PREVIEW-Episode 54: More Buddhism and Naturalism

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life Philosophy podcast. This is episode 54, which is more or less a continuation of episode 53 where we covered Owen Flanagan's book, the Bodhisattva's Buddhism Naturalized. That was more or less an interview with him. And we are now going to spend some time discussing the meat of the book and continuing on some earlier threads that we followed up on Buddhism in earlier podcasts.

0:35 Seth: And your name is?

0:36 Mark: Seth Paskin, Austin, Texas.

0:39 Seth: Mark Lintonmeyer in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:40 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:42 Dylan: And this is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:45 Mark: Dylan, is Middleton in the middle of Wisconsin?

0:48 Dylan: Yes, just like Madison. It is adjacent to Madison, but Madison

0:52 Mark: is not called Middleton.

0:54 Dylan: No, it's not. What's strange in the way, like, alliteration is strange is that I grew up in my junior high and high school years in Midland, Michigan, and now I'm living in Middleton, Wisconsin, and my kids are going to MHS High School, which is what I did as well. Their mascot's the Cardinals and my mascot was the Chemic.

1:15 Mark: The what?

1:16 Dylan: The Midland High School Chemics. Midland is the home of Dow Chemical and Midland High. The first high school was the Midland High Chemix and our symbol was an atom.

1:26 Mark: Was there like a raging debate where they said we should call ourselves the chemists and somebody said, no, no, no, it should be like chemic, because chemic is somehow more aggressive and sports like than chemist?

1:39 Dylan: I don't know.

1:40 Seth: Is it the fighting chemix? Is it the angry? Is there an adjective?

1:44 Mark: No, no, it's the precipitating chemist.

1:48 Dylan: Titrating.

1:49 Mark: Titrating chemists.

1:51 Dylan: We come closer and closer to winning every year.

1:56 Seth: So I thought we haven't read in a while our ground rules and maybe we should read them and reflect on how when we had a big time guest, we failed in enforcing them. Number one, try not to assume that our audience has read what we're talking about or has any other background in philosophy. Yes. I hope that folks were not too put off by the fact that we sort of launched straight into advanced territory. I do think that he was very good about explaining what he meant so that if we talked about mysterians, say, in the philosophy of mind, he would go ahead and define that.

2:28 Dylan: Yeah, I think you can. If you just sort of edit out as you're listening to the names and just sort of footnote them in your mind, it'll work just fine. He pretty much explained it and then included the footnotes. So if you were ambitious, you would write down the names and then go look up the books by them. But I think if you just sort of bracketed that out, it wouldn't lose too much. He didn't invoke the names so as to invoke their whole teachings or something by their names. He sort of more just told you who they were and gave due props, so to speak.

3:00 Seth: Yeah, I did that a little. But those were mostly, hopefully references to past episodes that people can go check out. And also G.E. moore, who we'll have a future episode on.

3:08 Wes: And you just need to.

3:08 Seth: What was your G.E.

3:09 Mark: moore fetish on that thing he picked up on that? He was like, I don't know what you're.

3:14 Dylan: Is that the G.E.

3:14 Seth: moore I read?

3:15 Dylan: I'm not so sure.

3:18 Mark: It kind of came out of the left field for me. I didn't realize that you had prepped by going through the G.E. moore canon prior to that. I didn't.

3:25 Wes: He's.

3:25 Seth: The point is he's arguing for naturalism. And G.E. moore is famous as a guy that argued against any naturalist theory of ethics. Ethical truths are something that we sort of know intuitively and they can't be defined in terms of anything else. You can't say the good is pleasure for the most people, because you could always sensibly ask the question, but is pleasure for the most people actually good? And the fact that you can ask that question means that the good is something distinct. Anyway, that's all you need to know to understand what I was asking. Just that it was some form of intuitionism that is putting values on a different plane somehow from the things of science. And of course, many, many, many philosophers ran with that. I was then projecting that forward that even the phenomenologists who just say, look, I just experience values, that they're just giving a slightly more modern version of that same intuition. But this brings us to our second ground rule, which is don't name drop. Just make your point. Don't say you would understand me if only you'd read Foucault's posthumous work Nutter Butter A Politico Technocratic Analytic. No, no.

4:34 Mark: I thought you were going to say something like no name dropping, for example. You don't want to say three people who are currently working in the field who are doing great work on this are Fred James, James Fred and Frederick Jameson.

4:50 Seth: We could see what he was doing, like you said, as footnotes rather than as something to take the place of expressing the actual idea.

4:56 Wes: Yeah.

4:57 Mark: He never invoked anybody as an authority. Which is the worst? If we have a spirit of this rule, it is not so much to invoke ideas that are not clarified as much as it's not to invoke somebody as an authority to stop a conversation.

5:12 Wes: The other part of it, I think, should be if you begin a lengthy talk about some secondary source you've read that the other guys haven't read, that can be a problem, because there's no way for us to have a conversation about that.

5:24 Seth: Well, no, we never do that.

5:26 Wes: Well, Mark, you've usually read, like 100 things. Yeah. That we haven't read.

5:30 Mark: You Never bring up G.E. moore in a podcast about Buddhism.

5:36 Wes: That's just the rule now. From now on, that's just the rule.

5:38 Seth: I had to get that Abhidhamma crap off my chest because we scheduled the talk with Flanagan for January and then he canceled and we had to push it off. So I felt, okay, we're doing it weeks and weeks later. Maybe we should introduce a second thing to read. So I, on my own, sort of previewed and spent a substantial amount of time with this very. I wouldn't say difficult, but just really boring, repetitive text. And I just couldn't see the point. And it really made me question, like, so this is supposed to be like the first phenomenology, Buddhist phenomenology, and it's just a lot of lists. And he was saying, oh, well, taxonomies are boring. That's Flanagan's response.

6:15 Mark: I thought he tried to answer your concern a little bit more than that.

6:17 Seth: Yes.

6:18 Dylan: Yeah, I like that part of the conversation, actually, because I thought he addressed the boring part by acknowledging challenging it and then going on to explain how he got something out of it.

6:28 Seth: Right. Why their tradition is superior than the Western tradition in terms of descriptions of interstates, that we don't put a lot of effort into that endeavor. I guess I can see that. Do notable exceptions jump to mind? I think you'd have to look in literature in the west to find that.

6:42 Dylan: Especially the ancient West, I guess.

6:43 Seth: Right.

6:44 Dylan: If you put it that way. Descriptions of interstates and stuff like that. I'm back thinking about Achilles again. So the way that whole book is that way.

6:50 Seth: Homer's phenomenological.

6:52 Wes: Well, you know, Spinoza has his long list of. It's not exactly phenomenological, but he's building up different mental states out of each other. Right.

7:01 Seth: That's right.

7:01 Dylan: Hume does it too. Right. In Treatise on Human Nature, he's got these long lists of characteristics.

7:06 Seth: Those, again, are references to past podcast episodes. We're not name dropping. Go check it out.

7:13 Wes: We can reference things like that, even if it's not a past podcast episode. I don't think that's the problem. Referencing. I don't think it's the problem.

7:20 Seth: Well, to a point. We did get a comment, a recent review on itunes, which was a merely four star one instead of a five star one that said something like, it's hard for newbies.

7:30 Wes: Yeah, I saw that.

7:31 Seth: Because we break our own rules. And I can see, like, when you hear a name. So somebody actually asked me via an email, who is this? I forget how he even spelled it. But he didn't know. He'd never heard of Lacan. That is a name that we have dropped several times. And absolutely un.

7:46 Wes: Just.

7:46 Dylan: Oh, that's we Kimosabe.

7:51 Seth: Wes has dropped it. It came up in the. In the semiotics one.

7:55 Wes: Yeah. I mean, if we had talked about Saussure without talking about even mentioning Lacan, I think we would have gotten in trouble, too. I mean.

8:01 Seth: Yeah, so he's a structural psychoanalysis theorist.

8:04 Wes: Yeah. Lacan is why Saussure is even something that's discussed today. Lacan took that theory and made it hugely influential on modern philosophers of the continental strip.

8:17 Mark: Well, there's a difference between who is this Lacan and who is this Aristotle? Do you think? Like, there's some tears and nobody's ever written and said, hey, who is this Kant? And spelled it like K, H A N, T. Well, they might have said,

8:30 Seth: hey, who is this Kant?

8:33 Mark: I set you up. God, did I put that one on the T for you, baby.

8:38 Wes: This reminds me of a story. I was once out with a friend and he brought a date with him. We were in a bar and we were talking about Lacan, and I was trying to bring her into the conversation. I said, do you know who Lacan is? And she got extremely offended by the idea that who wouldn't know who Lacan is? And I said, I didn't know who

8:53 Seth: it was, but she was.

8:54 Dylan: Come on, like, ask.

8:55 Wes: I said, I don't know you from Adam. I literally said this. I said, I don't know you from Adam. I don't know whether you know who Lacan is. I was actually trying to bring you into the conversation. That girl was so furious with me, never forgave me.

9:09 Dylan: I have that same kind of thing happen to me when somebody finds out. You know, I let a word like quark or lepton slip out of my mouth and someone asks me what it is, and I don't know anything about what they know or don't know. So I Have to figure out where to start. Okay, so you understand that stuff is made out of atoms. And I look at them just to see if that registers and then they, you know, go on. You know, atoms are made out of electrons. And in some ways it sounds a little funny, but the fact is that a lot of people, the only time they ever learn that stuff is in high school and they forget about it. They don't even pay attention to it.

9:43 Wes: I went on a date once with a girl who thought the sun revolved around the earth.

9:48 Mark: Come on, seriously?

9:51 Seth: And where did you find this?

9:52 Mark: Are you 600 years old?

9:54 Wes: She was English. She was English too. I don't know what happened.

10:00 Mark: I had the same experience, but now with name dropping, sometimes with vocabulary, I have to self censor at work because

10:07 Wes: I'll use the word lugubrious.

10:09 Mark: Yeah, autochthonous.

10:11 Wes: Autoxist.

10:13 Dylan: A $10,000 word.

10:15 Wes: All the SAT words that we.

10:17 Mark: It is my favorite word.

10:18 Seth: I did not know that word recently until we talked about that.

10:21 Wes: I knew it from SAT books.

10:23 Mark: You just have to kind of moderate your conversation around and you can't assume, when you work in the corporate world, you have to go with the lowest common denominator anyway.

10:31 Wes: And how do you find an opportunity to use Autoximus in a the business meeting?

10:36 Mark: You don't. I was just being facetious, but

10:41 Seth: it's like that idea you just came up for, the new packaging of the product was totally autochthonous. I have a new word that I just put together, much like a German word, as a disparaging thing we can say about Wes, you non locano. Noer. Assumer.

10:57 Wes: Non locano what?

10:58 Seth: Non lacano. No, er, assumer. You assume that people don't know about Lacan.

11:03 Wes: Good, good. A new word.

11:05 Mark: Hey, Wes, do you take any of the stuff that Mark directs at you personally?

11:09 Wes: No.

11:10 Mark: Okay, good.

11:11 Wes: I learned that a long time ago.

11:14 Seth: Should I aim more elsewhere? I didn't realize I was so cruel.

11:18 Mark: No, no. I'm fomenting dissent. I'm inserting a Foucaudian name drop power structure into our dynamic.

11:27 Seth: I have the final edit, so I have the ultimate power. I can make you say this. Maybe I could put a dog barking for your voice. For the whole time I thought I should edit in an extra person. Like we have an obnoxious hanger on just like, yeah, yeah, that's really smart. And just put that sort of randomly in the conversation.

11:51 Mark: That sounds like a terrible idea. It does.

11:54 Dylan: It does indeed. Don't do that.

11:58 Seth: I think it Would depend on the execution.

12:00 Dylan: I mean, think about reading a book and then having sort of randomly along in the book, distracting, ironical non references in the margins.

12:09 Mark: Dude, I checked books out from the Austin Public Library. I know exactly what that's like.

12:13 Wes: Okay.

12:14 Mark: If we were able to do a video, if we somehow had, like, Japanese anime characters that would pop in randomly at times, we'd be like, oh,

12:25 Wes: you

12:25 Mark: know, with big eyes, you know, that kind of thing that might be kind

12:27 Seth: of funny and not be at all offensive.

12:30 Wes: So is everyone drunk tonight or something?

12:34 Seth: We're just breathing a sigh of relief that we don't have a professional we have to impress.

12:38 Mark: Yeah, right. There's clearly nothing professional about what we're doing tonight.

12:45 Seth: Isn't the Talmud kind of like that? They have that kind of stuff in the margins.

12:49 Mark: Yeah, it's a little bit like that. There's a tiny, little, tiny bit of the text in the center of the page. And then the commentaries that have built over the years all around it.

12:57 Dylan: How do you get included to be able to write in that book?

13:00 Mark: There were rabbinical councils, if you will, back when the temple was still in place.

13:05 Dylan: So it's not like every year they vote on some guy who gets to write. When's the last time a comment got written?

13:11 Mark: A long time ago. I think I was imagining it was

13:14 Dylan: still going on and that it transferred it over into some wiki.

13:18 Seth: If they threw it open on the Internet to add commentary on commentary, just like our site, this people could post stuff. Like the person who just tried to post on our site. Affirmative action is genocide against whites.

13:29 Dylan: That's just so.

13:30 Mark: Yeah, just for the record, people, it's

13:32 Dylan: bizarre that they found it. What do we get, a couple thousand hits a day? I mean, they must be searching for it.

13:36 Seth: I think that was one of our fans. I think that was somebody that listened to the whole podcast and said, the thing that I take away from this is that affirmative action is genocide.

13:44 Mark: It's not the case. That comment was from anonymous, and the email address was like A, B, C, D, E. And it was routed through, like, a New Zealand IP address. I was like, really? If you're gonna be a racist, own it, man. You can do it with. Yeah, own it and do it and don't do so much work.

14:02 Dylan: Say it loud and say it proud.

14:04 Seth: Why? That brings us to our third ground rule. We will be rigorous and exact in all that we say, Unless doing otherwise would be more entertaining.

14:12 Dylan: Say it loud and say it proud rule.

14:15 Mark: That's why we can be 30 minutes into a podcast and not have even touched on the subject.

14:20 Seth: I was just. I was just picturing the people who wanted to hear about boot Buddhism in the first episode, and we're like, oh, when are they gonna talk about Buddhism? Oh, they had a second episode so they can talk about Buddhism. Maybe I'll just add in the Buddhist character, have inserted Buddhist koans as commentary to all that's been said so far in the episode, and still have this voice. What voice? You can never walk through the same river twice.

14:49 Mark: What the hell is wrong with you?

14:51 Seth: We don't do enough voices on the show. I realize I. I keep meaning to do them for the intro, but then I just. It comes at me too fast.

14:59 Mark: I did listen to some of these comedy podcasts, like Doug Benson's Doug Loves Movies. Have you guys ever listened to that?

15:06 Seth: Nope.

15:06 Mark: It's highly entertaining. And he had a guy on who does Jesse the Body Ventura as the conspiracy theorist governor. That's a good voice. Now, if I could do that, that would be worth doing. Any of you guys even know who Jesse the Body Venture is?

15:19 Dylan: I know exactly who Jesse the Body Venture is.

15:22 Mark: That's right. He was governor of your state.

15:24 Dylan: No, state. Right next door. State.

15:27 Mark: Oh, Minnesota. Okay.

15:28 Dylan: Yeah.

15:28 Mark: Not Michigan. And they all start with them.

15:30 Seth: Speaking of podcasts, because we essentially scheduled this interview with Owen twice, so I spent two different couple week periods listening to a bunch of Buddhist podcasts to get myself in the mood to see what the realm of stuff out there was. And so we didn't sound completely clueless or out of touch with what people were talking about in Buddhism, for instance, Buddhist Geeks has been recommended to us a few times. Anybody listen to that? It's a pretty good one. I mean, it sounds like it should be plural geeks, but it seems like it was plural. And now it's mostly a couple hundred episodes in one guy interviewing different people every week. And he's a good interviewer. It's pretty organized. They have an actual conference that they advertise very regularly, show up in person, and get all these academics involved. And it's really like a very wide swath of what people are doing in Buddhism. But it also seems a little bit. It's kind of get the guest on and let him say what he wants to say. Not quite a conversation in the way, say, Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot is a conversation where the host has read all the books of the guests and is engaging them on detailed points. It's a pretty wide range of stuff. They had Stephen Batchelor is a Buddhist skeptic. More along the lines of where Owen's coming from, who's been on that podcast as well as the secular Buddhist podcast that Owen was on. And then later the Buddhist Geeks podcast had another guy that was all about Buddhist magic. There are a few different episodes about this, but there's a whole strain in Buddhism that thinks if you don't believe in esp, you haven't been paying attention to the research. And so it's a little uncritical. Can I say I don't. I don't know. It seemed like it deserved a little stronger response. So in this particular one, he did bring up, well, I had Stephen Batchelor and he said this was all full of crap. That was the token point of objection. It was more. Hear him out. One of the things I found interesting in this whole topic, just like with the Persig, is that so much of the work people are doing is not connected to an institution. Right? There are people that do go to Buddhist temples, but there are many people in America just also pursuing it on their own, much like you might pursue philosophy on your own. And it just becomes a question like, well, what in fact, you might if you found that, you know, I'm not going to believe your claims unless they are validated by some authority. That's seen as a sign of weakness. No, you should be able to go in and see for yourself. And I don't know. That just means that anytime anybody makes any kind of claim, however ludicrous, that you have a responsibility to go out and independently research it. You can't take anybody's word for it. We had a similar back and forth on the blog about biblical scholarship in the wake of our God episodes of people who think that the resurrection historically happened versus those who think that's just obviously a bunch of nonsense. Like, well, how many sources do I have to read? And is there anybody actually writing objectively about this before I can have an educated opinion?

18:05 Dylan: The problem is this is the way conspiracy theories and people who are always complaining about how no one ever pays attention to me. The big flag is when most of the time is spent talking about how everybody's ignoring me or ignoring this person or this idea that I love rather than talking about what is actually being said. It's all constantly persuasive speech and it all is linchpin kind of speech. If you just knew and understood X, you would understand everything. If you just knew and had read Process and Reality, then you would know everything. If you would just read ayn Rand, Fountainhead. Everything would be clear to you. You can pick your favorite crazy person and put it in there.

18:49 Seth: Yeah. So one of the Buddhist geeks episode was the guy that was like, it's not confirmed with scientific precision, but there's strong evidence that there is reincarnation. There's all these cases that have been reported by this University of Virginia researcher about little children who suddenly have all these memories of specific people in different times and places. And then you look them up and those were there. And can't I just discount this without actually finding out what the fuck research he's talking about and looking it up? And I'm sure there is a guy that did this research and then. But is there anybody that seriously engages him and refutes him or does everybody just say no? That's obvious bullshit. It just becomes very tiring. I want authorities to tell me what to believe.

19:31 Wes: Yeah. And if you're operating on a naturalistic from that framework, which most of us are, then it takes an extraordinary kind of evidence for us to admit that something supernatural has occurred. Right. You want to say that something that transcends nature has occurred, then I better see it with my own eyes. And I'd better not be drunk or on drugs and so on and so forth.

19:50 Seth: When would that be?

19:51 Wes: Some guy writing something on the Internet. It's a whole different thing. Or even if he's published articles, I don't know in what journals, but. Right. Our burden of evidence, our burden of proof is going to be high.

20:01 Seth: And that's, I think, why Flanagan, when he's arguing for naturalism Again, maybe it's just in this book like he said, because he's already argued in past books, but he just pretty much says we're just in the naturalist camp.

20:11 Wes: Yeah. And he.

20:12 Seth: Yeah, this is just the set of assumptions we starts with. I'm not going to bother to argue with you people that really take rebirth seriously.

20:18 Wes: Did he imply that he argues for naturalism in some other book? I don't remember. He might actually argue for naturalism somewhere else. But in this. Yeah. He just says, yes, we're going to take this for granted. And by that he means. Right. He's not admitting anything supernatural. He's not admitting miracles or anything like that. Which is a little bit different than what we usually mean when we talk about moral naturalism versus moral non naturalism. Because, Mark, you brought up G more and G more. That's an extension of Hume's ought is distinction. Flanagan doesn't really address that. He doesn't really address whether he thinks that an ought can be derived from an is. That's one project for naturalizing morality is to say we can get from some set of facts which don't assume any normative claim to a normative claim. That's an ongoing dispute. But Flanagan isn't really touching on that here.

21:09 Mark: That's right, Wes. That's not the way he approached it. When I asked, why do you need to have some kind of system? Like, what's the motivation for the book to begin with? And he said, well, he felt that scientific naturalism should have a metaphysics, an epistemology, and an ethics, which was a very interesting thing to say, I thought, suggesting that a scientific naturalism is a kind of systematic theory, like the theories that are put forth and other philosophers. And so it needs to have the three key philosophical elements in it. But I also think there's a kind of in two stages, one being political and one being, I'll call it nostalgic, that people who buy into scientific naturalism, who are not scientists, who aren't really thinking about the bigger questions, but are just doing science, they want to have the same kind of grounding or some kind of solid foundation for ethics and for metaphysics that they get out of scientific inquiry that I think is somehow left over. It's part of this nostalgia for a way of thinking that I think in philosophy has. I don't know if it's gone out of style, but it certainly was broken down in the 20th century. And the second part of it is the scientific naturalists, for the most part, are setting themselves up in the atheist camp against, I guess I'll call them religionists or theists or what have you. And so this, even though it's not obvious, is part of that whole dialogue with the new atheists that we had the podcast on a little while ago. And Flanagan is in his own way trying to support the claims of the atheists who are aligned with the scientific naturalism against the religious camp who's saying that science provides no basis for morality. You remember the term he used, that if you aren't aligned with a religion, you have to come up with some way to convince people of your moral seriousness. When people say, I'm spiritual but not religious, it's a marker that says, oh, well, I'm very serious about ethics and morality. I'm not a complete relativist or hedonist or anything like that. So I think there's some weird dynamics at play in the motivations for this book.

23:21 Dylan: I think you're right. Seth, to point out that a lot of the underlying argument is to do with relativism and saying that, well, there must be some kind of standards, and those standards, we must be able to appeal to them in some way other than it being completely up to us individually, utterly relativistic. And I think you're right that there is a strand of people who see science as providing that. And I think that there's a history in science as thinking that it does. But I think even in the recent understanding of science, the way in which science would provide that kind of foundation, if you look at it at all, is so loose as to not be the kind of prescriptive rulemaking that people want to have, especially in morality or in ethics. Almost anything. Or if I say anything in science, you could just revise it away into something different. And it's not that it would disappear. It's just the way in which it's a foundational item has to do with the way it's integrated with itself. And things come and go all the time in science. And the things that have stuck around even in modern science are pretty loose in some way. I mean, they're very abstract, epistemological things. And if you say, well, you know, energy is conserved, that's a way of just embracing the whole, so that you can say, well, there's one thing I'm talking about, and that's the universe. And the only way I can measure it is by saying that there's something I can measure it with respect to. And the moment that you find out that energy, well, that might not be conserved, you end up saying, well, actually it is, because I'm going to have to come up with a new kind of energy. And that's because you were using energy as a way of describing a whole. You were trying to find something to measure with respect to. Even if it turned out that that thing that you called energy before MV squared ended up not being it, you would find something else that would do that for you. And I think that people have extrapolated that often into something that is intrinsic. In some ways that gives us a hold on the world that is not combined with our own interaction with it.

25:27 Wes: So for Flanagan, right, he's a naturalist in the broad sense, which is to say he thinks that the natural sciences are a paradigm for truth seeking and he thinks that supernatural explanations should be rejected. But that's not to say that he's on the Sam Harris round, where he thinks that empirical science is the methodology for answering all questions, say ethical questions. Now I think he thinks it should be pushed to the limit in assisting ethical inquiry. From his book and what he said about Scientism in the last podcast, I think he's aware of the possibility that the domain of sciences is limited to some extent. So when he uses naturalism in this book, I think he's using it in a very broad sense. And I think most of us would admit to being that kind of naturalist. The stronger type of naturalism is more up for debate. The deriving odds from is or the Sam Harris sort of thing.

26:17 Dylan: And I think that the way Flanagan wants to use supernatural probably doesn't disagree with the way most people who would adhere to supernatural explanations would understand. Supernatural.

26:28 Wes: No, yeah, I agree.

26:29 Dylan: Meaning that somebody who argues for ESP or karma strongly understood, or reincarnation strongly understood, they would understand that as supernatural. That's the way they would understand it themselves. I think they would at least.

26:41 Wes: Yeah. Which is to say there aren't natural laws that allow us to explain these phenomena. These phenomena break the rules. Right. The ordinary rules.

26:50 Dylan: Yeah. Which already is a funny separate thing. Right. That you would have rules for the universe that break the rules for the universe that aren't part of the bigger set of rules. It's the reason why magic is already always science. You know, you can go to school at Hogwarts and you can learn how to do magic. So it's a science. It's not magic in the sense of. I mean, it is.

27:10 Wes: That's interesting, because my problem with Harry Potter is that it's hard to have something be at stake when you don't really know what the rules are. You never really quite know what the rules are with the magic that's involved. You know, he's going to wave his wand and say some spell, but you have no way of predicting the battle based on who's got the stronger spell. You're really just not aware enough of the rules for enough to be at stake. For me.

27:31 Seth: If you would keep up with the rules of wand ownership, then you're right.

27:36 Wes: But then something like, you know, other movies play with the concept of magic as well. Like, say a movie like Mission Impossible or any hero movie where these guys are doing things which are almost impossible. I mean, these athletic feats, jumping out of windows or fighting with some guy on a moving airplane or something ridiculous like that James Bond or Mission Impossible. So we get the thrill of it's almost supernatural, and yet they're always playing within the rules. Right. There's always some plausible explanation. Okay, yes, that is possible. That he could do that. And that always keeps the stakes very high in those movies. I think the stakes fall apart when things become so supernatural that you're no longer cognizant of the rules. So I think that's a good way with pointing out the difference between the natural and the supernatural.

28:19 Seth: Well, see, that's funny because it seems like Dylan was saying that in the Harry Potter movies the magic is sort of too explained. Right. Where you're saying it's not explained enough so that you understand it. Or is it just saying it doesn't make sense? Like in Tolkien, for instance, it's not explained very much at all. It's just Gandalf is some sort of really a lesser God if you read the background texts into what kind of creature he is. But even just reading the book, like there's no explanation of where this came from.

28:44 Wes: Right.

28:44 Seth: You know, maybe it's just that it's sprinkled so sparsely through the stories that it's not.

28:48 Wes: My point is, in a typical struggle between a protagonist and an antagonist, say it's some sort of physical struggle. You would expect that someone's going to get exhausted over the course of the fight, or you expect that a punch of a certain strength will inflict such and such kind of damage. There are all sorts of background rules like that where you're in suspense about the outcome. I mean, obviously you know what the outcome is going to be because a good guy's going to win. And yet there's some sort of suspense about that. And often the suspense is, well, how is the good guy going to get out of this horrible predicament he's in where he's hanging off the edge of the cliff. But of course he manages to pull the villain over the cliff and climb back up. So he's doing things which are almost impossible. So they're playing with the idea of the supernatural or the impossible, but they're just getting it in under the radar, let's say. That's where I think suspense can be created with Harry Potter. I agree that the magic is over explained in a way, and they try and make it mundane. It's like a regular English boarding school and so on and so forth. But the fact that there's no way to follow a struggle between two magicians with wands. It's not even a narrative, there's not even a storyline to it, except that the energy is going from each wand and they're struggling with each other and boom. Suddenly one magician overcomes the other for some unknown reason. I Don't know if I've explained that very well.

30:07 Dylan: I think you do. I think you articulated nicely. You didn't see Rowling accomplishing that establishing of rules for Mag. And I think that regardless of whether she's successful or not, she tries to do the same thing that someone like Tolkien or anybody else who deals with science fiction or supernatural events or whatever is establish a consistency of universe so that even if you couldn't explain it, you know, you can't build the warp drive in Star Trek. But there are rules for it. There are things that can. You need the lithium crystals. Right. And there are. There's conflicts, there's lack of resources, there is limits that you run up against all those things and they are cause and effect. Right. That's what I meant by saying that magic in the case of Harry Potter or any of these other things, anything that you can learn ends up being a science. It would be interesting maybe to talk to somebody who really argues hardcore for supernatural explanation, yet says that you can learn something about it, and also claims that it's not a science in the sense of knowledge. I myself think that what they'll end up saying is that they want to reject a certain kind of science, but claim that learnable science for themselves. I think the only real argument against it, the only claim you could have, would be something like what Lucas does with the Jedi Knights and the Mido. What are they called? The midi chlorians. The midi chlorians, where you have some kind of alternative access through yourself which works the way like something like blessedness by God, authority works. In that case, that is not learnable. It's not knowledge in the sense of a science.

31:45 Wes: Yeah. It's not replicable and you can't get to it through an experiment. I mean, ironically, it's empirical to some extent. Right. If someone says, well, I see ghosts, and then, you know, you could find a whole community of people who say, yes, we've all seen ghosts, yes, but. But it's not likely that they're ever going to be able to show each other they are ghosts. Right. It was this very idiosyncratic, particular walled off experience. So they accept certain quasi scientific rules, like the empirical thing. There's got to be something that counts as evidence. But it falls apart when you try and get the level of generalizability or rulemaking.

32:20 Dylan: Well, importantly, the authority for whether or not it was observed is wholly up to them and utterly individual.

32:25 Wes: Right, exactly.

32:26 Dylan: But it's granted as being true and there's something sort of powerful about that. That the right sort of person giving the testimony, people will believe it. Right, right. I think in some ways kings and leaders and stuff work this way too. That you have other reasons for placing authority in what they say. And you find yourself not judging the events yourself. You judge it based upon the authority of that experience or what you vest in that person. And that's a whole different kind of way of knowing something. It's a kind of granting of it. That's not scientific. But that's not the way magic, certainly in Harry Potter. And I don't even think that's the way magic works in Vulcan either.

33:04 Mark: What are we talking about here? How does this.

33:06 Seth: We're talking about midi chlorians, man.

33:09 Dylan: No, the reason we're talking about this was the way in which Flanagan is a naturalist and what he means by naturalism in his book on Buddhism, naturalized. And I had made the point that his way of understanding the supernatural, I thought that most people who were supernaturalists wouldn't really disagree with. And then we got on a little bit of a weird but pertinent discussion about what it would mean to have an actual supernatural claim and what kind of knowledge that would be.

33:38 Wes: Yeah, I think this is important because some people will say you want to reject karma or you want these tame interpretations of karma, luminous consciousness. You're getting rid of the most important part of this or you're getting rid of its spiritual element. Right. We can anticipate those sorts of criticisms that he sucked the soul out of Buddhism by rejecting the supernatural.

33:58 Seth: Although I like the fact that he brought in the sale of indulgences, essentially that you can pay off monks to come back in a better state. That the soul has already been sucked out of the system in the culture in which it still thrives.

34:13 Mark: Yeah, I get that. I guess the thing that's interesting to me is that there's any desire, the motivation at all to try to use Buddhism to redeem a moral position that doesn't have the word God in it. And that's really what this comes down to is can't you use moral sentiment? And there's something about. It's that Buddhism has a certain kind of legitimacy as a moral code without the concept of a creator God. And in that respect, that's what makes it attractive to naturalists.

34:41 Wes: It's a real form of life. It's the way people actually live these days.

34:45 Mark: As opposed to Hume and Smith's moral sentiment.

34:48 Wes: Well, Aristotle's ethics. Although people may live that way, it doesn't have a large self designated population of Aristotelian Eudaimonists, but Buddhism does. And so I think that's part of what attracted Flanagan. And that and the publicity it was getting for neuroscientific verification and the fact that he met the Dalai Lama, that would pique my interest as well.

35:09 Mark: Totally agree. Yeah.

35:10 Seth: It was interesting. He quoted the Dalai Lama a bunch of times in the book that the Dalai Lama has written or dictated. I don't know many works, and I didn't look at any of them, so I can't attest to their quality. But I think he was trying to skate a fine line in arguing against some of these points while still being respectful of this world leader that deigned to invite him to this.

35:31 Wes: Yeah.

35:31 Seth: To get involved in this.

35:32 Wes: And you could tell, I mean, it seemed like it was important to him what the Dalai Lama specifically thought. Because on the one hand, the Dalai Lama is science friendly, and I think Flanagan was heartened by that. But on the other hand, there are these certain claims about luminous consciousness that

35:47 Seth: the immaterial soul, essentially Flanagan rejects.

35:50 Wes: Yeah. And so luminous consciousness, the idea that there can be certain kinds of conscious states that are not underwritten by neural correlates by brain states. And that, of course, is a naturalistic. No, no, that's precisely what it would mean for something to be supernatural. There'd be some entity which is not underwritten by natural phenomena of the brain.

36:09 Dylan: Yeah. And I mean, interestingly, you, very quickly, at least, if you've been educated in sort of the Western tradition, begin thinking about Descartes, that body, soul, duality, but also about the notion of, well, how much less does a person weigh after they've died? If there is this external suprabody consciousness, you immediately think of, well, what is it made out of? If it's not made of brain or body or flesh, in order for it to be contained or exist, it has to have some kind of material manifestation.

36:39 Wes: Yeah. So that's the materialist presupposition, which is usually one of the tenants of naturalism. Right.

36:44 Seth: And at the very least, if you have some respect for science and you believe in something like luminous consciousness, then you're faced with the same problem. Problem that Descartes has in, well, how does this stuff actually communicate or connect with Descartes said the pineal gland. And in fact, I will say that midi chlorians were not in George Lucas's updated thought on what the force was. They are not the force itself. He didn't make the force into a material thing. These are things supposedly in Our cells that allow the Force to communicate its will to us. The Force is still ultimately mysterious, but somehow it's supposed to help the explanation have the. This thing that we've investigated and we can measure be connecting us to that. And I think once you admit something outside the natural realm then you have to come up with this ad hoc to connect it to the natural realm somehow.

37:30 Speaker: Yeah.

37:30 Dylan: And I have to respond to this. The most disappointing thing and made me an ardent anti Star wars person when I saw in the movie. Apparently this was true early on in the books and Lucas's original conception of it. But there was nothing about this midi chlorian business until whatever it was, Episode one came out. Before then my naive Star Trek infused interpretation was that you had access to the Force and everyone did like chi or something like that. Like the Tao. Yeah, exactly. And so Yoda was well schooled in it. Right. And maybe a master of it. It was possible to be more well schooled in it and have better dispositions. But the fact that you would have to physically have more mitochlori in your blood in order to be a Jedi than someone else all of a sudden makes all those Jedi just a different race, Brian. Even more than that, a different being altogether. So that they become the guardians of the Force and the guardians of normal human beings. And this metaphysical presupposition is utterly in contradistinction to like the Star Trek universe. Now I've revealed myself to be a tremendous about this.

38:44 Wes: What are mitochlorians or things in the blood?

38:46 Seth: They're supposed to be things in your cells, like little.

38:49 Wes: And where was this revealed that you had to have these to be a Jedi?

38:52 Dylan: Well, in episode one it is when measure his blood. Obi Wan's was it? Quan jun qui gon qui gon goes

39:00 Mark: and oh my God, I can't believe this is happening.

39:04 Dylan: He meets the young Anakin and so impressed. And then measures his mitochlorian contact and says oh, he's a Jedi waiting. We must take him away and educate him in the ways of the Force. He will be a great Jedi.

39:18 Wes: That is horrible. But those first three.

39:21 Dylan: There's nothing of that.

39:22 Wes: The prequels are bad. I'm sorry. They're all bad.

39:24 Seth: Given that the science is unlimited in this universe, more or less. Wouldn't the next step to be getting midichlorian injections and transplants and cutting off a Jedi's head and carrying it around and you know, to connect you to the.

39:39 Dylan: Exactly. But of course it would go with how much money you have. Right. This is going to happen anyway. Drinking Jedi blood is going to happen anyway.

39:47 Seth: All right, so now that we've set that up, can we be similarly thoughtful evaluating basic tenets of Buddhism on naturalist grounds?

39:55 Dylan: Well, in this respect, I think that for me, the most interesting part that Flanagan spent the most time on the positive aspect of it was the notion of emptiness, which is the part that he, for lack of a better term, meditated on himself the most and analyzed. He discounted karma. He bracketed off a whole bunch of things that he considered supernatural.

40:15 Seth: Can we just say what his tamed version of karma is? What goes around comes around things you do have effects.

40:19 Dylan: Yes. What goes around comes around, buddy. That's all it is.

40:22 Seth: Even that sounds a little super.

40:24 Wes: It may not come around, but it'll come.

40:26 Seth: It'll come to somebody. It'll come to somebody. It won't necessarily come to you. Yes, but, you know, your grandchildren are going to have to deal with what you do in the world, etc.

40:35 Dylan: So maybe the most tamed version of karma is there is cause and effect.

40:39 Wes: But no, he makes the point that it's more than just cause and effect because it's the effects of sentient beings as opposed to non sentient beings. That's what makes karmic causation different than just regular causation.

40:49 Seth: And then nirvana, the other one that he considers, do you remember what he says specifically about that? He pretty much discounts probably what should be well established naturalistic take on mystical experience, which is, isn't it coincidental that every time a Christian has a mystical experience and thinks they're one with the universe or whatever, they see Jesus and that a Buddhist confirm whatever religious thing that they believed in the first place. So if that's what enlightenment means, then there's not going to be much to it. But he still seems to accept nirvana as something. And this was raised by Eric in the last Buddhism discussion, Eric Douglas, that we had, that there could be just people walking around enlightened and you wouldn't even know, because enlightenment has something to do with having a fundamental deep understanding of the truths of the creed, actually being able to see emptiness to get rid of your habitual way of taking everything you encounter in the world as having its own inner reality, you actually see the emptiness. And so maybe that's one of the things Flanagan would allow to be, okay, you're enlightened. Is that one of the ways you could attain. I'm sorry, I'm confusing the satori, the enlightenment experience, with nirvana, naturally, because usually you're enlightened and that's, that's what attaining Nirvana is. But then there's this other version of Nirvana that he discusses which is just after you die and you finally escape the cycle of rebirth. So that's nothingness.

42:04 Wes: Right.

42:05 Seth: So that's one version, I think he calls it like N1 and then another one where you actually just achieve whatever the Buddhist version of happiness is.

42:12 Wes: Right, right.

42:13 Seth: And that's also very worldly. And so, yeah, okay, so fine, we can talk about Nirvana. But it means one of those things.

42:18 Wes: Yeah, so he wants to give these tame interpretations instead of the supernatural one that implies an afterlife.

42:24 Seth: And these have got to be based on his talking to act Buddhists. So this is within the realm of something that actual Buddhists would call nirvana or would call the enlightenment experience. But as he said, there's so many different kinds of Buddhism around.

42:37 Wes: Certainly the Dalai Lama is friendly to the more naturalistic explanations, despite the fact that they differ in the end.

42:43 Dylan: It seems like he would say that most Buddhists would agree with him, but just say that he doesn't go far enough with Flanagan. Seems to me that Flanagan, that would be his claim is that the Dalai Lama would agree with him. Except actually there's luminous consciousness. You're not going far enough at the end. Everything else is true, all that stuff about Nirvana and enlightenment, but it really goes further than that.

43:04 Seth: I'm not sure I see the difference between. No, you've entirely missed the point of what enlightenment is, which I can certainly picture a lot of Buddhists listening to this. And yeah, he didn't get it. You guys don't get it. This is not what. Which I don't remember who I heard saying this, but something like there are so many, particularly in America where a lot of it is third hand. Whatever. There's so many different forms of Buddhism and everybody's convinced that they have the true one. So you're missing the fundamental point, the spirit of the religion, the heart of the thing.

43:32 Wes: Well, let's say what Buddhism as a natural philosophy is, because I don't think we ever gave an overview of that.

43:37 Seth: Right, some of it. But it's also the Four Noble Truths that we don't need to go through in detail, but we outlined it on the other one, that the recognition that life is basically suffering, there's a lot of suffering around and, and thinking that there's a way away from that, that we can detach from this suffering. That's not a listing of the Four Noble Truths, but that's the story yeah.

43:55 Wes: And that to detach from that effectively involves controlling our subjectivity in some way or our desire, getting rid of the poisons of delusion and avarice and anger. And the way to do that is to obtain virtue, basically, or through meditation.

44:15 Seth: Obtain wisdom, not through meditation.

44:18 Wes: Meditation or mindfulness. Right. Yeah. Flanagan makes a point that many Buddhists don't meditate, but meditation is one possible tool to achieve wisdom which brings about virtue. And presumably that brings about some sort of happiness or flourishing.

44:33 Seth: What we discussed last time is it seemed like the ontological situation, this recognition of emptiness and suffering and all that stuff is supposed to bring about virtue. In the other podcast, when we discussed this with Eric, I think we put it forward, it looked like that being virtuous was one of the things you had to do in order to get further on the path, in order to get enlightened, sort of in order to see the metaphysical truth itself, you had to engage in self discipline. And ethical action was one way of doing that.

44:59 Wes: Interesting.

45:00 Dylan: So the ought reveals the is rather than the is reveals the ought.

45:03 Seth: Yeah. I mean, isn't that kind of Aristotle's point too? Like you have to. A lot of the normative things of living according to the mean are a way of getting yourself sort of clear headed so you can be reasonable and have the appropriate views.

45:16 Dylan: Aristotle's point is that you become excellent by being excellent, that you develop the habits and you embody the virtue by acting in the way of the virtue. And that's not nonsensical. You just start doing it and you'll be bad at it at first and you'll get better at it.

45:34 Wes: Yeah. And Flanagan himself, for instance, talks about certain types of meditation which will help you become compassionate. For instance, he's also big on wisdom. Right. Comprehension of these certain basic truths about impermanence and about the fact that we don't have a self and emptiness leading to. They're supposed to lead to, let's say, compassion and loving kindness and these types of virtues. But it looks like also you can directly work on compassion through meditation or mindfulness. It looks like you can skip the wisdom part to some extent.

46:07 Mark: Yeah, I think there's probably like more or less engaged in the world kind of ways of exploring this. But I thought that the piece that he brought up that was most challenging is, and maybe this is the is ought and maybe it's not, but that being aware that life is suffering doesn't necessarily impel you to any specific action. So even prior to the is ought, it's not clear that Awareness of the fact of the matter actually is motivation enough for you to do anything about it.

46:39 Seth: Let me just return to the four noble Truths, because there it seems like the ought comes straight out of the is.

46:44 Mark: Right.

46:44 Seth: It's like you said, the first noble truth is life means suffering. The second of the origin is suffering is attachment. The third is the cessation of suffering is attainable. And the fourth is the path to the cessation of suffering. So it is. You are miserable. Everybody you know is miserable ultimately, when you think about it. And then if you analyze the rest of that human situation, you'll see that here's some stuff you have to do for that to stop. So right there, that's the obligation. It's not an external obligation, it's a motivator.

47:13 Mark: Can we spend a little time on this and just kind of cash it out a little bit? So when they say life is suffering, what they mean is everything in life is impermanent. It comes and it goes. And so life is a series of chasing after these impermanent things. You want happiness, you want wealth, you want joy, you want all of these things, and you experience sickness and pain and this sort of thing. But essentially none of these things are permanent states. Like the happiness is only temporary. So suffering is related to your desire to achieve relief from the things like pain and the experience, the positive experience of things like happiness. And so suffering as attachment means that you are attached to achieving these things, these desires. Is that right?

48:06 Dylan: I think so. I just was going to ask Seth. Whenever I hear that word, suffering, it makes me wonder about how it differs from saying that stuff happens to me.

48:15 Mark: This is a statement about your positive desire, so to speak, as opposed to the things that act upon you.

48:24 Dylan: So it's not a statement saying that I that everyone suffers. It includes with it a value judgment rather than a notion that we are embedded. And so therefore things happen to us that are not in our control.

48:36 Wes: So you're thinking of pathos, Dylan? Is that what you're thinking of? The

48:42 Dylan: difference? I guess.

48:43 Mark: I think there are actually two different things at work, and I'm not 100% sure. I don't know whether the first noble truth and the second noble truth embody. So one is that life is desire. You want things. You're constantly in a state of desiring.

49:00 Wes: I think desire is the important thing here.

49:02 Mark: Yeah. And the things that you desire are all impermanent. You think that you will be satisfied. You think that if you get money or you get that job or you have sex or what have you that you'll be satisfied. And in fact, what you find out is that getting what you desire doesn't result in happiness. And the reason it doesn't result in happiness is because these things are impermanent and they pass. Like, to me, that's the first noble. That's how I interpret it.

49:28 Wes: Also, I like the way Flanagan puts it. He uses this phrase, our desires outstrip our desiring nature. It's not just that we're in pain, but it's something about the nature of desire. And one of those things is the fact that when we desire something and we have this fantasy about it and what it's going to be like, well, by the time we get it, a lot has changed, including ourselves. And it may be that what we thought we wanted wasn't what we really wanted, or that now we've changed and we want something else. But also, even if our desire hasn't really changed just by the passage of time, we're not the same. The person who gets what they want is not the person who wanted in the first place. Time has passed and you've become somewhat different. Or in other words, the real thing is never like the fantasy. It never lives up to that fantasy, let's say.

50:15 Dylan: But isn't part of it a deeper claim about the nature of us and our desiring nature that we run by desire, that is our directedness, Our very motion involves desiring. Without desire, we have no motion at all. And so the problem that we end up running into is once we attain the thing that we desire, if we were to cease desiring at that point, we would cease having any motion at all. Is in a way, a conundrum that every time we get what we want, we need to have things we want. That's part of our nature as beings. But once we get it, unless we have something else in which to go after, then we cease being.

50:58 Mark: Yeah, let me make two distinctions here. So the first is, Dylan, to distinguish this desiring nature from the things that happen to us, right? So there are people that have chronic pain, that are in poverty and what have you. And the strength of this position is not that it's about alleviating suffering in the sense of external things that are perpetrated on us or the. That act upon us. It's dealing with this desiring nature. And the key part about dealing with the desiring nature is where it says that the origin of suffering is attachment. It's not that having a desiring nature is bad, and it's not that that's not who we are, it's that we're attached to the outcome of the desiring nature. So we think that I want this thing and if I don't get it, I will be unhappy or I will not be successful or what have you. The goal is not to overcome the desiring nature. It's to overcome attachment to the outcome of the desire. You want to be desiring, you can't help it. That's what we are. But if you don't get what you desire, it's not putting a value judgment on yourself or not equating yourself with the success or failure of the outcome of the desire. So if you want to be successful and rich and you become successful and rich, you're like, hey, that's great, I'm happy. But if you were to not be successful and rich, you aren't attached to it in such a way that you become unhappy.

52:22 Wes: What is Buddhism asking of us there? I mean, Seth, you're making the argument that it's not simply asking us to give up all our desires and become completely detached, right?

52:31 Mark: No, in fact, I think that's what the Buddhists say is you can't. That's part of what being a human being is. That's what ego mind does. It craves. It searches for things. Now their answer to it is to not be attached to the outcomes. And then that ultimately plays into recognizing yourself as impermanent and there being no self. And if there's no self, then there can't be desire or attachment. If there's no self. That's the leap of enlightenment or awareness that I'm not at yet. I'm just. That's what I think they're trying to say. But I think they acknowledge that being human is being desiring. But the first step is to say, I will not be attached to the outcome of my desires. I want these things, but if I don't get them, I will not be miserable or unhappy. You realize that you don't have to have these things and that that's the way life is. And if you overcome that, then there's this Eightfold path that takes you down this route where you can gain enlightenment. But if you make it at least through the first three noble Truths, even if you don't take any concrete action, the quality of your life is theoretically going to be substantially improved.

53:33 Dylan: It makes me want to think through, and this might not be exactly the place to do it, but the difference between this relationship between desiring and attachment and ultimately detachment from your desiring that when you characterize in the end as being rooted in a kind of compassion as opposed to love, and the way that love seems to involve a kind of attachment, that part of the importance of it is that it is an attachment in the way in which that caring is different than compassion.

54:07 Mark: Yes.

54:08 Dylan: So that there was. There's something sort of at stake. Maybe this is the route you go down where you end up seeing it being a conflict between compassion and justice that Flanning had talked a little bit about at the end, that attachment might end up taking you down that road of justice.

54:24 Mark: That's a good point. I definitely think that compassion in this Buddhist sense is not what we consider to be compassion. Compassion is not empathy.

54:32 Wes: Well, there's two.

54:32 Mark: There's.

54:32 Wes: There's two virtues, right? There's compassion and then there's loving kindness.

54:36 Mark: Compassion is basically recognition that what you've realized about yourself and about life and suffering everybody else is subject to too.

54:43 Wes: And it's a desire to end the suffering of others, though.

54:45 Mark: Yes.

54:46 Wes: And then loving kindness is the positive. You want to bring happiness to others.

54:49 Mark: Yes, exactly. It's not quite compassion in the same emotional, empathetic sense that we think of it. It's more an awareness that all human beings live labor under the same set of conditions and that the goal is to alleviate this attachment to desire. I won't say suffering. I'll say alleviate this attachment to the outcome of desire as much as possible.

55:09 Wes: So what is it about, say, the virtues of compassion and loving kindness and the other ones that are supposed to decrease attachment in the first sense? Right. Or reduce our suffering? What is it about having compassion and loving kindness that reduce suffering and get us happiness in the end?

55:24 Dylan: Well, don't they just decrease attachment and therefore decrease suffering by decreasing attachment?

55:29 Wes: How do they.

55:30 Seth: Well, again, I'm not sure that this is even in the right order, that it might be that once you have decreased attachment yourself, so you're not clinging, you're not so egoistic and trying to fulfill your own supposedly immortal self or something, then that frees you to be compassionate to others and. Right. Flanagan's question is, well, where does that come from? I mean, it might just be that you observe the suffering and that's the natural reaction once you've divested yourself of this attachment.

55:54 Wes: We want to know how virtue leads to happiness in this model or how this set of virtues leads us to happiness. And happiness involves ending our suff by reducing our attachments and getting rid of these poisons of delusion and avarice and anger. So the Question is how that works, how it does that.

56:11 Dylan: And also, which as Mark just pointed out, of course, Flanagan points that the flourishing or happiness in Buddhism is different than the flourishing and happiness, at least in Aristotle or other cases, he has many superscripts.

56:22 Mark: Yeah. So I'll give you an example. Suppose you're driving on the highway and some somebody swerves over and cuts you off. Like they're in the left hand, you're in the center lane and they want to exit and they cut across and cut you off. And you know, you honk your horn and you scream and you're like, fucking people.

56:38 Speaker: God.

56:39 Mark: Talking on their cell phone, not paying attention is just so typical of short attention spans and all this kind of stuff. Right? So that's one way of viewing the situation. You know, another thing you could say is, wow, isn't it terrible that this person is so bound up in both our consumer materialistic culture and their intense desire to achieve that they are trying to talk on the phone while simultaneously being late to work and for all I know, you know, had an argument with their spouse this morning or maybe their kids not doing well in school or something like that. And they're just not, they're not mindful, they're not aware of what's going on around them. And instead of honking at them, you just sort of easily off the gas and be like, you know, I'm really sad that that person is in that state. And so those are like two different ways to react to the same situation. And one is compassionate and the other is sort of ego reactive desire. Because your desire is to not have some asshole cut you off in traffic. Right? That's your, like you want to, you need to get where you're going and doing all that. And the theory is, I think that in taking that compassionate action, you somehow are either stopping or at least not perpetuating a chain of activities or events that would continue to lead to more suffering in the world. Like if you honked at this person, cut them off and they turn around, they were like, they could either be angry with you or they could be like, oh shit, I didn't even see that guy. I wasn't paying attention. God, I'm such a miserable. You know, well, you know, and then they carry that stuff with them all day and they inflict it on somebody else. I think in theory that's the idea. Yeah.

58:10 Wes: Part of it is just you reduce your own suffering as well.

58:12 Mark: You clearly reduce your own suffering for sure.

58:14 Wes: The anger and the whole thing. Abhidhamma all these unwholesome mental states that you could have are. Yeah. Are suffering.

58:21 Mark: I see the clear path on reducing your own suffering. And that's actually what I've been experiencing lately as I've tried to like put this into practice. I'm not so sure that I see that there's a direct correlation. In some cases I see how the action has an effect on other people and it's positive. In some cases it just seems like you're peeing into the Grand Canyon.

58:38 Wes: I mean, it seems to me the danger of this is that you're just going to repress. Right. Flanagan actually makes a little crack about how he knows a lot of passive aggressive Buddhists or Buddhists who aren't such great people.

58:49 Seth: Yeah, Same thing as Christians. Yep.

58:51 Wes: Oh, I'm love and I get this from going to yoga. You do run into a lot of. Yeah. People who are saying, yes, it's all about love. But you can feel the aggression and the anger that's bottled up. Right. Just pouring out underneath all of that love, joy, surface stuff. It's interesting.

59:07 Seth: So you could see the role of martial arts to come in here that you can channel your energy, channel your aggression, have that righteous fury that he was talking about that is just gone in a moment. You just get it out there and it doesn't pollute you.

59:19 Wes: Yeah. I think it's a mistaken approach to this to say when I'm angry in traffic, I'm just going to force myself to feel compassion or loving kindness and I'm going to get rid of that anger somehow. I don't know. But I mean, probably you have to accept the anger to some extent. Right. Or I don't know how you go from anger to compassion, but it can't be. You know, I'm just going to push the anger down and tell myself that I must be compassionate. So it's complicated.

59:43 Seth: So I just went on Google if you guys want to do this and just search for noble truths with no

59:47 Dylan: quotes, why will this help us?

59:49 Seth: The very first entry that comes up is thebigview.com that's the list I was reading off of. And then at the bottom of that, under the fourth noble truth, there's a link to the Efold path.

59:57 Mark: Yeah.

59:58 Seth: And I was looking over that and it gives the eight things and sort of describes what kind of things go into them. And a lot of them are just have to do with discipline, write speech, make sure words can break or save lives, make enemies or friends, start wars or create pe. Blah.

1:00:12 Wes: Don't slander These all fall under the categories of meditation, mindfulness, wisdom and virtue. Yeah, so. So, yeah, Flanagan has broken them up into those categories. But these, yeah, these are all part of the fourth nibble, Truth.

1:00:24 Seth: Right. As I'm looking through this list, I'm not seeing be compassionate. That's not a command. You can't make yourself be compassionate, but you can. Like under number six, right effort. Mental energy is the force behind right effort. It can occur in either wholesome or unwholesome states. The same type of energy that fuels desire, envy, aggression and violence can, on the other side, fuel self discipline, honesty, benevolence and kindness. So you want to prevent the arising of unison. Unwholesome states. Abandon unwholesome states that have already arisen, arouse wholesome states like, you know, so it's. Even though mindfulness is a separate thing. I mean, this is another form of that. It's to don't feed the anger, deal with it.

1:00:59 Wes: So there are techniques, basically, you know.

1:01:01 Seth: Yeah, right, right. It's a problem within Buddhism. It's not a rejection of Buddhism, him to say, oh, but we're just angry people. They can acknowledge that. Just. It becomes a problem to deal with on a practical level. Not an objection to the view.

1:01:11 Wes: No, I was saying. Yeah, I wasn't objecting to the view. I was saying it must work through these types of techniques. It can't just be, you know, I'm rejecting my anger.

1:01:20 Dylan: It's in this way that it ends up sounding like Aristotle and virtues and moderation, virtue, that kind of thing where your activity of being excellent is by engaging and being excellent. It's right behavior with respect to fear is being courageous and that sort of thing. That notion that we have ways of manifesting or flourishing and we have techniques, things that we ought to pay attention to in everyday life that we ought to sort of do our best at. Where best is however you're going to interpret. What do you mean by Right? Yeah, it's not any more prescriptive than saying you need to have the right view, the right intention, the right speech. All of these things go towards making you wiser and better acting and stronger in mind. And there are details in those things, you know, a kind of education that goes along with it. But it all has to do with optimizing certain relatively obvious things, I guess.

1:02:15 Wes: Well, for Aristotle, right. It's more habituation. And I mean, this gets us at Flanagan's comparison of the Aristotelian and the Buddhist approach, because the Buddhist approach is more therapeutic. Flanagan calls it A therapy of desire, and compares it to post Aristotelian in philosophies, including Stoicism, where you aren't just assuming, as Aristotle does, well, if you didn't have a good childhood, you're screwed.

1:02:37 Dylan: No, that's true. That's a really important point.

1:02:38 Wes: Buddhism is assuming. Well, we are all kind of fucked up and we need therapy, whereas Aristotelianism, sort of. You have to get to the plate with a solid enough grounding, and then you can develop these virtues through habituation and through the development of your practical reason.

1:02:53 Dylan: It would point to a discussion about the difference between education and therapy or the distinction between a knowledge and a practice.

1:03:01 Mark: And isn't one of the points that in Aristotle's conception, whether it's explicit or not, it's tied to a certain set of cultural norms and, you know, you can generalize and talk about whatever happens to be the contemporary cultural situation and societal norms, but that Aristotle at least has a framework in which, you know, you can say, go find the excellent men in your society and do what those excellent men do. Right. There are people in the society who are acknowledged as virtuous. If you go and watch what virtuous people do, you can become virtuous. Whereas the Buddhist conception seems to be, I don't want to say culturally agnostic because it clearly is tied, but it doesn't have as strong a conception. There are wise people that you could theoretically go emulate.

1:03:45 Seth: Sure, there's a whole tradition of that, this whole tradition of respect for teachers that doesn't even translate well into the

1:03:51 Mark: US but tying into the issue of whether somebody who has attained a certain amount of wisdom or enlightenment is active or not active, that there were plenty of people who are compassionate and meditate but don't actually do anything that signals that they're compassionate. Aristotle's conception does not suffer from the. I don't want to call it a fault, but in Aristotle there will always be an example of what constitutes virtue that you can at least go take a look at and emulate. Virtues aren't hidden. They're not states of mind. They're always tied to action.

1:04:21 Wes: Yeah, and Flanagan identifies kind of two strains, right? Where for certain kinds of Buddhism, virtues are tied to action, like for the Bodhisattva, for instance, whereas for the Aranth, I don't know if that's the correct pronunciation, you can just meditate on, say, compassion and never do anything compassionate, and that's enough. So it seems like at least some forms of Buddhism are closely tied to Action as well.

1:04:42 Seth: I don't know how much it's in Aristotle, but I remember that our discussion of Hume and Smith, that was building pretty directly on Aristotle. There was a lot of, not just virtue of actions, but was this sentiment too extreme? Like, you see that that's very much ties in with what Aristotle says about the meaning of having sort of emotional discipline. So not everything in Aristotle translates to action either.

1:05:03 Dylan: Okay, well, and this is going to have to end up in Buddhism too. I mean, even if you were to say, well, yeah, there's a strain that people just contemplate compassion but never actually do anything. And so in some ways maybe they're susceptible to the criticism that their meditation on compassion doesn't really lead to them being compassionate at all. But in other aspects of it, there's going to have to be maybe not an activity that is directed towards society, but there's going to have to be activities of theirs that they do that involve embodying rightness in these eight ways or embodying the Four Noble Truths. It might not be that they translate into going out and being a social creature or something like that. And that might be a criticism of it, but that's more like criticizing for the way in which your action is directed. It's a different thing to say that, well, that activity of embodying Buddhist practice involves no practice, no activity. Seems to me all of these involve activity. View, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, concentration. All those things involve you doing something even if you were to criticize it for, or it not really seem to be directed enough out to other people or something like that.

1:06:22 Seth: Well, the question though, if a lot of it is restrictive, then a lot of what comes into the right action is avoiding unwholesome actions that lead to unsound states of mind. You want to abstain, from harming, don't commit suicide, don't steal, don't have sexual relations that are harmful to others. That's just here's things to avoid. It doesn't actually say you have to have appropriate sexual relations or what's the opposite of stealing? Instead, like, you don't have to have property at all.

1:06:53 Dylan: Yeah, no, but the problem is that now we're getting down into both the specific interpretations of the 35,000 different forms of Buddhism. And we're also getting down in the problem that you get being skeptical about any kind of philosophy. They say, well, now that you said you do this, how is it possible that you ground that? And we're kind of now demanding a grounding of Buddhism which self consciously doesn't have one. That's one of Flanagan's points actually is that Buddhism just simply is not concerned with the kind of grounding that permeates the Western tradition. And that's one of the reasons why he thinks that it's compatible with modern science in the way in which it is just a little bit less obsessed with that notion of foundationalism. And I think he would claim in Buddhism a kind of similar minimal metaphysical set of presuppositions. Now that's a separate argument. Whether you think that naturalism has a minimal set of metaphysical presuppositions, you might disagree with that. But Flanagan surely thinks it does and he thinks that that's one thing it has in common with Buddhism.

1:08:06 Seth: So we've been mostly talking at this point, the recent part of the conversation about the ethics, I think we've said enough that we can say, yeah, of course you could have this Buddhist flavored ethical dialogue, this exchange, all these supposed objections that we're bringing up are things that within the Buddhist tradition you could come up with a response to. There's the conceptual apparatus to enable something fruitful to go on there. And there's nothing anti naturalistic about this acknowledgement of, of the desire being harmful and stuff, you know, so in some ways like, well, that was the point of the book, right? That's all we need. But I think when you raise this metaphysical issue, that's a different thing. There's a significantly anti metaphysical strain in Buddhism as reflected in some old story about where the Buddha was asked all these fundamental questions about the creation of the universe and refused to answer them. And that was a way of saying, look, Buddhism doesn't need this kind of thing. We can just rely on the phenomenology and we'll get the ethics out of that. Just all the stuff we've been talking about. So that seems if you're just focusing on ethics, then yeah, that's going to be compatible with science, no problem. There's a later development, this Mahayana tradition that we talked about in our Nagarjuna episode, which focuses on emptiness, that this was sort of the added element in the top five beliefs, whatever that we've been going through here, which is a positive metaphysical view, it's a non foundationalist view. It's to say that not only is your thought of an eternal soul an illusion, an eternal self, or the permanence of the world that you see in front of you, not only is all that illusory, but even the flux itself. Right. You could Say, oh, this is, you know, the things I perceive here are not real, persisting objects. They're just part of this Heraclitean flux. We keep calling it even. The flux itself, according to the strong emptiness doctrine, is illusory. There is no bottom, that there is no ultimate reality. Ultimate reality, maybe, yeah, certainly. If there is anything, it's something you can't talk about.

1:10:08 Dylan: Isn't that just Kant?

1:10:10 Seth: Well, interestingly, we had a secondary source for the Nagarjuna text at the time by a guy named Jan Westerhoff. And so I'd done a couple blog postings on with quotes from Westerhoff. Let me read one of them, which was specifically arguing that this emptiness view is not Kantianism. The difference is that for Kant, there's a thing in itself that's beyond what we can talk about. But that's not going to be the case for Nagarjuna. A key element, this is, quoting Westerhoff, a key element is denying that makes any sense to speak of objects lying beyond our conceptual frameworks. These frameworks are all we have, and if we can show that some notion is not to be subsumed under them, we must not conclude that it therefore has some shadowy existence outside of the framework. To this extent, our conceptual framework is to be thought of not so much as a map of a country, but as a set of rules for a game.

1:11:00 Dylan: So is Wittgenstein then? So I'm losing sort of the question, is it the question of the interpretation of this form of Nagarjayani and Buddhism,

1:11:09 Seth: Is the doctrine of emptiness compatible with science or not?

1:11:12 Dylan: Well, it is to the extent that it's phenomenological and pragmatic.

1:11:16 Wes: The idea of the doctrine of emptiness. I mean, it seems like a difficult question because it's this idea that you can decompose things into components. Right. The table is just atoms and the atoms are just electrons and protons and neutrons. And you can do that ad infinitum. You never get to a point where you get to this bare thing that no longer needs composition. A true atom, let's say. So that's the idea, and I think it's unclear what science would say about that. Right. Does the decomposition go on ad infinitum or not?

1:11:45 Seth: I think it doesn't give an opinion.

1:11:47 Dylan: Well, I think there's two parts in the discussion of science. So there's the reductionist point that is constantly looking for the smaller and the smaller, and would say that there's always further to go. But there's also a strain of it. That's saying that just because it's bigger doesn't mean that it is less fundamental. So both in biology and in larger scale macroscopic physics, there are lots of people that would say that mere reductionism is not the hallmark of what it means to give an account of something, even a scientific account of something. And this part of it goes very quickly into talking about emergent properties and stuff like that. So you get it, you get it in both directions. You get it both from the sort of standard direction of size getting smaller and smaller in space and time or whatever, but you also get it in the direction that a different axis of simplicity or that kind of thing. So it would be a way of saying, well, there are lots of different ways I can cut this up. And it's not even merely down.

1:12:47 Wes: The main metaphysical point here, right, is that there's nothing that's an entity in the way we typically think about entities as these sort of self sufficient beings. And you get that in dependent origination, which is sort of the flutter tenant before the Mahayana Buddhism. You have impermanence, dependent origination and no self. And dependent origination is meant to undermine concept of substance or essence by saying everything is causal. It's really sort of the scientific clause. Everything is causally related and interdependent. And so there's nothing that's just its own being by itself. And emptiness radicalizes that and says, but we have to go even farther if we were to trace all the cause and effect relationships. Whether you want to do that meteorologically and breaking things down into smaller and smaller particles or any sort of cause, effect relationship, you're never going to get a term for those relations that is its own self sufficient being that can't further be broken down or whose existence can't be explained by further causal relationships. We never get an actual term. And that's where you get everything is empty. Can we really say whether that's compatible with science or not? I'm not sure we can.

1:14:00 Seth: Well, what Flanagan seems to say is that the metaphysical claim that you've just made is compatible with science. There's nothing in science that requires there to be an Aristotelian concept of enduring substance that's entirely non scientific. And he mentioned in our interview quantum physics as providing support for that. You know, we didn't get enough details of that. And there's not enough details in the book to really say I think anything intelligent.

1:14:22 Dylan: Intelligent, no, there's a long, there's a long tradition from very early in quantum mechanics of people from at least Schrodinger interpreting quantum mechanics as being symbiotic and radically compatible with Eastern philosophical traditions, broadly speaking, without even making any judgment about that being true or not. That certainly is part of the philosophy science bit behind quantum physics.

1:14:48 Seth: He did make a good point in the book Flanagan did about the extremes to which Nagarjuna himself takes this emptiness claim. Like I was saying, it's not just the individual members of the flux that are ultimately empty because they're part of the flux. It's the flux as a whole that's empty. And then beyond that it's the concept of emptiness itself that is empty.

1:15:09 Wes: And then Flanagan uses Russell's theory of types to correct that.

1:15:13 Seth: Yes, I think this is worth explaining. So. Right. The theory of types, if you listen to our Russell on Math episode, is something like distinguishing between what a number itself and the set that it's in

1:15:23 Wes: or between a property and an individual, between some sort of second order element and then elements. So if there's some.

1:15:32 Seth: A predicate and an individual.

1:15:34 Wes: Yeah, so if there's some rule that applies to the individuals, you don't get a self referential paradox by saying that the rule. Oh, the rule also has to apply to the higher level predicates. You use the theory of types to sort of insulate different types of entities from each other. So the point is that this concept of emptiness isn't an entity in the sense that has to be explained. Nagarjuna thinks he has to explain it away and call it empty as well. But it's actually this second order property which doesn't have to be called empty in the way that.

1:16:07 Seth: Well, another example, everything is relative. But then you just saying that everything is relative is itself relative. Oh well, no, actually I was making a second order claim about other claims, something like that. But it doesn't have to turn into this self nullifying enlightenment experience that you know that leads very naturally to this. You can see how the Matyamaka then led to Chan and Zen forms that sort of thrive on paradox in some way of this is one way to achieve enlightenment. Thinking about the one hand clapping and things like that to just blow your mind. But he does acknowledge it. And I think actually we interpreted this correctly during our regarding discussion before that it's about psychologically not getting stuck on things. So it's not that the emptiness discussion is entirely just about these metaphysical concepts, you know, atoms, whatever. It's about freeing yourself from taking anything too seriously that you have to realize that everything that you're thinking is part of your Contingent conceptual scheme you might want to say is in some way full of crap is only conventionally true. And so. So if you were to say, glom onto emptiness, as Flanagan says, you're grooving on emptiness, then that would be something psychologically unhealthy. You need to get over that too.

1:17:22 Dylan: But you have to also maintain the notion that something's still at stake. This goes back to what Seth was talking about a long time ago, is understanding ourselves as desiring beings but having ways of tempering. That sort of the flip side of that is that, that if you give up that desiring, you give up that notion of trying to figure out the way the world is, you end up doing nothing. I mean literally nothing. You stop being. And so you have to figure out a way to therapeutically temper your desiring nature to maintain a activity of trying to sort out the world and understand what emptiness is without turning it into something that it's not, not being too dogmatic about it or being too certain about it. In some ways it means uncertain certainty, I guess.

1:18:13 Wes: So do we want to discuss no self as well?

1:18:16 Dylan: Yeah, yeah.

1:18:17 Seth: We made a bunch of references in the last discussion to modern versions of self. This is one of Flanagan's claims that the Buddhist doctrine of no self is compatible with a modern take on the self. And we've given one version of it in our podcast, which is Sartre's view of self, which he had these two notions of, right? Just consciousness that is just really what its contents is. There's nothing else to it. It's entirely empty in itself. But then also this transcendence self, which is something we build over time. But you got to realize that that is a social creation of some sort. You and other people are all working to invent that thing. It is real as any, as money, just like a social convention. But both of those sort of parts that I think feed into the intuition of say, Descartes notion of self. Both of those turn out not to be, you know, an immaterial permanent soul, say.

1:19:09 Wes: But we are persons with characters because character is required for us to have virtues, which Flanagan describes as dispositions to feel or do things in certain ways. Right? Because he's making Buddhism out to be a kind of a virtue ethics. It's important to say that by saying that we don't have a self doesn't mean we don't have personhood and character in the typical sense that we think about it. It's just a rejection of this metaphysical

1:19:36 Seth: doctrine, which I gotta think that there's Something. If you end up interpreting Buddhist take on self as entirely in line with our everyday intuitions, then there's something wrong. Because Buddhism is supposed to be flying in the face of common sense.

1:19:50 Wes: It depends on our intuition because our intuitions often go beyond the simply saying we're persons and we have characters. Right? It goes all the way to the metaphysical assertion that this is grounded in a immortal soul.

1:20:02 Seth: Let's say it seems like that's not what the root of desire is like. You might think animals being sentient beings, they're aware of their surroundings, whatever, have desires, but they don't have any metaphysical theories about them. So clearly thinking that yourself will last forever is not part of having a desire.

1:20:18 Mark: No, it's more like becoming aware of the impermanence of desire makes you aware of the impermanence of self. And the impermanence of self to a certain extent, I think, determines the impermanence of desire. Although everything is impermanent, but it's an awareness thing that makes sense. It's not as though there's a causal connection between desire and self.

1:20:40 Wes: Well, human desire, right, is obviously different than animal desire. And, and part of that difference is self consciousness and the fact that we don't just desire things, we desire the desire of others. We want to be recognized, we want others to be conscious of us, we desire others desires. And that creates all sorts of problems with avarice and greed and these poisons that animals simply don't have. I think that's generated by the dynamic of self consciousness and the way it's generated from other consciousnesses. And that brings us back to the Rousseau podcast, where all our ailments come from this mutual recognition. In a way, they come from the flip side of compassion, the ability to see that you've been slighted in some way or not recognized.

1:21:23 Seth: All right, I guess the question that we started with was, is all this compatible with naturalism, this version of self? If the kind of discussions we're giving of self are the kind like Rousseau was giving, then sure, that seems compatible with naturalism. You can give a psychological analysis of this. You know, it almost seems like a silly question to ask. Like of course is compatible with naturalism. And I think that's what Flanagan is trying to get with this book, that if you just stop getting hung up on the whole rebirth thing, you see that that is not actually the only source of motivation to be moral, say within this system. And you get rid of a few objectionable notions, which is a lot of what fascinates us Americans, at least. About Buddhism. So it's hard for us to shake those. But you know, he's just shake those off and let me talk about what I want to talk about here. And you'll see that this is very well grounded in the Buddhist tradition historically and it can play nice with the other things on our philosophical plates.

1:22:22 Mark: Yeah, the things on our natural Westerners.

1:22:25 Seth: Yes, yes.

1:22:26 Mark: Which then brings up the question of again, why do you need something to play nice? What is it that you're lacking? I just can't get over that part.

1:22:34 Dylan: Doesn't he implicitly contra. Make a contra distinction to the rest of Western philosophical tradition?

1:22:41 Mark: What, Buddhism?

1:22:42 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, I took him to be making a claim not only that Buddhism is compatible with natural science, but maybe even the stronger claim that naturalism points you in the direction of Buddhism.

1:22:57 Wes: Well, I think though he thinks there's a lot of commonalities between Buddhism and Aristotelianism, but even more with the post Aristotelianism. Yeah, he makes some comments about the large amount of overlap between Western and Eastern philosophy.

1:23:12 Dylan: I mean, he might be wrong about this, but I think that's part of his aim. This falls loosely under the rubric of his ambition of doing cosmopolitan philosophy, comparative philosophy. He's sort of rubbing these different traditions up against one another, sort of picking and choosing. And I think he sees Buddhism as having a lot of resonances with. With Aristotle and the post Aristotelian group that he talks about at the end, but offering potentially solutions to ethical problems that they don't offer.

1:23:46 Mark: Yeah, I'm as sympathetic as anybody to this approach. And again, I'd like to reiterate, I am actually trying to put it into practice. So I am on a daily basis going through these things. But I don't think that. That Buddhism offers solutions to moral quandaries that other things don't. What I think is Flanagan, as a representative of this group of people who are allied with naturalism and are atheists in the sense that they do not want to subscribe to a metaphysics that includes a creator God, are looking for something else that has a certain amount of credibility. And clearly Aristotle and Hume don't do the trick because those are just philosophical theories of virtue or ethics or what have you that were never realized in practice and that Buddhism has a certain amount of credibility. And so if you want to stand up and say, look, I believe in the sciences and I don't believe in a creator God, and you're in some sort of a debate with a bunch of priests and rabbis and Sam Harris and Dawkins. And you don't want to be a douchebag. Like, like Harris is right. You can say, look, I'm a scientist and I'm a Buddhist and it gives you a certain amount of credibility. So I think he's trying to find a way to appropriate Buddhism. Whether it still can be called Buddhism, I don't know. But it's some sort of Buddhist flavored ethical approach.

1:25:13 Seth: I should say that Harris's book, the one that we read, the End of Faith, the last chapter, that is a recommendation. I think he's entirely in favor of exactly what Flanagan is after in this book. That is, forget the metaphysical baggage, like these are some good psychological tricks and you should discipline your mind and try to have these mystical experiences. And you know, as long as you know that there is a perfectly biological, material explanation for all of it, that's all great. And I remember in the other interview on the Secular Buddhist with Flanagan, he mentioned sort of his friends, because he was friends with Dennett, he mentioned. And Harris is probably in that same group. Flanagan basically shares the beliefs of those guys, but just doesn't want to pick a fight about it. Just doesn't see the point. Point in like becoming one of the new atheists, even though he, well, could have.

1:26:01 Speaker: Yeah.

1:26:02 Wes: I doubt though that he's in Harris's camp when it comes to Harris's talk about happiness. I mean, the overall point of this book was to kind of reject an approach that Harris has embraced, which is to say, and by the way, I don't think the goal of the book is to reconcile naturalism and Buddhism. I just think he takes Buddhism and he says, I'm a naturalist. I'm going to take the naturalistic core of this. His larger question is whether you can use neuroscience to evaluate whether some ethical tradition is leading to happiness. Right. And he picks Buddhism because there was press about it, there's neuroscientific studies being done, and because it's a form of life which people actually live. You know, you can't go around measuring Aristotelians to see whether they're happy. That group doesn't really exist. Maybe a few people would call themselves ethical Aristotelians. And then no one is making the claim that, say, Christians are more happy than the general population. Maybe they will make that claim and try and measure it.

1:26:56 Seth: Maybe they'd make the claim that they, we don't have to measure, we don't need.

1:27:00 Wes: But if you really want to say whether neuroscience can be used to say what makes us happy, or so on and so forth. You have to say, so what do you mean exactly by happiness? So that's why he spells out this very specific conception of happiness that comes from Buddhism, because by spelling it out, you can explore the extent to which it's actually measurable. Can we do experiments to tell us whether Buddhism makes us happier? And I think Flanagan's conclusion on that is no, because much of what goes into these theories of happiness is objective. It's not just something in someone's head that's going to have a neural correlate. It's a form of life, and it depends on specific contents and constituents. It's not enough to have a certain subjective feeling, for instance, it has to come from a wholesome source. Let's say it has to be because of some real relationship you have with a human being as opposed to. To a happy pill that you took. There are elements of happiness, or eudaimonia, at least, that are external to a particular individual's mind.

1:28:02 Mark: Yeah. You know, I felt like the first half of the book is just him calling out bad science. And that was like, less interesting to me than the. The project of the second half of the book. But you're absolutely right, Wes. Part of it was that he was sort of personally involved in some of this because of an article that he wrote. Wrote that was picked up by somebody, and they extrapolated from it in ways that he felt was unwarranted. So he had to defend himself. And he got caught up in this kind of. In the interview with us, you know, he mentioned. He said, look, I'm not really even a Buddhist. Like, I'm much more sympathetic to Confucianism. And a lot of that had to do with the fact that he felt that Buddhism doesn't have a great political philosophy and that there's never been a Buddhist state. Buddhists don't know how to rule. Which is a whole separate conversation that I think would be very interesting.

1:28:48 Wes: Yeah, some of it's just about bad science. I mean, there's good science, right. Showing correlations between the left prefrontal cortex activation and a positive mood and all that stuff. But it just doesn't yield the larger conclusions that some people want to make for it. That's one problem. And then the other problem is just more of a problem of principle, which is that even if we did our best science, would we be able to neuroscientifically evaluate how happy Buddhism makes us? And I think he makes a strong argument. Argument against that.

1:29:17 Dylan: And that's exactly the Way in which he is, by example, showing the problems with scientism.

1:29:24 Wes: Yeah, he himself mentioned that thinks, you know, scientism is actually a problem.

1:29:28 Seth: So at least in respect to the naturalism and the way he approaches it. Wes, you are okay with his approach, at least from what he was saying to us.

1:29:36 Wes: Yeah, you can use naturalism very broadly in this way. And then everyone's a naturalist. Most of us who are into philosophy are naturalists to the extent that we reject, reject supernatural explanations. Right. We're not interested in that. So in that broad sense, yeah, that's a fine approach. But then again there's the more specific question of whether empirical science can answer ethical questions and so on and so forth. And that I think is much more a difficult question.

1:30:02 Seth: All right. I just wasn't sure because he speaks approvingly of Pat Churchland's book that we had the episode on which I know you seem to think violated some of your anti scientism concerns and then, and also just the stuff that he reiterated with us about Dennett.

1:30:18 Wes: Yeah, yeah.

1:30:19 Seth: You know, basically thinks Dennett's okay and he's actually not a behaviorist.

1:30:23 Wes: He's fond of some people I, I, I'm not fond of. But no, he loves Dennett. He thinks Dennett is amazing.

1:30:30 Seth: Yeah. I'll have to post something on his comments in Consciousness Reconsidered on how he interprets that. He talks about that very same Dennett article that we talked about.

1:30:39 Dylan: About.

1:30:40 Wes: Yeah. On the Qualia, which I think is,

1:30:42 Seth: seems to think it needs tweak. You know, that he was a little, he didn't say it right, but oh, he. Okay, some of the right idea. All right, next time we're going to do Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Part 1, Sections 1 through 133 and 191 through 360. Please read follow up things about this discussion we just had on the blog. Tell us more things about Buddhism that you think that everybody should know. If you're gonna order stuff off of Amazon, please do it through our website. We have a large link on there that will give us a cut of anything you buy, even if it has nothing to do with philosophy. And it will not cost you anything additional. And we've got a Facebook group, we got Twitter, all that stuff. Thank you all for coming back and talking more about this, guys.

1:31:30 Mark: No, thank you. Good night.

1:31:32 Seth: Good night.

1:31:33 Wes: Good night.

1:31:33 Seth: Good night. Achieve satori, y'.

1:31:36 Wes: All.

1:31:36 Seth: That's really smart.

1:31:38 Speaker: Who wants to love me? Who wants to love me? Who wants to love me I've got a lot of money. Don't turn away from me, please I need you. If you expose yourself then I'll see you. Love's been away so long I was languishing oh languishing. Roll me away till gets under your skin. Who wants to love, love me who be my honey? Who wants to love me? I've got a lot of money. Who wants to care less? Who leads my distress? Who? Who Clean up my mess. Who wants to love me? Come fill this hole in me. Cause I need you. Empty a bowl of me I will feed you. I've been alone so long it was bloodying oh bloody Ying. You could come patch me up with your skin. Who wants to love me? Who be my honey? Here all my money now maybe you love me. Who wants to say yes? Who wants to cheat death? Who make me confess? Who wants to love me? Who wants to love me? Who be my honey? Who wants to love me? I've got a lot of money. Who wants to love me? Who wants to love me? Who wants to love me? Why don't you love me? It's. It.