Author: Warren Tang

I write about linguistics and philosophy. I also write poetry and take photographs.

Not Materialism

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I mentioned to a friend that perhaps there are physical or material things only. He said that is rather naive.

If I were to take the impermanence seriously, then even physical things (like mental things) do not exist as such. What is to say the appearance of things seemingly longer than thought is not as immaterial as thought itself. Just because the length of appearance is longer and seemingly more permanent does not mean it is permanent. So there is justification that things are not real as well.

Let’s start having dialogues again – comments on

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There was a time when I had great conversations with people online. We would argued about finer points of things. I was open to opinions. But that was until I got trolled.

These days I Periscope a lot. And there everything is in real-time, including interaction with your audience as well as trolling. But this also had meant blocking trolls had become real-time as well, which is a good thing. By interacting with viewers who felt trolls a nuisance had meant blocking was no longer a problem I faced alone. To know other people feel the same way as you about trolls had meant that I can now block without feeling I was shutting out perhaps a valid opinion.

At times people disguise their trolling as views, and one must learn to deal with it as much as one does in real life.

So let’s get back to dialogues. Let me build again a good community of readers as I once had had. Let me be free to speak my mind without fear.

No evidence for other universes

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After I wrote this post I did some reading. And, yes, people do think about what is outside our universe, but have found no evidence for other universes interacting with ours. But neither is there evidence for a god-creater (if you ignore secondary evidence such as the Bible) either.

There is nothing like consilience, the convergence of evidence to something.

What is wrong with rationalism?

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This was supposed to be posted here instead of my other blog. 

Warren Tang's avatarghoti

The assumptions.

Rationalism assumes that reason gives us all knowledge. It overrides emotion and belief. It also override the senses as the path to truth. It is directly opposed to empiricism.

Reason takes on a mysticism similar to that of the soul, whereby a body is unnecessary. So it is part of the mind-body problem in Western philosophy, culture and thinking.

Sensory knowledge is not perfect. But neither is rational knowledge. Both should be considered inseparable. And both should be considered necessary to any knowledge.

Rationalism and Empiricism should not opposing ideas. There should be a philosophy of Rational Empiricism or Empirical Rationalism.

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An alternative theory to multiverses (parallel universes)

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Most talk on multiple universes tend to be about parallel universes and are trendily called “multiverses”. But why do universes have to be parallel? Why can they not be independent universes occupying their own patch of space, its light yet to have reached us. 

I call these non-parallel universes. Perhaps beyond our universe’s edge in space is another universe created out of a big bang like our universe had been. Who is to say there has to be only one universe? Perhaps two (or more) universes have come together already and we have not noticed the evidence. 

Rationalism and Empiricism (not Rationalism versus Empiricism)

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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

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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 

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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?

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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.