This was followed in 1910 by an unpublished manuscript, ‘An Inquiry into the Whole’. In that work he also suggested: "If we had the mental vision, our object would be to penetrate to that concept of the Whole which is no mere aggregation or sum total or compound of parts, but which is itself one and indivisible, a real vital organic unity of which the multiplicities of the universe are not the constituent parts but aspects, phenomena or manifestations."

The very notion of thinking aboutlife (or evolution for that matter) as having a definite purpose or goal is already asymptom of a deeply rooted bias in favour of the constant and against change. Thereare voices that will immediately attack this view, blaming it for insinuating that lifehas no purpose at all. But a dialectic of such kind is empty of any credence if notentirely absurd. The view I propose here does not indeed accept that life is sub-jugated to a single purpose or principle but instead affirms life as having not onepurpose but infinitely multiple ones, not one goal but multiple goals and, moreover,the vast majority of these purposes and goals cannot be known a priori because theyare subject to continuous formative processes of becoming. This is why life as suchis open-ended.

worldview as a complex mental object makes sense onlyin the light of evolution – as the work in progress that it is; both fluid and firm at thesame time.

16:15 - Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations

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

cognitive illusion and immediate experience perspectives 00:01:44 from buddhist philosophy

some people will 01:52:34 read nagarjuna as allowing for the existence of true contradictions that something can be both true and false at the same time and uh graham priest is a philosopher who has a 01:52:46 uh reading of nagarjuna as under his uh dialethis logic which allows for certain uh contradictions to be true um [Music] i don't think that actually works in the 01:52:58 case of i think nagarjuna seems to presume the principle of non-principle of non-contradiction in order to run these kinds of reduction reductio absurdum type arguments um by drawing contradictions and incoherencies within 01:53:11 a given concept under analysis and then showing how it leads to contradiction so we should reject that concept um uh yeah do you have any thoughts about uh about 01:53:23 you know quantum physics is is sort of notorious for seeming to violate basic laws of of logic like say the law of non-contradiction or law of excluded middle or uh and so on and 01:53:35 so do you think that um our conventional logic you know it's like say classical logic is uh in if if there is no ultimate reality for madhyamako or for your your 01:53:48 understanding of uh quantum physics slash medium um then should the tools of classical logic what are the tools within conventional discourse broadly speaking as well for um 01:54:01 capturing um what madhyamaka is saying or what quantum physics as you understand it are saying so yeah let me answer specifically um uh 01:54:13 nagarjuna uh main negotiations from one perspective can be viewed as a logician right i mean it's a it's it's a his way of presenting things 01:54:25 uh uh it's it's a characteristic of somebody who's uh who's a legitimation you use logic uh but from from where's the perspective the first first of impact it sounds strange because uh his main tool is the 01:54:38 tetra of course which um somehow uh presents uh the impossibility of four alternative one being a something i don't know time exist uh one being non-a say time does not 01:54:57 exist and the third being um neither a nor not a and the fourth is uh both a and known a so it seems that wait a moment uh we we 01:55:09 we we are talked in logic 101 um that uh uh either a or not a and there is um beginning of logic so it seemed to be a clash here uh my 01:55:23 impression that there's no clash is that the known of non-a is not the same known as uh um as they restotelien known and we can uh we can think of innumerable uh everyday experience in which this whole 01:55:36 possibility it's exactly what we would uh we would consider so the exhaustive thing is the four there's four possibilities i don't want to go technically specifically but so it's not a an alternative logic here it's just a 01:55:48 different way of using known um so i don't see any clash between what we call logic uh in in in it's an interesting articulation but not 01:56:00 any any club it's not a mag logic um the same is true with quantum mechanics uh people been arguing that we can understand quantum mechanics by changing the logic i find it yeah but i find it 01:56:13 it's not really particularly clarifying um it's true i mean the particle doesn't go here normal goes there so if we think of these are two alternative quantum mechanics can be thought of can be 01:56:25 phrased if an alternative logic but all the alternative logic that i found they can be rephrased in terms of logic with different definitions so i don't i don't i don't think that this is the point um that's this is this is the 01:56:38 answer to your your question about logic you know the uh mutha madhyamakar karika his main treatise which we're talking about nagarjuna's text um 01:56:50 it's very short as you mentioned carlos and some of the things that are not there that are not written that are implied and also make it such a difficult text to understand is that he's refuting many different schools 01:57:05 of understanding an essence in reality and so when he does the tetralemma one of the usages is to be complete in terms of all the different you know 01:57:17 traditions or schools that are claiming some essence in reality to refute them and some do say that there's nothing you know not neither alternative and some say things 01:57:29 do exist and do not exist the both so i think he's using that more pedagogically if you will to um to refute all possible understandings 01:57:40 of an intrinsic existence and that's some of the beauty of his work and it's some of the difficulty in understanding it because you know unless you're really well read and really 01:57:53 understand fully all the different positions uh you it's hard to really know what he's doing at any one time um i could comment on this because it could be interesting um 01:58:08 so there is this uh sense in which barry explained that uh somehow answering 12 possible counter arguments at the same time and there's also a very simple way that you can see that this is not really 01:58:20 about a different logic so take the double slit experiment in quantum mechanics what's the point there that you try to explain a certain set of experimental data 01:58:32 by saying where does the particle go does it go through slit a does it go through slit beam let's go through both does it not go to neither and none of these four possibilities explains what you're seeing on the 01:58:45 screen so what do you do there it's not that you've reached the conclusion that everything is wrong is that you uh throw away the presupposition what was the presupposition that the particle 01:58:56 is somewhere so this straightforward use of logic it seems to me that i don't see any [Music] weird logic going on there yeah 01:59:08 you also throw away the the notion of a particle then if particles are that which have to be somewhere no you throw away the doctor there is an intrinsic reality that's what nagarjuna does if you continue doing that then you throw away 01:59:22 everything i i don't agree with uh personally if you ask me i agree that there is no interesting reality um [Music] in the sense that whenever you assume 01:59:37 such a thing you're going to fall into contradictions

you're quite unique there are maybe a few quantum physics physicists that have interest and you know but few that i think have really read nagarjuna particularly from the 00:41:08 beginning to the end of his uh you know opus magnus is his major treatise of the six we have all of those actually translated into english and you know some of them will deal more with the 00:41:20 compassion side also um so i applaud you for that

i read that book 00:11:08 in the translation by garfield and it was a shock for me it's an incredible it's a it's just a fantastic book so it really blew away my mind and i 00:11:21 spent a while as a a summer uh immersed in that book trying to read everything i could get nakatuna and thinking about that and i ended up with two ideas um which i just would put on the table and to to 00:11:35 discuss one smaller one larger one smaller is that in nagarjuna there are some basic ideas which are helpful uh to make sense of about quantum mechanics not not because the cartridge 00:11:48 knew anything about quantum physics of course it didn't uh but i think that to do science we need we need ideas and philosophy is very useful and uh we get from philosophy uh 00:12:01 conceptual structure way of thinking uh that as usual to make sense of of of better ways of understanding about the world and and and what is useful in nagarjuna is the idea 00:12:14 of uh what you do for quantum physics is the idea that uh it's it's better to think of the world not as entities or substance or or things of god or 00:12:27 whatever matter uh that has its own properties but only um through the interdependence of of things so you don't understand anything by itself if not connected to the others 00:12:39 that's uh in fact it's even more i think what nagarjuna shows that uh if you think that their relations with you think that things affect one another that's the only way of thinking so the idea of 00:12:52 of a thing by itself of things existing uh independently of anything else of a fundamental reality it's uh it's not useful and it's 00:13:08 i think the guardian argues contradictory that's a that's a specific idea this is the bigger idea which i i found uh wonderful and that completely captured me 00:13:20 is that uh this is a for me fascinating philosophical perspective because it starts from the day of separating uh sort of a conventional reality and 00:13:31 and an ultimate ultimate reality uh which is very common uh in in a very common perspective also in science and western philosophy um 00:13:44 you can also read some of the evolution of science or western philosophy trying to search for this ultimate life is that matter is that god is that spirit is that the mind is that language is that there are many other circles is that phenomenology or 00:13:58 the whosoever whatever you want and nagarjuna the book of nagarjuna is not a positive construction it's a negative destruction every chapter takes away something look this by itself doesn't stay together 00:14:12 this there's a state together it takes away it takes somebody takes something and so the suggestion here is that maybe the question is wrong um we should look for the ultimate value the ultimate value doesn't exist in a 00:14:24 sense it's the same thing as a as a conventional reality that i found fantastic it's a it's a dissolving um it's dissolving a fake problem in a 00:14:36 sense and opening up a sudden uh uh coherence as i read it and with all my superficiality it's not denying reality right it is here i mean this pen is his pen 00:14:48 it it denies the fact that this is ultimate reality in this pen or in something on which this pen is based including the mind which is uh there's a superficial buddhism a view of 00:15:01 beauties in the west uh which is just everything is the mind the mind is it's everything is is uh if you think it's a self and everything you know um where you were born in hollywood so 00:15:12 the illusory aspect of the walls i wonder if you got it from buddhism from hollywood i don't know but this is this idea that you know the the world is a big cinema and everything is is in the mind of berkeley 00:15:25 and this is a there's a chapter in in in nagarjuna which denies that completely because the mind itself is not um it's not uh doesn't have an ultimate reality so you cannot found anything on the mind nor on the dharma or the 00:15:39 on anything up to the point and then i conclude so my reason of my fascination throwing my fascination from the guardian on the table in this passage about the view this uh 00:15:51 this comments the emptiness of emptiness which was the real moment in which the guardian captured uh captured me so it's a point in which uh you know translated the way i read it or probably superficially is that all 00:16:04 right so everything is empty in the sense of doesn't not having an intrinsic reality so therefore this emptiness is the foundation of everything and regardless of the words no no no wait this is this 00:16:16 is a this is the view uh which you which is itself empty in the sense that it depends on else this is suddenly extremely liberating i think uh and i found it it hadn't 00:16:31 impacted me intellectually suddenly i have a i have a way to take take away from my intellectual search and anguish finding the foundations uh which i find liberating and even 00:16:43 personally i mean it's thinking about myself not as an entity but as a combination of other things uh has definitely an effect on me on a on a on a human being 00:16:55 and uh so i guess what what finally fascinated me in a gardener is this anti-foundational aspect it's taking away the starting point um it's absolute radicality 00:17:08 uh when he says that nirvana and samsara themselves are sort of illusioned in some sense empty in his own sense devoid of intrinsic reality

let me first say how why we're here um 00:05:01 and first point out that barry and carl have never met before this is the first time you will discuss

i didn't know anything about nagarjuna and uh i know very little about buddhism and buddhist philosophy so i am 00:09:04 very i'm here without any potential of saying anything uh beyond extremely superficial uh about buddhism to apologize for that i i in fact i i look forward to to to to 00:09:18 to getting from you um ideas and and take away some of my uh superficiality um i and i have a lot of buddhist friends because my catholic friends back in 00:09:30 italy many have converted or changed into buddhism somehow and i i read about maine buddhist idea but i i knew little about uh uh derek arjuna in particular 00:09:41 in fact i didn't even know that his book existed um but i worked on quantum theory on the foundation of quantum theory and i have been fascinated by a particular way of 00:09:53 viewing quantum theory which is called the relation interpretation of quantum theory in which [Music] one of the central thing one of the central ideas is that objects systems 00:10:06 things whatever by themselves do not have properties in some sense do not exist by themselves they only exist because they interact with something else and uh this is a 00:10:19 it's an idea which is not completely absent in in in western philosophy but it's not easy to frame in philosophical uh id western ideas and i've been 00:10:31 writing and talking about uh relational quantum mechanical relation contemplation of quantum mechanics and so many times after a talk people will come to me and say have you read nagarjuna 00:10:44 and i said no and i am not particularly excited about attempts to mix you know modern physics with eastern idea because uh things i've read about that i always found very 00:10:57 superficial superficial way of putting both but after you know the twentieth time i heard have you read nagarjuna i think well maybe i should read that

Dogen and Nagarjuna’s Tetralemma #6 of 21

Dogen will take all the 4 positions of Nagarjuna’s tetralemma (either, or, both, neither) and present them in one sentence or one paragraph. He might even debate the righteousness of one point of view and then combat it with the other point of view. He breaks up our attachment to our point of views and points his finger at total dynamic functioning.

THE LOGIC OF THE CATUSKOTI

Jan Westerhoff on Nāgārjuna

No Four Ways About It: Nāgārjuna’s Tetralemma

TogetherNeither one or otherNor all oneAlone