what happens um when we're thinking about our inner states one of the things that we need to recognize is that our introspection when 00:22:54 we we become aware of our beliefs our desires and our hopes and our fears and so forth is all done through language and on the model of language when i decide that i believe that john dunn 00:23:07 gave a great talk this morning when i believe that hal roth is a great scholar of zen and when i believe that alan wallace gave us a beautifully inspirational talk about the role of practice and contemplation in the 00:23:19 understanding of the self and i introspect that way i'm using those sentences alan gave that great talk john gave us a great talk about pramana and so forth as models for my inner states and i'm not 00:23:32 doing that because i looked inside and saw little english sentences in my brain i'm looking i'm doing that by using language as a kind of introspective model that's a matter of self-interpretation 00:23:44 it's easy to forget that because it feels so immediate so language gives us the concepts that we use to think about the world but it is also the model for the concepts of our propositional attitudes like belief 00:23:58 desire knowledge and so forth and as a model we have to recognize that the model the map isn't the reality to go back to what john uh reminded us of he reminded us of earlier introspection in 00:24:11 terms of language gives us an interpretation it doesn't give us an independent reality that is being interpreted and when we think about the madhyamaka 00:24:23 of nagarjuna and chandrakiri we remember that to be empty is to be empty of any intrinsic nature and if we follow chandra charity as i suggested earlier that means that it is to exist only 00:24:37 dependent on conceptual imputation and what i am suggesting now is that all of our inner cognitive states that we introspect we encounter only through a conceptual imputation only through 00:24:50 interpretation only through language and that is they exist conventionally not intrinsically even though they might appear to us to exist just as we see 00:25:02 them and to do so intrinsically