings for the term. In Hinduism accumulation of karma is important in order to reach liberation. In Jainism the soul is surrounded by karmic “dirt” which “clings on to souls” which attract it. In Buddhism all production of karma – whether good or bad – through one’s actions is to be avoided. Thus the interpretation varies according to religious tradition which is reflected in the ways to attain their goals. In Buddhism it is awakening or bodhi. In Hinduism and Jainism it is liberation or moksha, though again the meaning of these terms are different for each religion. One should be aware that the word is only a “container” and not its “content” or meaning.
So in Buddhism if by avoiding karma we are to be awakened then how can one talk about anything that has to do with deservingness or merit. In Buddhism we do not talk in this way for this very reason. Merit of deed is wholly an English language convention and concept attached to the word karma by mistake.
The brain and its thoughts
Look at this picture.
Clearly, you see that the checker squares labelled A and B are of different shades, right? But check by isolating the squares from the surrounding and you will see that they are in fact the same shade of grey.
What is going on here? From experience you have learned that shadows change the shade of colours they fall upon, and that your mind will compensate for this. Note that it is not your eyes that is “doing” the compensating here, but your mind. Your eyes received the colours and shades as they are, and it is your mind that is doing the adjusting. Remove the surrounding information and you mind will no longer compensate allowing to see the shades as they are.
In Western understanding the mind is not considered a sense faculty. Traditionally there were only thought to be five senses – sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. And the sense corresponding organs were the eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin. The mind was seen as something different, therefore the brain was not seen as a sense organ.
In Buddhism, the mental objects are sensed by the mind, thus the brain is counted as the sixth sense organ. This has two important implications. Firstly, mental objects (thoughts) are placed on par with the objects of colour and form, sound, scent, flavour and texture, and makes the contents of thought as something ordinary. Secondly, it removes the mind as the seat of some kind of self by default of the ordinariness of what happens in the mind.
In this way we are able to deal with our thoughts and not be ruled by them. Essentially this is what the Buddha’s teaching is all about – taking control of yourself as a physical being – by showing us that the thoughts are really just the real world things that we can control.
Perhaps the self is an illusion as well, much like this image.
Philosophy from looking at a piece of paper
The Zen buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh once spoke of the impossibility of looking at a piece of paper seeing its front face and not presume that it has no back face. Most people will not argue that. Intuitively we will presume this, if we are of sound (without mental disabilities) and mature (old enough to have enough experience) mind.
Maurice Denis began a revolution in Western art with this insightful statement,
« Se rappeler qu’un tableau, avant d’être un cheval de bataille, une femme nue ou une quelconque anecdote, est essentiellement une surface plane recouverte de couleurs en un certain ordre assemblées. »
“Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a nude, an anecdote or whatnot, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.”
which led to (or summed up) pretty much all modern art. The Cubist paintings of Picasso are an expression of this idea. And Cezanne tried the same in his still-life works before Picasso.
In literature, Eliot, Woolf and Joyce are good examples of this approach and understanding. In linguistics, Saussure said as much about meaning in language. And in philosophy, Wittgenstein, after Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and Derrida had pursued an understanding to the same end.
In Zen, all things are linked, and all things are empty. The back of the piece of paper can be safely presumed to be there even if we do not directly see it by virtue of the existence of the front of it. The back relies of the front for its meaning and existence, as does all language relies on all words for each other’s definitions. Nothingness only means what it does because of somethingness. The reverse is true as well.
Why bother with marriage?
Do not be fooled by the title.
This video is not putting down marriage but praising it. Marriage is an important “institution” in that it commits the people in question to achieving specific goals. Goals include family and work can be achieved with greater “efficiency” than perhaps being done alone. Everybody gains.
While we might go into it with romantic ideals we might ask then what exactly is love. I do not personally believe in a idealised version of love, and neither does my adopted culture – Japan. Japan still has remnants of its past custom of arranged marriages. Actually they are not as “arranged” as people seem to think from the English transliteration of the term miai. The potential partners always has the last say on the matter. They can say no at any time. There is something practical about marriage (as it should be from a survival point of view) and it is not in the term, marriage, as such. It is about commitment. And we achieve a lot more by simply committing to something, for better or for worse.
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