this is not to say that our inner life has some kind of a second grade um existence conventional reality is not 00:25:14 second level reality um because as the guardian and chandra kirti also emphasized we must remember that conventional reality dependent 00:25:26 origination is exactly the same as emptiness which is ultimate reality the only kind of reality anything that we ever encounter is going to have is conventional reality so when i'm talking 00:25:38 here about cognitive illusion i'm not arguing that the existence of our interstates um is illusory i'm arguing that the illusion is that we have immediate access to them as they are and 00:25:51 that their mode of existence um is um intrinsic existence so this allows us to understand the majority analysis of the most fundamental cognitive illusion 00:26:04 of all the illusion of the immediacy of our knowledge of our own minds and the givenness of our own interstates and processes our direct knowledge of them as the kinds of things they are independent of 00:26:18 any concepts that's the illusion that wittgenstein quine and sellers each in there worked so hard in the 20th century to diagnose and to cure but we can put this just as easily and maybe more 00:26:31 easily in the terms of second century indian madhyamaka the fundamental cognitive illusion is to take our mental states to exist intrinsically rather than conventionally and to take our knowledge of them to be 00:26:45 immediate independent of conventions this illusion is pervasive it is instinctive and it is profoundly self-alienating because it obscures the deeply conventional character of our own 00:26:57 existence and of our self-knowledge and this illusion is what according to buddhist philosophers lies at the root of our grasping of our attraction and diversion and hence at the root of the 00:27:09 pervasive suffering of existence

american philosopher wilford sellers is this way that impressions and thoughts appear to be simply given to us as the events they are as instances of the types they instantiate 00:05:48 and this i take to be the deepest form of what sellers identified as the myth of the given the most difficult one to extirpate we always forget that our knowledge of our own states is as mediated by 00:06:00 language and conceptual apparatus as any other knowledge so when we attribute beliefs or knowledge when we attribute cognitive states when we attribute even sensations 00:06:13 to ourselves or to others we're always i'm going to suggest uh engaged in an active interpretation a kind of self hermeneutics or a hermeneutic of the other and we use 00:06:25 language to model our inner life we use external properties to to uh model our inner life and we're always modeling our inner life we don't simply have it as it is