Ep. 347: Nyaya Sutra Against Buddhist Skeptics (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Hey there. It's pretty much your last chance to sign up for my fall Big Books and Continental Philosophy class. The class starts around two weeks from when I'm posting this and you should already be starting on your Hegel's Phenomenology reading. Go to partiallyexaminedlife.com class to see the current section times and to get the link to enroll. Hey, this is the Partially Examined Life episode 347. We're in the middle of a discussion of the Nyaya Sutra. For more information please see partiallyexaminelife.com I'm Mark Linsenmayer, often mistaken for a post, and I'm here back with Wes and Seth, though Dylan is not here for part two of this discussion.

Dylan will be back, Wes will be gone. We had done Chapter 1 and 2 of the Matthew Dasti Stephen Phillips 2017 presentation of the text with early commentaries last time. So chapter three is called In Defense of the Real and kind of is again reacting to these Buddha Buddhist skeptics defending the knowledge sources that we talked about against the ideas that, well, couldn't we just be completely dreaming maybe that concepts always refer to each other so ultimately there's no foundation for them at all and it's all just a bunch of bullshit. It's all socially constructed, it's all in our minds, it's all an illusion.

So these are the realist defenders against that. And I think their arguments work against if you're going through Descartes meditations and he says, you know, how do we know that there's not a demon? How do we know we're not a brain in a vat? How do we know we're not dreaming? These are seem, I thought despite the difference in geography, pretty applicable. I don't know. Did you think that there was something about their worldview that made these not white land in the same space?

1:48 Seth: No, I thought just in the same way that during the last episode we were talking about them focusing on perception and the senses and inference from perception and so forth. You know, it's very similar to what we saw here, starting with kind of more formally the empiricists, but even before that the questioning of sensation in the form of Descartes skepticism. Yeah, you just wonder how much further philosophy would be advanced if we'd only gotten a hold of these texts sooner in the western tradition. That was me being sarcastic.

2:19 Mark: I mean there is the difference which we talked about last time of when is it appropriate to doubt? So that was the chapter two doubt in philosophical method that we didn't Explicitly discuss. But I think some of the insights of that went into our discussion last time, which is that doubt is not the default position. So you might just say it is. As we've talked about, when Hegel and other folks are dismissive of skepticism, they're doubting the doubt.

2:44 Seth: Right.

2:45 Mark: Is there any reason, unless there's somebody that actually has a stake in the game, to argue against some particular knowledge claim you're making. Right. They disagree with you for some legitimate reason, not just because they're wondering. You've been wrong before, maybe you're wrong now. I don't know if I trust anything that you perceive or that any of us perceives. You know, if you're not just troubled by some sort of foundational thing like that. It's like you have to have standing in court.

3:09 Seth: Yeah.

3:10 Mark: To be able to bring a case.

3:11 Wes: Some of this reminds me a bit of Aristotle. And I know Seth was being facetious, but he made me want to remind myself of when this was written. And there's a wide range. It may have been a bit before the ancient Greeks. I mean, the original. The commentaries are written hundreds of years afterwards.

Right.

And the sutras, I think are anywhere from a few hundred years before to sometime in the ad so it's unclear.

3:37 Mark: Right. I had said 150ad that's the latest.

3:39 Wes: That's the latest, yeah. It is interesting that these, either relativism or phenomenalism, whatever you want to call it, or skepticism, all related. They're ideas that have apparently universal appeal. They're not incredibly original, it turns out. They crop up in various places and then the arguments against them are, I think, a bit more varied. Right. So in Aristotle, Aristotle had what I think is a very, very sophisticated. More sophisticated than this in some ways, but argument against relativism. But here we do see some interesting things that.

And I know I say this all the time now, but I was reminded of Moorean propositions at a certain point because the idea is that skepticism is self limiting and that it makes a lot of assumptions. So I think some of the overall point that's made in this chapter that we read is that the skeptic assumes a lot of things about cognition. That assumes a lot of background knowledge, a lot of background propositions. So it's a rather robust claim to a certain type of view of the world. And once you do that, your skepticism can only go so far. So for instance, one of the examples is that some of this is more straightforwardly about seeing like a pole right at a distance and mistaking it for A person, again, a sort of example that comes up in the Theaetetus, you know, so the idea there is, well, okay, what's your picture of what's going on there?

Well, you have a subject who's looking at an object, and you're presuming there's a subject, you're presuming there's an object. You're presuming that there's some error in cognition. You've got a whole mind independent reality right there. That's the basis for this larger skeptical claim that everything could be an error. But that doesn't make any sense because in order even to conceptualize the possibility of error, you need again, this very robust picture that makes a lot of assumptions about the world.

5:36 Seth: Yeah, I'm so glad you brought that up. I would not have made the connection to the Moorean propositions, Wes, but it's so much like that. It's, you know, you can boil it down to, in order to know that you're mistaken, you must know what non mistakenness looks like. That in itself presupposes not just the whole conceptual framework, but that you've had an experience of, you know, a veridical experience and that you've been able to identify it as veridical. And here's my mark moment. This gets expanded in the chapter on self because they talk about the mechanisms of selfhood that would be required for continuous experience with we already know.

It's kind of hinted at from chapter one in that you have this knowledge source of inference that requires memory, right? You need continuity over time and you need to have experience, experience, experience, so that you can infer from past experience to present or future experience. So, you know, when you think about a psychology that brings all that to bear, you know, it's fairly easy to defeat the skeptical, at least this type of skeptical argument. And when I say this, I mean the brain in a vat Cartesian type skepticism.

6:41 Mark: These arguments are sort of the same form that we usually use against relativism or skepticism. Like, hey, you're claiming that everything is relative, but if everything is relative, then your claim that everything is relative is relative, so it's self undermining, right? You're arguing that we don't know, this could be a dream for all I know. And like, you're using the word dream, so you know that there's a difference between dreams and reality, right? So you're, you're presupposing that in arguing that actually there is no difference, as far as we know, between dreams and reality. I mean? Just that, that formulation. I'm not sure that I like that formulation. You see the issue with that?

7:15 Seth: Tell me just that.

7:16 Mark: When you're saying, ultimately, you know, maybe I'm a butterfly dreaming I'm Zhuangzi or Chuang Tzu butterfly, as far as I know, you're claiming that there might be. Yes, I was given this idea of a difference in the apparent world between dreams and reality, but I'm saying that there's that apparent difference. Is that a fundamental difference? Is that a fundamental difference in the epistemological status, the ontological status of those two states?

7:40 Seth: Let me mirror back to you, because I'm not sure I understand. So you're saying, yeah, we can distinguish between dreams and reality, but is what we use to distinguish sufficient to establish the type of differentiation that we need?

7:52 Mark: Yes, that we think that reality is somehow foundational. It lets us build these whole edifices, you know, that's why, well, dreams. You wake up from dreams. Dreams, things shift around. You know, they're. They're phenomenal things, differences in the character of dreams. But you know that some dreams are more realistic than others. So you could just imagine sort of asymptotically, what if there is a dream that is so realistic that you couldn't tell the difference? Is that not at least conceivable?

8:17 Wes: We're really talking about two things. We're talking about whether there's a mind independent reality and then what the nature of that mind independent reality is. Because if we're in the Matrix, we do have a mind independent reality. It's just the computers or whatever it's being used to. To put us in the simulation. The same thing if we have an evil deceiver, which is why that's Descartes, really his chosen example. If we are going to have be deceived about our reality, including the distinction between dreams and what is real, there has to be a lot of consistency to it. Yeah, it can't look a lot. It can't look on reflection. It can't look like what happens when there's a dream which is like free association and things jumping around and people morphing into other people and all of that kind of. I can't.

9:02 Mark: Shenanigans.

9:03 Wes: The shenanigans. But no, I'm just thinking fluidity. Let's call it fluidity. There has to be something more solid and there have to be public objects. Right. That we can. All right. And even if I'm the only one in the Matrix and none of you guys exist, it's just me. It has to seem as if, right, I have shared public objects with people. There has to be, in other words, a coherence. But it doesn't matter what the mind independent reality is, whether that's matter or an evil demon or the matrix, as long as those things do a good job of giving me consistency and coherence. So I don't know, Mark, if that's the kind of point that you were trying to make or if that's an extension of your point.

9:41 Mark: Right, right. So when you're saying, I know the difference between reality and dreams, you're saying in reality there's real physical objects, not merely. I would almost say independent reality in quotes. In other words, that there's something about our intuition of reality that would not be satisfied if we found that we are in fact in a simulation. That is at least the intuition.

10:04 Wes: Well, simulation is not like a dream, though. That's the thing that I'm.

10:07 Seth: Yeah.

10:08 Wes: The basis of the simulation, if it's a big computer, as opposed to matter. Given how mysterious the world is to us, I'm not even sure that makes such a big difference. Is it code underneath all that quantum stuff? Or is it an evil deceiver? Or it's so inscrutable and mysterious in a way, it doesn't matter what you say the mind independent reality is, as long as it's doing the job of consistency. Now, dreams, we know dreams can't do that. So if we are comparing all of reality to a dream, we can only be doing that by a rough analogy. And it's much better to use an evil deceiver example.

So then the question is, okay, well, does this type of argument work against the evil deceiver example? I'm not sure if we want to be skeptics. We make all sorts of background assumptions, not just about the world, but how about our own minds? And this is a point that Hegel makes. We act like, wow, we know a hell of a lot about our own minds. We got categories, we got this, we got that. Why are you. This is the Hegelian response. Why are you so confident that you know all of that crap but nothing about the world? In a way it should be. The common sense says it's the reverse.

I don't know a lot about this mysterious thing about the mind, but I do know I'm drinking a cup of

11:21 Seth: water right now on page 66. This is Vatsyayana's response. On your view. No one has resources to deny the reality of dream objects. So let's just call them simulation objects, right? That's Wes by comparison with objects of waking experience. If dream objects do not exist because they are not experienced upon awakening, then those very objects we find in waking life must exist as they are in fact experienced. So it sounds like Wes, taking your matrix example where the simulation does the trick and we're not talking about dreaming and the simulation is the waking experience that you experience.

We would be back to that just in the last couple episodes when we were looking at the reliabilism stuff they were talking about. If we are in a simulation, it's as if we have knowledge or something like that. I don't remember. But that's the situation we would be in. And you're right, that broader point I think or argument would fail because they're basing the dependence on a veridical experience of the quote unquote real world. And if that itself is mistaken, if it's an evil demon situation, then although you might say as long as it's consistent and complete and has knowledge sources from which you have reliable pers.

You know, I don't know as long as the mechanisms you might think that you're perceiving, but it's actually not perception. It's a different kind of tickling of your brain neurons. But as long as it's done in the appropriate way that it counts as a knowledge source. I don't know. But there's an interesting follow on argument to that which may or may not be interesting here in the next things he says all right, so if you accept that there are conceptions of objects in a. Let's call it a mistaken state. He says dream state, but a mistaken state and you accept that they're conceptions of objects in a non mistaken state.

You have to explain why they're not at least within the categories. They're not identical. So they say okay, you have dreams that are anxiety dreams, you have dreams that are wish fulfillment dreams, you have joyful, you have emotions, you experience emotional content when you're dreaming, right? And he says how is it you have to explain the variety for all those different things? And the argument is that that variety comes from your actual experience of all of those things in real life. So that's another. This is an anti skeptical argument for the dream versus waking.

My question is would that be applicable in that evil demon state or are we back to the same place?

13:51 Wes: Let me restate this again. I don't think the dream is the strongest example here because dreams don't have the consistency and coherence and if all of reality is a dream, then it's a weirdly consistent and coherent dream within which our dream distinction arises. Our ordinary distinction between ordinary dreams and waking reality would have to arise within this supposed dream reality. So it's a really rough analogy. It's really trying to say, I think something more like the evil demon example. When we get to the evil demon example, I think the skeptics ultimate argument has to be that we're confusing two things here.

Do we want mind independent reality or do we need a certain sort of mind independent reality? In some sense? The skeptic is concerned if it is a brain in the vat, for instance, or if it is the Matrix. The skeptic is concerned about the fact, well, I'm having, I know I'm having this experience because light is bouncing off my eye and there's a naturalistic, materialistic explanation of why that's happening. And I don't like the explanation of that. I'm hooked into a computer or something like that. My point is that it actually doesn't really matter what the mind independent reality is, because when we talk about the light on the eye and all that stuff that is already happening at the phenomenal level, which is reducible, as we know, to something else, a buzzing confusion of subatomic particles, whatever you want to call it, and that might be reducible further.

In other words, the structure of reality is already so layered and is already so inscrutable at the bottom layer that it doesn't matter if you call the very bottom layer a computer or a evil demon or whatever it is, as long as it performs its function of providing a mind independent that you and I can share. And it's not just me solipsistically coming up with it. And then that reality, that mind independent reality sometimes shows up in the seams of the phenomenal world. It's not like the phenomenal world is just divorced from the underlying mind independent reality.

That reality shows up in the structure of the phenomena. I think this is another Hegelian point. We have immediate access to the thing in itself as structure, as form, by way of the phenomena. All right, so I feel like I'm getting us way off track. But I just want to say that I do think it helps us understand these arguments a little bit. Because the claim here, what they're trying to get at here, is that we need these independent real causes. There has to be some causal picture and all that is just to say that there's some mind independent reality that has a causal relation to the phenomena as we experience them.

16:27 Mark: I think by introducing cause in there, you might have introduced something that determines a particular kind of mind. Independent realities. You were just putting it so in a computer simulation, you know, there's a simulation of my eye and there's a simulation of the object that I'm looking at and there's a simulation of light waves, but not. It doesn't necessarily. At least if you are looking at right now at your computer screen and you know, there's a thing. Time one is a. You're watching a graphic. It looks like event on the screen at time one causes the event on the screen at time two, but it doesn't. They're both caused by the data that is stored that is first displaying what it says to store it display@time1. So they have a common cause. There is a causal link somehow.

17:12 Wes: Yeah, the computer is like Malebranche's God. The stuff that's happening, the forces are not in the things. There's a God making him look like that.

17:21 Mark: Yeah, exactly. So I mean, I guess it's still the fact that I'm looking at the monitor. Well then the normal causal stuff is happening between me and the monitor. And maybe that's what we're doing thinking is. Is going on between the subject. It seems like there's a difference between a Matrix scenario where you have an independent creature that could awake from the Matrix and there would be therefore a difference between. Oh, well, there was consistent logical consistency and object permanence and all this stuff in the Matrix. But now that I'm awake, I see that that was all bullshit. That was all, you know, the same issue that I was just expressing of what I'm seeing on the screen now.

18:00 Wes: Well, it just means you've gone from one world to another. You've traveled between worlds.

18:05 Mark: Okay. Okay. I mean, that's a very novel interpretation of what's happening in the Matrix where generally it is not just taken. Oh, it's. They're just different realities. No, no, you. You woke up to the real reality and it's shitty. It's, you know that they're. They're being persecuted by robots underground, you know.

18:21 Wes: So if you. Have you lived your entire life so far is everything that's happened in your life and someone woke you up and said, oh, you've been inside the Matrix, but so has your wife and everyone else. We were all in the Matrix together. Would you not want to say that that was just a different world that we were in together? Would you say that you can't say it didn't exist. You can't say you didn't have those relationships that you didn't do the things you did.

18:44 Mark: I mean, maybe that's what happens when we die, that we're, we wake up,

18:50 Wes: says everyone have their joints ready to light up. Well, you're talking about causality and I think that's important because yeah, the causal picture looks different if we're plugged into the Matrix.

19:03 Mark: So there's a difference between if you're a character in the Matrix like that versus a simulated person. Right? So you are just a piece of code. There's no way that the piece of code is going to wake up. Or if you say, you know, you, you have one of these sci fi scenarios where I'm now addressing like I'm their God, the pieces of code and saying, hey, you know what, you're in a simul simulation. And then maybe I could rig something so that I could create a robot in, in my real world and have them put their soul so their code into that and then they could gaze upon the real world for the first time for that person.

I don't think they would say I'm waking up now. That does seem like more of a. Well, I'm in my world, the simulated world. And now you have moved me into a different way of experiencing a different part of reality. So that seems more directly symmetrical than the, the Matrix example.

19:54 Seth: Yeah, I mean, at a certain point I just get fatigued with these simulation hypotheses or whatever. But I do think there's something interesting about this text. They do something interesting with causality that you don't see or that I don't know of an analogy of in the Western tradition, which is we know that causality is baked into their epistemological process. It's important for them, for the text anyway, to talk about causality from the perspective of perception. And if you think about causality from the perspective of perceiving and absorbing, it's strongly embedded in their notion of investigation.

So they keep talking about cognition of particulars or cognition of the world. And they're, you know, they keep saying, because you can investigate, because you can go and you can actually determine the source, like what caused what, or you can work down the chain or you can distinguish between things, right? And the, the very fact that causality is required in some sense to distinguish between things that you might be mistaking. Right? So you see in the distance something, you can't tell if it's a person or a post. The reason you can't tell. That is, you're noticing the similarities, but you don't have sufficient perception and cognition of the differences to be able to determine which thing it is.

So you walk closer, right? You get close enough to where, ah, now I have access to the difference that I need in order to be able to distinguish where I was only seeing similarities. And that difference has a causal element. There's something that causes the experience that you have. And you have an organ of sense, whether it's sight or sound or taste or whatever it is that you use to make the distinction. And you have, you know, that mind capable of cognizing that and then using memory to refer back to. And I don't wonder if there's a particularly in the pragmatic context that we established last time for this particular text, if there's a way to parlay that into just kind of a broad sweep, almost like an Occam type argument.

Like it's because we can figure out so much about the world and how it works. Hypothesizing that there's a deceiver or simulation or something that's causing all this in this excruciating detail and complexity is just ridiculous.

22:17 Wes: I'll stop hitting this point, I promise again after this. I don't think it's so ridiculous because the causal picture that we have is dramatically complicated by what I've called these layers of reality between there which there are relations of emergence or supervenience. So we can talk about the causal picture at this level and say Wes is walking across the room and describe the foot, motion of the foot and pushing off of the floor and all of that stuff. But if we drill down to the ultimate layer of particles and fields, the causal picture looks much different.

There is no room for Wes down there or feet. It's just particles interacting causally with each other. Those are the absolute, those are the ultimate entities, and those are the things that actually have causal relations with each other. And then the rest of it is the matrix. The world of phenomena can always be treated as the matrix relative to some lower level reality. Which is what an appeal to an evil deceiver highlights. We don't get rid of these skeptical problems by saying, oh, it's silly to posit an evil deceiver because it's built into the nature of scientific explanation.

That's why we get, we're so stuck here epistemologically throughout history. It's a bug that comes with scientific explanation because scientific explanation involves these, the relationship between these different layers which are a Lot like a deceiver matrix relation. So I think what happens in a text like this is important because what it's pointing to is that there is a causal order within the realm of phenomena that must point to some causal order outside of that. And that is our thing in itself. We do get access to this external reality.

We can't deny that. Maybe we should get more into the specific. Yeah, Seth, you were trying to get us more into the specific content of this, which I feel like I'm. I'm just taking us away from.

24:07 Seth: But no, no, no, I don't think so. I. I think it's really interesting and that's, you know, I'm enjoying this text precisely because it's different from the way we normally think about these things. But you're right. We are here trying to say, oh, did this anticipate Gettier's objection by 2,000 years or that kind of thing? Which is probably not very productive.

24:27 Mark: Well, can I just make the connection? So the thing you were referring to in the gettier was a helpful demon. So it is one that systematically distorts causal processes so that when you think this is going to be my lucky day, the helpful demon hears you and makes things lucky. So that is. Yes, it's mind independent. The demon is operating, but it is not operating. Well, I was gonna say the mind is not operating in a law like way, but actually we're just positing that there are different laws that you actually, by thinking positive thoughts can be influencing things. But that's of course.

25:02 Wes: Yeah, this is one of the complications.

25:04 Mark: Yeah. What makes the deceiver a deceiver is not that they just. I could see, you know, in a matrix sort of film, like when the mastermind gets confronted and say, I'm not an evil deceiver, I'm just a constructor. I've built this world for you. You know, so that if it's built according to strict laws and reg, then you could just say, well, okay, you're the God of this world. You're not an evil deceiver because there's no deceiving being involved like you. Again, you'd have to have, as these Nyayas would say, that the difference between you have to have not been deceived at some point.

25:35 Seth: Yeah, no, ultimately what it comes down to is that what you think the cause of your perception or cognition is has to not be the cause it had. You have. In other words, and as long as you've gone through the process of doing all the appropriate ways to get to the knowledge source. Like, you know, in other words, you think there's a thing in itself out there that's causing this experience, but in fact it's not the thing in itself, it's something else or, you know, whatever. But anyway, we can leave that aside for now. I want to touch on the Getty example or Gettier.

26:06 Mark: Yes, we did determine post that he was an American and he went by Gettier.

26:09 Seth: Was it like the Will Ferrell hot tub thing? Edmund, get here. You know, anyway, in that case, all the examples are examples from. One of the things that is interesting about that is from a Nyaya perspective, those would be errors of inference. Because all the examples are you think Jones is in New York or you think blah dee blah, whatever. And it just so happens that you thought Jones was in New York because he told you he was going, but then his wife got sick and he wasn't going to go. And you know, or, and then there's another Jones, whatever the example is. But the point is those examples are not mistaken perceptions. They're all mistaken inferences from testimony or something else. Right.

26:56 Mark: I mean, the barn one was weird because like I'm seeing a real barn, but if I knew that I was in barn country where 90% of the barns are fake barns.

27:04 Seth: You're right. The barn one. If there were 500 fake barns and one real barn and you just happened to look at the real barn and say I'm seeing a barn. Yes. And that when they could explain very simply to say you're seeing the similarity but you're not seeing the difference. And so you have an error in

27:19 Mark: perception and that perception is not of the barn. Like you are right about seeing the barn, but your perception. Well, so maybe this is inference. Your, your perception of the overall situation is what's wrong. Right. You're. You're correctly perceiving this barn, but you think you're seeing it in normal epistemic circumstances when in fact you're seeing it in. In funland.

27:37 Wes: Ah.

27:38 Mark: Where almost everything else is an illusion.

27:40 Seth: Well, that's an interesting one. No, because I guess the assumption from a Nyaya Sutra perspective would be if you saw a fake barn and you sufficiently investigated it, then you would be able to see the difference. And then when you saw the real barn, you'd actually know that it was real versus fake or projection or whatever.

27:55 Mark: Yep.

27:56 Seth: Yeah. So is that normal versus abnormal circumstances or it's just having the appropriate level of information, comparative information? I don't know. It's a real barn because I haven't Seen enough fake barns.

28:07 Mark: Right. I think in Nyaya circumstances, like you would be. Until it is brought to your attention that there's something weird with the circumstances, you'd be very, you know, that's my knowledge source perception. But then somebody comes along and says, you know, I also live around here, and I know that they're mostly fake barns. I'm going to challenge you. And then you have to walk up to the barn and feel it and do the stuff to confirm. And it would still be an accurate perception. It's just you didn't know that further investigation was necessary. You thought a mere first unreflective perception was sufficient to establish it. But actually the further investigation was necessary. Certification is the word.

28:45 Wes: Mm.

28:45 Mark: I feel like I just pulled you off of what you were saying, though, with that whole example inference. You were saying they're mostly inference.

28:52 Seth: Well, the examples from what we were talking about in that epistemological. They're primarily inferential. The Nyaya Sutra approach to addressing those particular cases would have to be something like the way that inferential knowledge ultimately boils down in some way to perceptual knowledge. Now, mind you, when they say testimony in this text, they're not talking about eyewitness testimony. They're talking about, like, somebody who knows about a subject, like a scientist who teaches you about astronomy.

29:21 Mark: I mean, it's. Either way, they're not. There wasn't enough detail in the testimony chapter to tell us.

29:26 Seth: Right. You know, so the idea would be that, I think from a Nyaya Sutra perspective, interestingly, it would put us on the same path. They would not approach it the same way. Where from a Western perspective, they're trying to come up with a set of sufficient criteria that can cover every case. Right. Like, oh, if this, and if that, then knowledge, you know, in the Nyaya Sutra, they would say, okay, well, how certain is your knowledge that X and how well does it accord with what you know? And anything that you get from testimony. Right. Is automatically going to, to some extent, be suspect until you verify, you know, you got to be from Missouri.

I don't know what the Indian equivalent of Missouri is, but, you know, Missouri is the show me state. You heard that before? Sure, yeah. Okay. Yeah, you got to be from Hyderabad. But anyway, the point being that the resolution of the epistemological challenges that we read about during the Gettier episode are ultimately not going to come down to definitions. They're going to come down to applying the principles of, you know, the four sources of knowledge and the. The Investigation and cognition. Have you or have you not sufficiently done that?

That's kind of how it's ultimately going to get resolved. And somebody's going to say, oh, well, Jones is in New York, or I have a, you know, coins in my pocket. The coins in the pocket is easy to verify. The Jones of New York, you heard from testimony. I could just challenge and say, you're never justified until you are standing there with coins in your pocket and seeing Jones in New York.

30:57 Wes: Shall we bring it back from these contemporary examples and just work through some of these?

31:02 Mark: Let's make sure. Yeah. That we get through the actual arguments.

31:05 Wes: I thought the way it begins is really interesting because it really is talking about emergence or supervenience. That's the very first sutra here where you have an objector saying, but when we examine things closely through cognition, we do not find true objects, just as we do not find a cloth when we distinguish the threads. So this is the idea that we have. In the realm of phenomena, things appear a way that's not their reality when you drill down. So whether it's threads in the cloth or whether it's atoms. So Vatsyayana and Uddyotakara are going to elaborate on this opponent's objection and say, we do not find real objects, the cloth.

The cognition of the cloth is in error. Same thing with anything, all the way down to atoms. That means the cognitions of such things as cows and pots are errors in the same way, because really what they are are atoms, and their appearances to us are deceiving. This is why I said that this emergence picture, the scientific picture, is very much akin to a matrix problem or an evil demon problem, the relationship between those two layers.

32:10 Mark: So the objector is a middle school science teacher who, like, I'm gonna blow your mind, kids. You think that it's. Everything is solid around you. It's actually atoms in mostly empty space. And you should respond to that, teacher. Yeah, but it's also the case that this is a solid table. That.

32:27 Wes: Yeah, but that doesn't change the mysteriousness of the relationship of emergence. It doesn't. Which I don't think is something we. We understand that. I think it's a core problem. And like classic philosophical problem, like free will, for instance, is an emergence problem, I think arguably, or various other problems. But. All right, let's look at the response. This is not a reason since it is self defeating. Okay, why is it self defeating?

32:51 Mark: Vatsyayana says, when we closely exam things, it is not that we fail to find any truth about them. Conversely, if we fail to find any truth about any of them, we have not examined them closely. The sutra maker has already rejected the view that we fail to find any truth about anything when we examine things closely. When he said, and the unwanted consequence of such part whole analysis is that in that way all these things would dissolve. Which is not a very clear statement.

33:16 Wes: When we perform this part whole analysis or this emergent phenomenal layer and compare that to an underlying layer, we are giving a causal picture and it is an orderly causal picture. Right. We can give scientific theories about this stuff, and that's significant. I think that's the whole offshot of the answer that we're going to get. It's significant and indicative once again of a mind independent reality that we can even give causal explanations about the relationship between whole and parts or between the two layers.

33:48 Seth: Yeah, I think the argument's actually even simpler than that because he's saying it's self defeating, but it's. There's like an error. So the example is you have a piece of cloth and you take it thread by thread, you break it down into its components parts and then you go, look, no cloth. Therefore there never was any cloth. And anything that's made up of parts like this doesn't exist because you can disassemble it.

34:08 Wes: They were just saying, look at it closely, Seth, you don't have to destroy the cloth. Sorry.

34:12 Seth: Okay, look at it closely. You see the thread. So you see it's not actually thin. And what he's saying is turn that perception around. Instead of not seeing the cloth, why don't you positively see the actual thread? In fact, you are seeing something, you're seeing the thread, and that's a veridical experience. And then like you said, Wes, then you can bring in the apparatus of how it causally comes to become a piece of cloth. But he's basically saying your argument is by looking closely, you lose sight of the bigger picture. But that doesn't mean you don't see nothing, you don't see anything. I mean, it means you're seeing something different. In fact, you're seeing a part of a whole.

34:49 Wes: Yeah, the whole is systematically related to its parts. The phenomena are systematically related to their underlying causes. Which is a lot different than saying everything's a dream. Saying we have phenomena that are systematically related causally to something underneath them is an entirely different picture than the skeptics picture.

35:07 Mark: I guess I thought we'd covered this last time just by saying, making the point that the whole inheres in the parts which is a weird use of inhere from our perspective. But I guess it's.

35:16 Wes: Did we get a. The anti skeptical implications or the. I mean it creates an error, it creates a reason for skepticism and then we have to wriggle out of that the second. Okay, so what's the answer? Continued.

35:29 Seth: Well, the answer to continued talks about substances and part whole relation, which actually comes up in, I think it's the next chapter, so you may want to not go too deep into this. Spoiler alert.

35:40 Wes: So objects are experienced as unified because a hole in here is in its parts.

35:44 Seth: Okay, yeah, you can go to the next one. 4, 2, 29.

35:47 Wes: Okay. We find out the truth about things by examining them closely through cognition. All right, so we look at the individual threads. It's of a certain character, right?

35:56 Seth: All sciences, all activities and all the conventional speech and practices of all living beings depend on the findings of knowledge sources after they've been investigated through cognition, we find that things cannot be explained. So this is a broader response which is just simply that a broad based claim that nothing in our experience exists just collapses under the weight of what actual lived experience is actually life for human beings.

36:21 Wes: Well, Vatsyayana says it's self refuting. Right. So yeah, if the thesis nothing exists were supported by a knowledge source, then the knowledge source would contradict the claim nothing exists.

36:33 Seth: Correct.

36:33 Wes: So in other words, if we want to make an argument, this is similar to the Aristotelian point or the point of the Theaetetus, you know, that Mark, as Mark said about the self undermining nature of relativism. But if you want to make an argument to say that everything is error or nothing exists or it's all in the mind and then you have to draw an evidence. And the moment you draw on evidence, you draw on a mind independent reality. You draw on something which goes above and beyond that transcends the nothing that you are trying to prove. To prove nothing, you need something.

37:09 Seth: Yeah.

37:09 Mark: So in this one we see, I think our editors want to make it clear that there's two distinct arguments. The first one we made last time, which is just, well, if you didn't use knowledge sources, you know, just everything would collapse. In other words, our practices rely on this. So it's the pragmatic argument, but that's not going to be very satisfying. Right. A Cartesian somebody engaging in the skeptical enterprise does not deny that for practical purposes we assume these things. But they want to know are we really correct in assuming things?

Maybe we're just operating on what in Indian philosophy They call there, or Chinese philosophy, they call conventional reality as opposed to ultimate reality, real reality, something like that. But that's a different argument, according to our editors, than this one that you've been outlining. It's very close to it to say that there is a practical contradiction, that you are actually relying on a knowledge source to make this at the same time that the conclusion would undermine all knowledge sources.

38:09 Wes: Right. And that's where I was, you know, getting at the Moorean propositions. And yeah, we need a lot of background claims to make the skeptical argument. We need to assume a lot. Doubt the doubt. We need a T shirt that says, why not doubt the doubt?

38:21 Seth: Yeah, There is also the translators, you know, prepped us, right. That their primary opponents here, first of all, they're, they're proposing a realist metaphysics. And so it makes sense that the epistemological approach they take would support that. But the difference is here that their primary opponent, right, they point out, are primarily Buddhists. And the Buddhist anti realist position. Like, I'm trying to think why the Buddhists put forth, like, have we done enough Buddhism to be able to understand, like, why the Buddhists would have an anti realist position.

38:55 Mark: And sure, suffering gives rise to desire. And you want to show that that desire is baseless, that the things that are making you suffer are all illusory. Your body itself is illusory. And somehow you want to. The only way to escape suffering is to see clearly that those are illusory and to transcend the whole thing. So there's a practical for them, the pragmatics, is that you don't want to believe this crap because that is actually not working out for you.

39:23 Seth: Given that, we'd have to understand some more sophistication in that. You know how it is every time you read one side of an argument, you think, are they straw manning it? And that sort of thing. But it comes out in the chapters on substance and self and all that stuff, like all of this stuff will add up to. Yeah, we have a continuous actual real self that has properties and there are composite substances, that sort of thing, as you can anticipate. All right, let's get back to it.

39:50 Mark: Well, we're very close to the end of the time that we had allotted here. And I know we haven't gone through most of these arguments in detail. I think we've gotten at all of them in outline, that there's this practical contradiction of some sort. So for instance, one of them is, even if you're dreaming of Something then the elements in your dream, right? You're dreaming of sheep. Well, I think we sort of said and you must have experienced sheep or something like it in real life, you know, so that any illusory state depends on some prior veridical state.

We've gotten at the idea that we assume that memory works in some way, right? The fact that you can misremember something means that you need to be able to contrast that with a correct memory. Where this gets really tricky. And I don't know if either of you looked at this article that I pointed you at by Matthew Dasti, our editor, one of our editors. Parasitism and disjunctivism in Nyaya epistemology. Either of you look at that. I'll link folks to it. It's just, it's the first thing in the bibliography that they have at the end of this chapter.

So this idea of disjunctivism I think is really important. We've used that word before. I was looking through our old notes in like philosophy of mind, like consciousness is either what it is in us or what it is in robots. But those can be different. You know, this is a completely different kind of disjunctivism. It's just to say that the whole reason that we might become phenomenalists, right? The whole reason that we would reject John Searles when we had him on he said no, we actually just perceive the thing directly. That's what the eyes are saying, like we are causally connected to the thing.

We don't perceive a Cartesian theater. We don't perceive image. The reason that we think that is because when we have an illusion, it seems like it's the same phenomenal information. So I'm experiencing an actual puddle of water that's in the distance. I have an image that I'm contemplating that looks like puddle of water. I'm perceiving a mirage. There's no real puddle of water. But I also have identically a picture of a puddle. Dasti calls this an alethically neutral subjective experience and alethic just has to do with truth. So in other words, we're not perceiving directly the puddle, even in the veridical case, according to a Cartesian Lockean version of perception.

And the disjunctivist goes with Searle and says, yes, actually the veridical perception and illusory perception are fundamentally different things. So I really am. When I see the real puddle of water over there, there's light bouncing off the puddle, coming to my eyes. I'm physically connected to the puddle. But in the other case, I'm not. It merely looks. I'm having an experience that to me might be phenomenally identical to when I see the puddle. But in that case, I am just perceiving an image.

42:20 Wes: This is an externalist account, it sounds like. Right, yeah.

42:23 Seth: Yep.

42:23 Wes: All of this is kind of bottlenecked through inputs into our brain, which ultimately are just electrochemical. For the brain, there's no puddle of water. It was just little. Right. It goes into the eyes and then turns into electrical pulses, and then you've got brain activity. And so I think that's the way the skeptic would ultimately view it, is that there's somehow this radical disjunction between the thing in itself and then things as they appear to us. And then the. The answer, Mark just outlined as well, there's a real causal connection to a thing in one case, and then there's a. The causal connection is to the Matrix, or whatever you want to call it in the other case. And those are. Those are legitimately different. Yeah.

43:05 Mark: And we can explain. When we see a mirage, we can explain what optically has gone wrong and why we get that. So there is a real thing. It's just not what we thought it was.

43:15 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think the larger point to be made is about global versus local error. And once you globalize error, you lose the distinction between what's real and what's not real. Because when we think about dreams and reality, we have a way to distinguish those two things. If we say everything is a dream, then in the dream, that's everything. We still have a way to distinguish dream called Dream Prime. Now, what we normally call dreams from our waking reality, when we. And the skeptic wants to say, well, these are two forms of dreaming, the answer is to say, well, what you're talking about is not dreaming.

It doesn't look like dreaming. There's no way to distinguish it from the not dreaming. Right. You're using an analogy that doesn't quite work because, again, we have. There's a systematic order to reality, whatever you want to say, the underlying cause is that allows us to make distinctions between error and veridicality, between dreaming and not dreaming. All those distinctions very successfully arise within experience. So to reduce everything to that fails to take account of that.

44:19 Mark: Seth, do you have any sort of final thoughts for this part before we come back together to talk about the metaphysics next week?

44:25 Seth: I still find the structure of this particular translation a little bit disjointed and confusing, but I Do very much like reading it. I'm very much enjoying it. So much so I thought about. I want to look at the original actual text so I can understand what. What it actually looks like.

44:39 Mark: Yeah, it's really long. So we really get a sense of like what Gautama's actual style is because it goes. This is just like a Talmudic. I think you made that comparison last time we read this. Zooming.

44:51 Seth: Yeah. Yeah. In any given chapter, there's like four to seven lines from the original sutra. They fill the 15 or 20 pages with commentary. So anyway, I just think it's refreshing. I'm learning something new about the approach. And, you know, I'm continually impressed, you know, that they've had this level of sophistication for so long and it just seems like we should be more aware of it. But as far as cashing out specifically about defense of the real or whatever, in a certain sense, I'm with Wes on Just by virtue of the first two chapters, you're kind of already in the Moorean territory to some extent.

I think, you know, we talked about this in chapter one, that it sort of already assumes that you can have knowledge. It's just a question of how you get it. And that kind of in some sense excludes. It certainly excludes the local, you know, if not the global. It's just. The global to me, is the one that has no. Just has no power. It's not convincing.

45:43 Mark: Well, yeah, the structure of this text. This is why I recommended that Dasti article. Because he just lays them out in order here, you know, that he has. And they're very subtly different. Just in a summary. Epistemic parasitism, causal parasitism. Parasitism of content or meaning. Argument from causal networks, argument from probative force, argument from language. The differences between those are all very narrow, but they. Parasitism. Right. Parasite that is error is parasitic on veridicality. Right. It would not make any sense for you to be making this skeptical. Objection. Unless you already assumed the knowledge processes, you know, unless you were coming from the same place as me, your interlocutor, assuming a realist causal system. So we'll get into that next time.

46:27 Seth: Yeah. Well, wait a second. Just. Sorry. You just made me think about something. What is interesting about that is you just said falsehood is parasitic untruth or falsity is parasitic untruth. I think somebody could object and say, well, you can't have any notion of what's true without understanding what's false either. I don't I don't think the relationship is parasitic. But the question is, then how would that work? Like, how would you know one from the other one answer is to look at that causal mechanism thing. But I think the pragmatic aspect of the text, right, people are always acting.

That's something they said in the first couple chapters. Ultimately, people use information to do things and that's how they figure out whether it's true or false is, you know, like, oh, I went to buy. I thought I had money in my pocket. I went to buy something and I didn't. Okay, so I know that I was wrong. Right. Like, you know, there's a. There's a practical upshot. There's a pragmatic aspect of truth functioning in the system that allows you to get to that. Sorry, you just made me think of that at the end. There's my closing.

47:23 Mark: Yep. No, I think we referred to that in the Zhuangzi. Even that. That the idea. The Nyayas are saying that you have to normally have truth and then error is the sort of exceptional case. But Buddhists following the. The Taoists are going to say no. Truth and falsity go hand in hand. They're mutually dependent on each other. And the fact that there is no foundation underneath both of them or something means that it's all ultimately illusory and two sides of the same coin and whatever. So I'm not sure how to adjudicate that difference. I'm sure we'll read something else that we can talk about this more in the future.

Maybe next chapter. If. If we think truth is a. In fact a metaphysical and not epistemological notion as camp in the Golden. All right, we're wrapping this up. Come back for part two. It's actually a different conversation on different day. And we'll deal specifically with Buddhist skepticism about self. So chapter four of this book, if you are a Partially Examined Life supporter, that will be in your feed now or soon. Although if you support us through Apple, that'll be up next week for the wider public. Yes, it'll be up next week, but you don't have to wait.

You can go to partselexaminlife.com support and sign up.

48:39 Seth: Bye.

48:40 Wes: Thanks.

Bye.

48:41 Mark: Bye.