illusion of immediacy descartes was big on this one 01:21:51 and udio takara was big on this one in india that somehow i know my own mind my own states my own being immediately directly without anything standing in 01:22:04 between but i know only know other things through the mediation of my sensory apparatus and my sensory organs nobody thinks that when i look at an apple that that redness and sweetness are 01:22:18 immediately available to me we think they're mediated by my eyes and my visual faculty by light hitting my eyes causing stuff to happen on the back of my retina electrical stuff happening in my occipital cortex and i see the apple 01:22:31 that's a lot of mediation right and we think the same thing about every external object but then if i ask my own feelings my own thoughts my own emotions do i know those through the mediation of 01:22:44 something they think no i know them immediately because they're just part of me and we forget that we know them through the mediation of our introspective senses which are just as mediating just as subject to illusion as 01:22:57 any of our external senses um we get the illusion of agent causation something that augustine makes very plain in the western tradition the idea that somehow our actions as the notary public 01:23:11 suggested are uncaused are free and that there's a big difference between things that happen to us and things that we freely do forgetting that our actions are caused 01:23:23 by our desires and our beliefs and our desires and beliefs are caused by our emotions and our values and our and our va and all of that and that if our things were uncaused we'd be these weird 01:23:35 random objects but we think of ourselves as standing somehow outside of the causal nexus even if we know that that is simply insane there's an illusion of unity this idea 01:23:48 that myself is completely simple and singular even though my thoughts and my experiences and my sensations and my actions are plural but there's a unity behind that that there's no that this i 01:24:01 am exactly the same thing that i was when i began this lecture and we know that that's an illusion so these are all of the reasons to shed the self-illusion and why we think of the self-illusion as crazy 01:24:15 and that gets us through the second major part of what i wanted to do tonight

yogachara theory and i'm thinking here about three nature theory and three naturelessness theory suggests to us that we are simply wired for certain illusions and among them is 00:29:19 the illusion of immediacy um and we're wired to thematize our experience through the framework of subject object duality i often compare this to the way that we're wired for certain 00:29:31 optical illusions for instance you don't have to learn to see the mueller liar illusion as an illusion we all see it as an illusion and it's because of the way our visual system has evolved and there are lots of other optical illusions like 00:29:44 that the color five phenomenon for instance and so forth yogachara really takes very seriously the idea that from beginning with time we've evolved karmic predispositions to certain kinds of 00:29:55 illusions and these are some of them and of course a little bit of reflection shows that that duality has to be illusory um after all um we are 00:30:09 not subject pure subjects standing outside of the world of our experience confronting a world of objects some of them outer and some of them inner that's the vedanta position that ain't the buddhist position instead what we are is 00:30:24 organisms and again i will set aside all of the debates we might have about how those organisms are constituted but we are organisms embedded in an environment and our bodies our sense faculties are 00:30:37 part of the world in which we find ourselves as a consequence our subjectivity our own engagement with the world is constituted not by standing outside and detecting things but rather by being 00:30:51 embedded in the world and the only way that we could possibly become aware of any object whether it's a tree or an apple or a thought or a feeling is to construct that as an object in our field 00:31:04 of consciousness even if in doing so we manage to hide from ourselves the fact that we are constructing it

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

16:15 - Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations

when we attribute sensory experiences to 00:06:39 ourselves for instance like the experience of red or the experience of seeing blue the model is external properties and we think of there as being inner properties just like those external properties that somehow we are 00:06:52 um we are seeing immediately