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

0:07 Mark: You are listening to the Partially examined life, episode 347, part two, recorded on a completely different day than part one with not quite the same group of people. We're going to talk more about the Nyaya Sutra. We read chapter four on self this time. This is Mark Linsenmayer existing only for an instant but leaving traces for eternity.

0:32 Unknown speaker: This is Seth Paskin experiencing whatever it is that Mark is experiencing in Austin, Texas.

0:39 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey capable of cognizing anything in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:43 Mark: All right, let's get down to it. It's the self. We get to apply the methodological things from chapters one and two. Two is more about methodology, and we didn't really talk about two. So maybe we can bring in, I don't know, at least we see the tarka in action, which I mentioned before.

0:57 Unknown speaker: So this is at least argument by elimination.

1:00 Mark: Yes. So when something is actually being challenged, right. We assume epistemologically that if something seems to be supported by one of the knowledge sources, then we can just slot it in as that's knowledge, baby. And we can build our towering edifice of science on that. But as soon as somebody actually has a live issue with what we're arguing about, then we have to bring in some sort of more sophisticated argumentation and not just rely on the first knowledge source. So as Seth was just saying. Okay, well, we got two options now. Mostly it's just going to be, I want to eliminate the other one.

I want to show that it's garbage, and then mine that's still remaining on its original evidence persists there. Or if you tried to knock down mine with some argument, then I knocked down your argument. So it doesn't in fact knock down mine. Et cetera, hypothetical reasoning. I'm quoting something here. Such arguments are not knowledge in themselves, knowledge generators, but they can swing the balance concerning what it is rational to believe. So we wanted to apply this method to discussions of self, which of course is a main thing we've talked about that the Buddhists, that these Nyaya.

Nyayas. I keep trying to say that word. Right. The Nyaya philosophers were arguing against these Indian Buddhists, who of course were famously said, there's no self. Somebody want to remind us we get nothing in their voices. We get some paraphrases, but from what we remember from past episodes, what is this no self thing about as far as it actually sunk into our heads?

2:28 Unknown speaker: There's a couple of different ways to tackle it, but primarily it's the idea that all you can actually gather from your own experience of selfhood or consciousness is that there's a continuing stream of experiences that happen. But the claim, and there's probably an argument behind it, but the claim is that you can't refer those back to a single unchanging, fixed subject in which these experiences adhere to. So ultimately the self is just more like an Event, a disjointed event of stream of experiences. That would be one way.

3:01 Dylan: And I've always connected it to. And it's probably not. This isn't surely not historically accurate, but I've connected it to the same line of thinking that you get with noticing change and how all kinds of things are changing. And you apply it to that. You might in Heraclitus or something like that, and you apply it to the existence of a person and how your body's changing, the constant flow and flux of it. And you go down, effectively, a kind of skeptical road based upon the impermanence and the sort of underlying notion of what is permanent. Something that's eternal is the only real kind of thing. So once you start with something that's eternal and unchanging as being the presumptive conditions for a real thing, then whatever the self is ends up being something that isn't a real thing but is, as Seth denoted, an event. A confluence of some sort, but is ephemeral in some deep way.

3:58 Mark: Yeah, and this is going to get us into some kind of thorny process philosophy territory, just in that, okay, if something is an event. In fact, I was just reviewing Henri Bergson, who was saying, this is the big mistake of Western philosophy, is that we are like Parmenides, like Plato, looking for things that exist over time. But no, it's the flow, it's the flux. I can intuitively, when I grasp what is my mind, then underlyingly, it is this flow. So what is that flow? Is it a sequence of still images sort of flashing by? As Hume would say, you have appearance at time.

A, of self, appearance at time, B, of self, appearance of time. Or rather, you know, you have appearance of. I'm thinking this thought now, I'm thinking this thought now I'm thinking that thought. And it seems like something must be having the thoughts to put them together. Hume says we're not justified in thinking that, but Bergson just wanted to say no, actually, we don't get these different snapshots. The flow, the event is actually a thing. But event sounds like something that happens once, like for an instant. It sounds like one of the snapshots.

But we're talking about an event is over time. So what is that metaphysical?

5:02 Dylan: An event with a time dependence. Yeah, right. So if I go mathematical, I want to put little brackets with T in there. You're right, Mark, to call out that. There's something weird about calling that an event because you would normally think of an event as being something that's instantaneous in time. Or fixed in time. But here you're right, you're talking about an event as being a sequence of co joined things. So if you take that film example, the snapshot example, and Bergson is saying, well, it's not that the thing is made up artificially of the real moments, it's that the moments are artificially sampling the real thing.

5:41 Mark: Yeah. So we can see whether these guys have any conception of this way of approaching it. I felt like things were getting on when the Buddhist is responding well, it's actually just a bunch of events connected by causality. I'm like, well, that chain, isn't that the self? Can't the self just be the thing? But the Nyayas do, I think, are like Plato. They do want to say that there is a personal soul that exists over time, that actually existed before our birth and after our death. So this is a very familiar sort of view. And they're arguing not only against the Buddhist notion of anatman.

So that's no self. So an Atman would be the self. Well, yes, there is an Atman, but also, I didn't remember, but we learned right at the beginning of chapter four here that they're arguing against the Vedantins. So the Vedantan school was the other school in addition to Nyaya that we talked about with Stephen Phillips in the other episode. And the Vedantans are going based very much in the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita. And in the Bhagavad Gita episode that we did, we did mention how this distinction that the Indians had between mind and body, that didn't quite match up to our distinction that mind was this Prakriti which is just pure awareness.

I'm just inserting this during editing. The word is Purusha. Prakriti is actually matter. So not like your particular thoughts. It's not like Descartes mind that's all filled with a bunch of stuff. It's just the pure bare awareness. So that's not yourself?

7:07 Dylan: No.

7:07 Mark: In fact, you could say it is a universal mind. It's the consciousness that peeks out of every single mind, every single point of view, in all places, in all times. And that's why we're ultimately one and Nyaya wants to argue. Even if that's true in some weird metaphysical sense that we're not concerned with. Clearly I am different than you. I own my experiences, you own yours. I have psychological characteristics and desires, you have your psycho. Like we still have selves. I don't know if that one resonated particularly with you.

7:36 Dylan: I'm stumbling over the leap in your description from the mind as just pure awareness to every mind being joined up for a universal cosmic awareness. That part doesn't necessarily seem to follow to me, even if that's what they believed. But the notion that minds are characterized by awareness, which would seem to be like the thing that is including sense perception. But prior to thinking, I think what

8:06 Mark: I'm getting at is the same view as Plotinus. Right? So it's. I'm gonna identify with the one by getting rid of all of my peculiarities of my thoughts. I'm gonna meditate and clear my mind, and then I'm gonna be. So that's just what these vedantins were going for. They're also arguing against the Charvaka school, who is. Are just the materialists. So this is probably one of those schools that like, did not persist throughout history.

8:31 Dylan: I don't.

8:31 Mark: I don't know the history of them. But you could just argue there is no self because there's just the body and the brain. And why posit a self on top of that, let alone a self that could exist beyond death? So that's of course, a view we're very familiar with. The arguments are coming from all sides against the Nya here, and they want to defend. No, no, no. There is what you might consider an ordinary view of self.

8:53 Dylan: Yes, you summarized the environment. That's one of the nice things about this translation. And this edition is providing some of that background. But the beginning of this chapter is going through what are the arguments for the existence of the self?

9:10 Mark: The first one, actually, we talked about in the first episode.

9:13 Dylan: Inferential marks for the self are desire, aversion, effort, pleasure, pain, and knowledge. And that's from the Nyaya itself. And then there's the comment.

9:21 Mark: Yep, gautama, Gautama. And then the rest is Vatsyayana's commentary on it. And what are these? I know we had trouble with the inferential marks before.

9:31 Unknown speaker: What's the problem?

9:32 Mark: Just reading more of the text here. Vatsyayana says such desire here would not be possible when we have a desire. You're saying, I want this thing that I have experienced before. So you're identifying things over time. So there has to be some subject that is synthesizing memory with current perception or synthesizing past perceptions.

9:54 Dylan: Yeah. So the presence of desire means there's something that's doing the design.

9:57 Mark: I just didn't know why that counted as an inference. But yeah, go ahead, Seth.

10:01 Seth: No, no.

10:01 Unknown speaker: There's kind of two steps in the use of these as inferential marks. And one of them, I think, is more important than the other. So you could say the fact that desire exists indicates is an inferential mark that can be used to say there has to be something that does the desiring. That would be kind of taking a more traditional Western approach to the structure of consciousness as intentionality. So if there is objective experience, you know, there has to be a subjective experience or et cetera. But what Mark pointed out is desire only makes sense if there's previous experience with the thing desired, which generated a positive pleasurable or whatever.

Because if we were just this stream of experiences without a recollecting or a connected self, every time you experience something that could potentially be an object of desire, you'd be experiencing it anew. So you wouldn't desire it because you wouldn't know what it actually does for you, or so forth. So if it's possible to desire something, that means you have memory, you've connected it to a past experience where possession of that thing did you write? And so on and so forth. And that's what essentially all these things are. So desires. The positive aspect.

Pain.

11:17 Seth: Right.

11:17 Unknown speaker: If you avoid something, it's because in the past you were hurt by it. Just even knowing that something is good or bad for you or to you is an indication that there's some kind of subjective part of you that is persisting over time and retaining memories of previous experiences.

11:35 Dylan: So I think it's a really good point to bring up as being the way in which these items point to. The need for a nexus is more than that. First version that I was pointing to. The end of that first paragraph says desire would not be possible if there existed only a series of distinct cognitions, each with its own fixed content, just as it would not be possible with a body different from one's own. So you need the continuity of each moment over time to get the desire. You linked desire and pain. But interestingly, they include a lot of opposites that I'm not used to seeing included.

So here, desire and aversion, which makes a lot of sense that those two would go right together. That you want something, but you also want to avoid something. Pleasure and pain, something that give you pleasure versus give you pain. Those seem like the right kinds of opposites. And then effort and knowledge are directedness. It feels like effort is. I'd have to look back at it, but effort would be. It feels like more engagement. And knowledge would be like that you've received something from the world, or you have the notion of knowing something about the world that indicates that you have a self.

12:48 Unknown speaker: Yeah. And that just refers back to the mechanism for really two of the four knowledge sources or ways in which things can be perception and inference. You wouldn't be able to infer if, again, you couldn't retain experiences and you would never get to basic concepts. Perception gets educated over time. And you'd never get to basic concepts if your perceptions were just flat in your face and brand new every time you had them.

13:16 Mark: Well, that's why I'm wondering whether you could really ground the self by inference. If the self is needed for inference to work, and perhaps needed even for just perception to work. Because in perception, you're recognizing something. Last time in talking about the different types of perception, it was like, well, how do we know the self? Or how do I even know my inner states? There's no sense organ that goes with that. And he said, well, one of these folks said, there's the mind, and that counts as a sense. So I would say we know the self because we directly perceive it with the mind.

Or you could say it's apperception. Right? It's necessary. It's a necessary transcendental thing that is required for inference to work, for these other things to work as well. I buy these arguments. I just don't like characterizing them as inference. It's not like smoke and fire. If you didn't believe that a desire was associated with a self in the first place, then to say, well, later I have the same desire and I remember an earlier thing, so it must be the same self now that perceived the self before. I'm just not sure that if you deny that there's a consistent self in the first case, then you wouldn't admit that there's a consistent self in the second case.

You just have to admit somehow that there's a consistent self before. You then say, that's necessary for memory to happen.

14:31 Dylan: You're right, Mark, to point to the example of smoke and fire as the sort of canonical example of inference. But at first I wanted to say, well, maybe inference isn't the right word for the translation or something. But earlier we're using smoke and fire. This is the example. This is how we figure stuff out. Right? This is what we mean by inference. So what must be meant is that desire and aversion and effort and pain and pleasure are effectively like the sensory perceptions. They're the corollary of smoke. Right. The signs that with Them together, or even each of them individually points to their being a self. If the fact that you have this thing called aversion means that there has to be a self for the reasons that they're saying, that's what they mean by inference. And you're saying that you don't like calling it inference. Inference because.

15:29 Mark: Because we didn't have the previous experience that I see new smoke and I say smoke, that indicates fire because I have a past experience where smoke and fire went together. I see new desire or I see the object of my desire, whatever. And they're saying I should conclude that there's a self because I had some previous experience where a self had a desire.

15:48 Dylan: You're right.

15:49 Mark: That's not exactly what's being said by this example. It said that I'm having a desire because I enjoyed the thing before. So memory's involved. It's just saying memory requires self. I think that's all these things are saying that. And it could be passive memory or it could be, you know, throwing effort in there means that it is. The fact that we make an effort assumes that we're the same person as before. And there are a bunch of other related arguments to this as we go, like moral blame. If you became a new self every moment, then you just murdered somebody.

I would have to say, well, that was somebody else that wasn't. You don't have a self, which, of course, I think the Buddhists admit there's a conventional self. They just don't think that there's an ultimate self. That somehow when you do an analysis and you realize, oh, that this all falls apart. Just like Hume is not saying, I guess I'm me, and we're all, you know, no, of course we have it. Just like he's okay with causality, even though causality is not metaphysically real, a power in the way that we think it is. The self is something we can sensibly refer to, but we shouldn't take too seriously.

We certainly shouldn't conclude based on the existence of an apparent similarity between the contents of my consciousness and how they're different than the contents of your consciousness. We shouldn't assume that it's immortal. I mean, that would just. Or that there's any eternal substance.

17:06 Dylan: But that leap to immortality and eternal. Seems different than what they're calling inference. Right?

17:12 Mark: Yeah. This is not getting at that yet. I just jumped ahead.

17:14 Dylan: But yeah, I guess maybe they're making a mistake or using language, their language, a little bit more loosely. It does feel like it's Inference analogically. But it's looking like the consequent entailed by it as opposed to I had this experience and now I had this experience again. So I'm going to make the leap that I saw A connected to B. Now I see B. I'm going to say that A exists.

17:37 Mark: The form of the argument in all these is identifying various B's. I mean, I think it just all boils down to the fact that we have a coherence of our mental activity over time. So they want to say that proves there's a self.

17:50 Unknown speaker: This comes up in the commentary. I'm not sure if it's explicitly mentioned in the text. But there's another argument essentially that there's never a circumstance where the thing that is me has experiences or memories that belong to somebody else. What is experienced by one is not remembered by another.

18:13 Dylan: That's a pretty good one.

18:15 Unknown speaker: And you cannot, I think it's a great one and you cannot tap into someone else's memory. So if you haven't seen something and somebody else has, there's no way for you to access it. And I think this gets fleshed out a little bit elsewhere. But the key point is if there isn't something that is the individual subject, it. It sure is weird that we are still somehow separated and isolated from other experiencing things. You would think that if there was no me, I could just grab anything anywhere from anyone or any place.

18:50 Mark: And I think that's the same. I was referring to the Vedantan view of the real self as pure consciousness. And that might be everywhere. I mean, that sounds like what you're talking about. But is what you just said also compatible with no self? Clearly there is a limit to our scope of what we can see and sense and value and desire. And that seems to be around our bodies more or less and the things connected with it. I want to see more about like what the Buddhist would say to this. Because the Buddhist is not going to deny that we have a body. Ultimately we don't have bodies.

Right. Everything is illusory. So insofar as there is no self. As a corollary to there is nothing but to argue independently like, okay, there are things, there are real things, there are real bodies. But yet even that there's no self. I'm not sure. It just seems obviously wrong. Can we beef up this Buddhist position based on what they're saying?

19:44 Dylan: You reminded me of my both for Hume often and then also linked them up. Hume and the Buddhist is the same thing. True of a lot of Extreme skepticism. I think that in the case of the Buddhists, maybe Hume, that there's a disposition about what it would mean to have a self, and that would be something eternal and tangible in a specific way. And so the fact that the self is changing over time ends up meaning that there is none. And I think that that's the kind of thing that naya, cause, defied, attempt are denying in that they're saying, well, you're basically the same a version of what we would think of as process philosophy or that kind of thing. Or even Aristotle would say this, right? Each individual is a self, but they're changing and growing and adjusting over time. But there's still a coherent thing called that person, that individual, right?

20:43 Mark: So we don't know what the Buddhist would say to a sophisticated process ontologists, whether they actually would be a process ontologists, or whether they would still say, no, no, there's not even a self, even of that sort. They don't want to say there is no appearance of self. Which is all that I was saying, right? Is that like what Seth was saying, if there were an appearance of self, my consciousness would roam the earth freely? Or something like that. And I think at the bottom of 77 we see this is Uddyotakara giving the opponent's position. Such recognitions happen. So in other words, that like my experiences are different than yours because of causal relationships.

21:17 Dylan: This whole section gets kind of confusing. Like how is it that the Buddhists are thinking this?

21:22 Unknown speaker: I think the argument here is, yes, we're talking about a process, individuals as processes. But you're saying that the processes happen to a persistent, unchanging or somehow central subjectivity. And we deny that that exists. But we don't deny that or we don't claim that all experiences are just random free floating things. In fact, there are two elements that a Buddhist could argue in favor. One could say the locus of the body is sufficient to explain why you have your experiences and only your experiences because you have a physical body. And if the causal relationship is a way of saying that experiences are not wholly distinct and disjointed, in fact, they're connected together causally, both at the sort of macro and micro level.

So, you know, the combination of body and causality is sufficient to account for the appearance of centralized subjectivity and the ability to remember and so forth.

22:31 Dylan: On the top of 78, recognition is thus produced by causal relationships alone, causal relationships among cognitions, even though there is a plurality of individual experiences. And then later on, similarly, a recognition occurs from a determination through causal relationships among cognitions belonging to a single stream. They do not belong to another cognitive stream because they do not have those cognitions as their predecessors. It is false. Let us repeat that a recognition occurs because there is a single enduring subject or agent, since none is found. Therefore such a recognition as you described can occur otherwise than by your explanation. So that's the summary of the Buddhist position. They're tied together, but they're not there because there is a single enduring agent.

23:21 Mark: Yeah. And it doesn't have to be like for Hume, that they're next to each other. Right. That's what makes a causal stream, is the things happen next to each other. Here the opponent says, because from each individual prior cognition comes a successor cognition because the latter conforms to the causal power of its predecessor. In this way, the whole bundle of causal powers are strung together into a comprehensive whole, which is also, it seems like we were looking for in a self. Oh, it's a comprehensive whole. Okay, so you do have a self. But no, you're right.

The thing that they're arguing about is not the appearance of self. You know, they are still saying that it's a series. So it wouldn't meet Bergson's criteria of. No, no, no. The self as an unbroken series is primary, they're saying. The Buddhist is saying here, like Hume, that there is a causal chain. And it's just like when we're seeing animation and we see it as one continuous movement, when in fact it's just different things being flashed really fast. So that does make it sound like. Yeah, it's actually an illusion. You think that there is a whole.

Even if it was a continuous process, like Aristotle saying that it's moving through time. Because Aristotle, I don't think is saying anything like all that really exists exists at an instant. And somehow our minds fool us into thinking that all these instants, you know, bend together into one thing or something like that. I don't think that's Aristotle's notion of time at all. Right. That time doesn't really exist.

24:45 Dylan: No, I think that he would. For my. A film analogy, the way we would say that on a. I guess it's now old fashioned. All movie theaters use digital.

Right.

But you know, you have a film that has 24 frames a second and there's a still. And then when you see the film and it looks like there are people moving around and whatever looks continuous, that continuity is the real thing. And what you have in the film is a sampling of it that isn't the real thing. Because the real thing happened, right? You know, there was some version of it, it was edited together, but some version of the real thing happened. And now you have a sampling of it in a film that you then happen to be able to view. So it looks more like the real thing in that case.

My point is that the presence of stills, again as being a version of what counts for real, is underlying this argument. It's something that's static, something that's eternal in a way that is the same for however long of the time that you're taking it to be. Only things that don't change are real. That's definitely not Aristotle's view.

25:50 Mark: So the reply Here on page 78 is just wrong because you haven't given up the idea of a plurality of distinct individuals, diverse cognitions. So he is saying, Uddyotakara is saying, the Buddhist is taking them for time slices. It seems like that that's problematic in a way for ourselves, in the way that it might not be problematic for something we're just looking at, right? It doesn't really matter. And I think this is pointed out later that, you know, we can see similarity. You know, maybe it's a stop motion thing. And so in fact, somebody is swapping in a different piece of fruit that looks like this piece of fruit, and you see it consistent.

You say, I'm looking at an apple. Apple. Still an apple. Still an apple. It matters for some purposes whether it's the same apple or whether someone is secretly snatching an apple away and replacing with another apple. I mean, if I wrote my name on the apple, it's disappeared. It's a magic apple. It would matter then. But for the most part, certainly the stakes are not such that an individual. Could it be that I myself and being swapped out every second for a new individual, that that creates all these ethical problems and problems with memory hanging together, these psychological problems that perhaps just the impermanence of things in the outside world wouldn't cause for us.

27:00 Dylan: And they're also pointing out here causal relationships presuppose these pluralities.

27:06 Mark: So the self can't be a causal relation. And if we want to say the outside world is like Malebranche or somebody does like that apple couldn't persist over time unless God were replacing it every second by his will. That would still be legitimate. But I don't know, for the Nyai, at least, it doesn't look that way for ourselves. Now that I'm saying, I'm like, why wouldn't that work? Isn't that kind of the overall Hindu view is like, yes, we are distinct selves, but we are underlied by Prakriti or some sort of transpersonal or divine force. If I'm an eternal soul, there's something that gives me that. My eternal soul is maybe not one of the fundamental components of the universe. I'm not really sure about this. We didn't read other stuff about their cosmology. Bring us back Seth79 or so so

27:51 Unknown speaker: this is a response to the causality argument. So this is Vacaspati Misra.

27:57 Mark: Vacaspati is what?

27:59 Unknown speaker: Vacaspati. And it is not true that in spite of the differences among cognitions, causal relationships alone could make possible recognition such as we have described. 4 Where there is a causal relationship very clearly evident, such as between threads and a piece of cloth, or between pot halves and the pot they compose, even there, there is no putting together of experience over time. There is nothing like a recognition in the form of those threads previously experienced are this very piece of cloth. Nor that which was a pot moment is this moment of a pot half.

28:34 Mark: That's a weird example.

28:35 Unknown speaker: It is. The opponent replies, in truth, we often fail to observe differences in the things that stand in causal relationship. Yet we find that being divided every moment, they are the basis for the experience of recollection.

28:47 Seth: Wrong.

28:47 Unknown speaker: If you take away one piece of fruit and put it instead another piece of fruit, you can recognize it as the same type. But between the two pieces of fruit there is no causal relationship. This is interesting because it's not really a strong argument on either side. It seems to be a series of assertions about the counter is that causality isn't sufficient to explain recollection. There's not enough meat on the bone.

29:13 Mark: It's not sufficient and it's not necessary. So the fruit thing was that it's not necessary? Yes, it is causal on their account that the parts of something cause the whole.

29:23 Unknown speaker: It's not necessary for recollection.

29:25 Mark: Yes, but yet we don't use inference certainly to say, I've seen these threads, sometimes they're part of a cloth. Oh, voila, these threads are part of a cloth. Like that's at least not according to the description. Like I'm not sure, if I saw threads just lying around, I might think about cloth. He's trying to say that this thing about part whole relationships as causal isn't sufficient to get us from recognizing the parts to recognizing the whole.

29:51 Unknown speaker: I think that's fair. And I think he's also trying with these examples to take causality out of the equation. Altogether, because it's saying if you think about the threads and then you think about the cloth, even though the threads themselves are the things that made the cloth, the mere bald fact of that causal relationship is not sufficient for you to be able to say, oh, this cloth is all those threads that I saw. If it were, then causality would kind of jump out at you. Parts would jump out of you from the whole in your recognition. You would be able to infer things from causality that it just simply can't do.

This is very human that we give causality all of this force. But in reality, if you actually look at, you know, in Hume's case, he says there is no causality. But what I think Vacaspati is saying here is it's almost like you have an idea of causality that you're bringing back into the recognition. In order to be able to make this point, you would essentially need to have some knowledge above and beyond body and causality to explain how causality could be sufficient for recollection. Because if you just take a straight up phenomenological approach, you realize that causality really plays no role in recognition.

31:15 Mark: We're sort of getting back to what a process is. What I count as a process. Just in analyzing the world around me seems to depend on my needs. The digestive process. Like, well, I want to know how that food gets to its destination. Even though if it's, you know, it's totally transformed, it's not food anymore, it becomes crap and various things that are going to the blood vessels and whatever, it's going all over the place. So I could say that that whole process is an event, a thing. Yes, clearly, other causal processes, I mean, they're causal processes all around that I don't necessarily identify as, you know, they could just basically be a heap.

31:52 Dylan: Aren't they all things? Isn't every causal process in this way of talking a thing? Which is fine with me because the

31:57 Mark: chain of causation is eternal. Wouldn't then there really just be only one thing?

32:01 Dylan: Well, so you go down that route. That's one of the routes you end up going down with the Buddhists, right, that they would say, well, it's eternal change of causations. And so it ends up being just one thing.

32:11 Mark: Yeah, it has no foundation on anything. So it's nothing. Yeah, unless it sort of has like a God to inhere in. This is what we're getting at here, I guess, is this would have to be the Nyaya response. Is that a simple chain of causality would not be self supporting to be a thing. The various events have to be lodged into a medium, which is the self that persists over the causal chain.

32:34 Dylan: That might be what the Naiyayikas are saying, that there's something that the causal event chain has to be inherent in a process. Philosopher would say that the causal chain ends up being the self.

32:46 Mark: All right, and now we get down to an argument. So Uddyotakara is talking about just how desire, aversion, effort, pleasure, pain, knowledge, these are all properties of something and so they have to inhere in something, and that something is the self. Just like there's no just red floating around in your ontology. Red is a property. It has to adhere in a substance. So by analogy, drawing on the very same sutra that we started with desire, aversion, effort, pleasure, pain and knowledge, this was the thing that I thought was more fundamental, that you don't need an inference. You just say, what metaphysically are we talking about?

33:23 Dylan: They're inherence marks rather than inference marks.

33:26 Mark: Yep, yep.

33:27 Dylan: The next argument is they're multimodal sensory channels because there's different senses. It's a little bit like the knowledge argument, right? The knowledge being one of the inherent marks is you have various sensory modes that all point to the same external things that point to then back to a single self.

33:48 Unknown speaker: This is really interesting to me. The claim is, okay, you have sight and touch, you see a thing and you touch the same thing. And there's two different senses of perception, two different perceptual faculties with two different objects, methodologies, or the way they work, and they give you completely different sensations. So the argument is something like, could it be possible, given how different those sight and touch are, for example, or hearing and taste, if there was no unifying subjectivity or self, how would those things even come together?

They're literally completely different. They have different objects, they have different ways of doing, they create different experiences. There has to be something that unifies those experiences under a common. And then you get into your point mark about takes those things and puts those things into a substance or whatever. You know, like I have to have a place for it. But otherwise you would just have five completely disjointed, unrelated sensing faculties that were disconnected. That was a novel argument to me. I found it interesting.

34:55 Mark: Yeah, we at least need something to serve the functional role of bringing all the sensations together and making it into a coherent knowledge experience. There has to be an experiencer and not just the sense organ as an experiencer, which I would think even if you thought that there was a conscious creature that only had one sense, could only. It's just a pure big eye. I mean, I guess if you poke the eye that there's some other. But anyway, still there's something to explain about it being conscious and having knowledge, even if you weren't bringing things together.

So I think the problem of the self is more fundamental than this. Like, I'm not sure that just there has to be something in the chain of signals that bring these signals from the different sense organs together. Like, okay, well, you need something that's not just your eyes and ears. But if we admit the mind is one of the senses, as was suggested in our last discussion, okay, there's a mind, but is there a self? It seems like the Buddhist has been fine, yes, yes, there's a mind, but the mind is an illusion. The mind is just a causal series of things.

All right, well, there's a lot more to say here. I think we're going to continue in part three, where we will continue to discuss this chapter that's going to be available only to partially examined life supporters. Check it out at partiallyexaminedlife.com support next time. We're going to continue our discussion of analytic epistemology, giving a next historical response to our Gettier Goldman discussion with some articles by Timothy Williamson called Knowledge First, Epistemology, Justifications, Excuses and Skeptical Scenarios, and Morally Loaded Cases in Philosophy.

We'd love to hear what you want us to talk about. You can email us@pel partiallyexaminedlife.com or reach out to us through Facebook, through X.com or various other ways. Good night, everybody.

36:43 Unknown speaker: Good night.

36:44 Dylan: Good night.