#165 Buddhist Emptiness Explained - Jan Westerhoff

27:31Now, so far, we've looked basically at the idea where it turns all the way down, right? So it goes all the way down. But this is not the only model that has been used in order to interpret Madhyamaka. Another possibility is also that it turns all the way round. So sometimes that is described as ontological coherentism. so what that means is that you don't have a depends on b depends on c depends on d infinitely down but you rather have it set up in some kind of circle so a depends on b depends on c depends on d depends on a right and the the idea is that if the circles get large enough enough it actually looks like a straight line because you don't see the end of it so it's um it's it's you know if you just imagine a really really large uh circle in space if you're standing on it it might look to you as if it's just a straight line continuing because you don't see the curve yeah so to that extent you can say well it might be the case that we are actually not living in a in a kind of turtles all the way downward but in turtles all the way round world even though we rarely see the circles link up.

28:50Jan Westerhoff:Yeah, we might have been confused before we knew the Earth was a globe to sort of walk in a straight line and end up sort of getting back to where we started. Yeah, so it looks flat to us even though it is spherical, right? And causation could potentially work the same way. Yes, and dependence relations could be these kind of structures. They just look flat, by which I mean straight to us, even though they are not. Okay, and so now people have been, have been exploring the formal aspects of both this non-foundationalism in terms of all the way down and also of ontological coherentism in quite a bit more detailed over the last decades or so.

29:31And one of the interesting things that have come out of it is the understanding that there is nothing logically wrong with any of these ideas, right? So originally, you might have thought, okay, well, this idea that it's dependence all the way down or all the way around, at some point in time, you hit a contradiction. And that shows you that these kind of structures cannot be exemplified in reality if you assume that there are no contradictions exemplified in reality. We just make that assumption for the time being here, right? Otherwise, things get even more complicated. But now it actually seems quite clear, at least as far as things get clear in these parts of philosophy, that you can have different internally consistent models of foundational structures.

30:25You can either have the communal garden variety where it stops somewhere and you've got your real stuff and then everything goes upwards from that. Or you can have its dependence all the way down or you can have dependence all the way around. Now, that, of course, doesn't tell you which one of these is correct, if any of them is. But it tells you that all of these are life options or life issues. Right.

30:51Jan Westerhoff:Well, that's what I think that's where the pressure point is going to exist for some people, because usually this debate is is settled by ruling out the possibility of certain options. And like a Thomist, for example, a sort of classical theologian would just say that like, if you have any understanding of what cause and an effect is, then as long as you posit this infinite chain of causation, especially one that doesn't go back in time, but one that goes sort of, as you say, it's a dependence relation or what a Thomist might call a essentially ordered series. that this just can't go on forever or into a loop because there would be nowhere from the causal power which we observe to originate, right?

31:40Jan Westerhoff:We might look for a contradiction and struggle to find one, but of course you can understand the strong intuition that we have at the very least. It seems like there might be a way of positing this as a contradiction if you say that there exists some effect. Effects only exist insofar as there are causes for those effects. And you could define them in various ways to say that if it doesn't have any causal power of its own, there's no cause, yada yada. But like, is this just something that Medyamaka just denies? Like how can you defend, in other words, the plausibility of an infinite or looping causal chain when to most people's intuitions, that seems really strange.

32:20Jan Westerhoff:Like if there was a candle, if there was a fire burning, and somebody says why is that fire burning and i say well because it was lit by a different fire and someone says why was that on fire and say well it was it was lit by the original fire it would just seem as though firstly i hadn't explained anything and secondly like i was probably missing something right good yeah i think that there are two different uh things to look at here one one is the sort of more historical dimension of the question and one is the more systematic one so on the historical side the the indians as a whole didn't have great problems with sequences going all the way back yeah so this this idea that okay well it needs to be starting somewhere and you need a first course to get the whole thing going and so on so that was never regarded as a particular problematic issue um i mean this this is a good question why that is the case i mean it's i mean one one of the uh potential explanation is a different understanding of time where within classical indian texts you get a kind of a cyclical understanding where it is not that you have as you have in christianity a first beginning you know in the book of genesis yeah it it it starts with uh um uh let there be light and then of course the question what happened before before god created the world is of course also not not so easy to answer but um so if we assume that there is some kind of starting point um then of course we need to solve that um philosophically but if you assume that there is this kind of um theories of world ages or culpas which start out somewhere and then they develop and then they decline and then at the end of each age, then that leads to the beginning of a new age, right?

34:12And then you've got the next world age, and the whole thing happens again, and this goes back indefinitely. So to that extent, you can say, okay, well, it's going back all the way. And so this is, I mean, you find a manifestation of the kind of the refusal to really engage with that question um when you sometimes find the discussion within buddhism okay so where where did actually the cycle of of

34:43Jan Westerhoff:reincarnation and rebirth which is a central right central problem within in buddhist sociology how did that actually start right and then what what you would usually find a buddhist teacher will say well this is beginningless ignorance anadya vidya right so ignorance about you know the way reality really works is a kind of a core problem but then the question is okay where does the ignorance comes from and i say you know it's beginningless whereas it has always been there and like like samsara so to that extent you don't find it so surprising that within indian scholastic texts you don't find much engagement with this question that is very central to western metaphysics right okay so that's the that's kind of historical question yeah but then the question is, of course, is that simply a historical artifact or is there simply nothing the Madiamakas can say?

35:33But I think here you need to ask yourself, okay, so on the one hand, if you look down these chains of infinitely backwards dependence and you get this kind of metaphysical vertigo and you think, you know, where is all going to go and it looks kind of shifty but then uh what's taking into account there are other cases where it it looks comparable but you don't get that shift in a say they take the negative numbers right the number minus one the predecessor is the number minus two i mean these are all as real as the numbers get but there's no smallest negative number right so they they go all the way back the number line yeah um so we don't really have a problem here um and and why is that well presumably because we don't think that each number sort of borrows its existence from the predecessor right but then the question is okay why do we actually think of existence or causation in that way either right so why do we actually think that causation works on this kind of borrowing model where the the effect only has its own causal power because it's borrowed that from the from its own cause and that borrowed it from something else and there has to be some sort of metaphysical central bank that holds the gold because otherwise all the the checks are going to collapse right yeah but within madhiamika you you don't have that causation that notion of causation as this kind of substantial real relation at all yeah and i mean if you want to i can explain a little bit why that is the case.

37:16Jan Westerhoff:I think it's it seems like the issue here is one of dependence in that like it's easy enough to say that the number line stretches on infinitely but I don't think there's a meaningful sense in which like the number minus one depends upon the existence of minus two except maybe conceptually. You might want to say that conceptually you need to have a minus two to make sense of what minus one means. Yeah, I mean definitely. But in that sense you've kind of turned these numbers into concepts rather than like real things in the world, right? And I feel as though when you have an existential dependence, that is something depends for its existence, not as a concept, but like ontologically, right?

37:58Jan Westerhoff:Like I've heard you talk about this before, like say the existence of Northern England, right? Clearly the existence of Northern England depends conceptually on the existence of Southern England. It wouldn't make sense to call it that otherwise. But the thing I'm picking out with the phrase Northern England, which is like a particular landmass, that actual existing mass obviously doesn't depend on the continued existence of Southern England, which could disappear and the North would still exist. And I suppose I want to say that in the former case, conceptually, yeah, that can just be an infinity of sort of groundless, whatever, that's fine.

38:37Jan Westerhoff:But when you have an existential relation where the existence of a particular landmass really does depend on say the rocks that that landmass is made of, and the rocks really do depend on their sort of being gravitationally held together, that it does seem to me that that seems to me like borrowing. That seems to me like borrowing its ontology, borrowing its existence, you know what I mean? So I would, and I'm saying that as if you don't know that, I'm sure you know that, but for the sake of our audience and for the sake of myself. That's why I would like to ask maybe how the Jamaka would respond to this.

39:16Jan Westerhoff:Because I suppose that the sort of functional takeaway from this, because people might be listening to this like, oh, this is cool, interesting, but what can I do with this? It's like, all the time, we're having debates on this channel about the existence of God. And so often, they collapse into some kind of argument for the non-existence of an infinite regress of dependency, of causal chains of time or whatever it may be. And this is like an interesting escape route for many people, it seems. You're offering a sort of, no, you don't need this. And I suppose I really want to pin down how that works.

39:47Right. Yeah. Good. There's a whole other chapter to talk about. And these are Buddhist arguments against the notion of a creator god. Because the Buddhists, of course, they engaged with theists quite a bit within classical India. And so they also had to have something to say on that question when theist came along and said, no, no, no, this was all created by Ishvara, the great creator. But put that to the side for the time being, because I think what is important to get clear about is how the Madhyamakas think about causation, right? So the sort of intuitive idea presumably would be that causation is a force out there, mind independent force that ticks along in the world and does stuff independent of our thinking about it wanting it to go a specific way right so if we you know if i set in motion a certain causal process say i i light one part of a dry field the whole thing starts to blaze up and there is nothing i can do about it even if i said okay i wish i've never started this right Okay, so it goes like that.

41:03But in the Buddhist conception, particularly in the Madhyamika conception of causation, it is actually quite distinct from that. And one reason it is distinct from that is connected with their specific understanding of time. And the understanding of time that Madhyamaka takes on board, and actually take that on board from an earlier Buddhist school called Sartrantika, is a form of presentism. So it's the idea that only the present moment exists, the past isn't real, and the future isn't real, but just the present moment.

41:48Jan Westerhoff:What might be known in modern academia is the A-theory of time. that only the present exists well with i mean with it with the a theory of time you have the specific contrast well between the a theory and the b theory about whether you've got anything that moves there right so in the b theory the idea is you just have all these different temporal relations before after um uh um sorry you have the different relations in in terms of temporal distance you know one one day before one day after and so on and they though they never change whereas if you talk in terms of present past and future what is present now what was future yesterday and will be past tomorrow and so it seems to change its temporal attributes right and so this is what is happening in the a theory whereas in the b theory nothing nothing moves yeah um but well i mean what the the the essential bit here about the the the conception of time I've just mentioned is the ontological idea that it is only the present that exists right so the for the opposite picture imagine a kind of block universe right where sort of the present is sort of in the middle and then there is at the left side of the block is everything that happened in the past in the future somehow frozen is what is going to happen in the future and we sort of move through that block.

43:17But you would say, well, even though I can only influence the present, the past and the future, they still have ontological status. They still exist. So the satrantikas and then also the madhyamikas who follow that deny that. They say only the present moment is real. And now you get into an interesting problem when you're talking about causation, because causation is a relation that connects two points in time. I mean, there's a whole debate again about whether you can have simultaneous causation, whether cause and effect happen at the same time. But let's put that to one side at the moment. I think it's much more plausible to think of the cause happening first and the effect happening later.

43:57You know, I start smoking at a petrol station. Then a second later, there is a big explosion. So first there is me lighting the match. Later, there is the big boom, right? So in a causal sequence. Okay, so however, if you believe that only the present moment is real, how can you actually make sense of causation? Because it seems you're always missing one part of the two relata that are related, right? So you're either, if you locate yourself at the time when I light the match, then the explosion doesn't exist because that's future. Or if you say, okay, so now the petrol station blows up. Well, now the time when the match doesn't exist anymore because that's past.

44:48So, okay, so how can I still, I presumably still want to say it is my stupid smoking that blew up the petrol station. So, okay, so how can I say that? And the Mariamaka says, okay, so you only ever have one real relatum here because only the present is real. And the other one is supplied either by memory or by anticipation. So if I'm at the petrol station lighting the match, I should anticipate in my mind what is going to happen next, maybe the big explosion. And at the time of the explosion, I can probably remember the stupid thing I just did, namely light a match. right so that's how i can talk about causation yeah but now what that means is that we can only talk about causation at the cause of relation because there is some essential mind-made ingredient in here right so you can't have the relation without anticipation or memory And so you can't have the idea of causation ticking along at the background of a world as it is anyway independent of mind's handiwork.

46:00Jan Westerhoff:Now, I feel like I've heard this before. Well, you might have done. That's from me. No, but I mean, I feel like I've heard this kind of thinking before, but in a different context. And I know you've talked about this at least a bit as a sort of point of historical interest. But if someone just tuned in, they might think that you were talking about a certain Immanuel Kant. It seems as though a lot of the concepts which are useful for Mediamaka philosophy, that is, the nature of causation, the nature of time, the fact that they're not real features of the world, but rather something we kind of impose onto this sort of external world that kind of is really there, but we don't have great access to.

46:45Jan Westerhoff:It sort of begins to sound a little bit like the Kantian conception of there being this noumena out there and that causation and time are things that we map on to that instead. And so, I don't know, is this a sort of preempting of the philosophy of Kant or are there important distinctions? Just because that's where people's minds might go. And if there are important differences, I want to make them sort of clear. Sure, sure. So I think two things that might come to mind here, you're right, I mean, one is Kant, the second is of course Schum, right, and his theory of causation. So let's stick with the case of Kant for the time being, because this is quite interesting to the extent that in the early engagement of Western thinkers with Madhyamika, so from the 1920s, 1930s onwards, Kant and Kantianism was often used as a kind of explicatory paradigm in order to explain what the Madhyamakas are up to.

47:56And so this is historically quite important because it provides a kind of lens through which early interpreters tried to understand that and of course it's clear why they want to do that. their readers would probably know a bit about Kant. They wouldn't know anything about Nagarjuna. If you tell them Nagarjuna is a little bit like Kant in these respects, at least the general idea. Yeah. Okay. And I mean, you are perfectly right and they were perfectly right that they are interesting parallels. For example, the idea that space and time are not features of the world out there, but to a certain extent, mind-made projections onto it.

48:40And the other important distinction that they drew between, or the comparison they drew between Madhyamaka and Kant, is the distinction between the two truths that I've mentioned early on, where they said, okay, so we've got the conventional truth, that looks a little bit like the Kantian phenomena, so the stuff that appears to us and then there is the ultimate truth and that's the kantian numina and that is sort of we can't really know anything about that unless we are enlightened buddhas and then presumably you can see what the ultimate truth is like yes not from our perspective

49:14Jan Westerhoff:can makes this distinction between the the phenomena which is how things sort of appear to you like if you look at an object like the table there it is again um what i'm really experiencing is not the table, but rather my perception of the table. It's how the table appears to me in sight, in sound, if I tap it, how it might feel. And I can never actually just directly access the table, I suppose, without being the table. Otherwise, it's through perception. So what I experience is the so-called phenomena. But the thing in itself, the thing that's really there that I don't have any access to, except through my sort of window of perception, is what Kant calls the noumena just to clarify that yeah so and and of course there has been since the days of khan there has been an endless debate about what the noumena actually are yes from from the view is there you know is there actually one noumenant for every phenomenon so is there sort of a noumenal glass behind there or is it some kind of sort of morphous thing behind it or should we think about it in a completely different way of course that i mean that'll take us take us down the route of of of Kant exegesis, but it's probably worthwhile just to have some brief ideas about where the discontinuities are between the Kantian picture and Nagarjuna, so to see that they are not singing from the same sheet for the whole way.

50:33I think it is useful to illustrate some contexts, but the main difference lies with the Madiamaka theory of the emptiness of emptiness. So as I said before, emptiness is a really sort of key concept for Madiamaka. Just before we talk about the emptiness of emptiness,

51:00Jan Westerhoff:I feel like we haven't actually really explained what emptiness is. We've kind of talked about the Madiamaka as the middle way between these two so-called extremes of there being some kind of foundational ontology, let's say. Some substance upon which everything else depends. If you keep dividing the cup in half, you'll get to some foundational stuff. And this other view that it just goes on forever. But Yamaka is the middle way, and it proposes this view called emptiness. Okay, emptiness of what? What are the things that are empty, and what is it that they're empty of, and how does this help solve our problem?

51:34Right, very good. Okay, so I think this is a very important point, because when you hear these statements in the Madhyamaka literature, everything is empty. And of course, as you also find in the earlier Perfection of Wisdom text, of course, the question is, you know, empty of what? So the notion, it's not that it's like the glass is empty of water. So it's, of course, emptiness in a metaphysical sense. And what it is empty of is the technical term that the Indians use is svabhava. which if you take the term apart, it consists of two-part, Swar, meaning something like its own, and Bhava, existence or being.

52:16So the whole thing is somewhat unhelpfully then translated as own being, but doesn't really tell you what it is either. So I think a much better translation that has now been adopted is intrinsic nature. And the idea is that something has intrinsic nature if it doesn't borrow its existence. sorry if it doesn't bear the existence in itself yeah so um so so one way of thinking about this is if something is consists of parts then it cannot exist by svabhava because what it is is actually not itself but it's something that is derived from the parts right so if i've got again the lamp itself can't do anything independent of the parts that make it up right so what is really doing the lighting are the other parts not the lamp yeah and so that is there is one one case where you say okay so there the lamp itself is no super bother and another dimension of the same thing is that if you can take something conceptually apart, so even if you, say, have a physically indivisible atom, it presumably has still specific qualities or properties that you can mentally distinguish.

53:40And so you can sort of mentally take it apart, even though you can't take it physically apart. That also is something which stops it from having intrinsic nature because its nature depends on all these different properties. okay so when the mariamaka says things are empty they mean that they mean things are empty of the intrinsic nature and they mean that entities depend on other entities for their existence they borrow it from other things yeah so that is that is the um the key notion here we can see immediately how that connects with the notion of foundationalism and non-foundationalism we talked about early on, right?

54:20Because if you think, okay, so the table has no Svabhava because it consists of parts, and then you say, okay, well, what about the parts? They surely have Svabhava, right? And there were earlier Buddhists who thought that. Okay, so if you break it down to the final bits, then those things actually have this intrinsic nature.

54:37Jan Westerhoff:Like the myriological symbols. Like the myriological symbols. They identify that with particularized properties or what is sometimes called tropes. So occurrences of properties at specific spatiotemporal instance. I think these are really real. And so the table is just sort of made up of these things like an image on the screen is made up of pixels, right? Pixels are real and they're sort of difficult to make out because they move really fast and they're really small, but they are really there. And what we see is the table, which is unreal, but pixels are real, right? and so the the the mariamakas of course objected and said no no the pixels aren't real either right because they can again be either taken apart conceptually or mariologically but by real you mean they don't have sverbarba exactly yes that's right intrinsic they don't have intrinsic they're real in the sense that you know that the table is there i can i can touch it and interact with it but it doesn't have exactly its own intrinsic nature very good so so when when we say real we In this context, we'll have to distinguish between conventionally real and ultimately real.

55:42None of these things are ultimately real. They are conventionally real insofar as there is a glass here, and if I tap against it, it makes a sound. So that is all happening. But if I analyze that in terms of where it all comes from, in terms of what it's based on, I end up with nothing. And that is the fundamental notion of emptiness that we find here.

56:05Jan Westerhoff:So why not these foundational myriological symbols or whatever? Why not like, you know, somebody might say, well, whatever this, suppose you're like some kind of atomist and you just posit that there does exist some kind of unbreakable foundational unit of stuff. and maybe it's an excitation of the quantum wave field at a particular point in space-time or maybe it's a particular string that vibrates in a particular way and that's what gives it its essence. Can't we just say that that is a thing, it exists, and that is the foundational intrinsic nature of reality? Why does emptiness go all the way down?

56:42Jan Westerhoff:Why would those things themselves be empty? Yeah, so you'll have to, of course, you have to look at the specific cases there and say, Okay, so if you have your infinite sequence of decomposition, then it's clear that none of these things can have intrinsic nature because they go all the way down. If you have some more sophisticated notions within modern physics, the meriological thing might not be so much of a problem because you think, okay, well, what it really is, reality is not made up of little billions of balls that are really small, but say of the probability distribution of a particle being at that place or that place.

57:35And then of course, what you think about that then depends on the details of, well, what you actually think a probability distribution is. right so are probabilities things that are out there in the things objective probabilities or do you actually think that they are in states of information or or states of mind and once you if you go for the latter then of course you immediately bring the mind in and then of course you you you get that dependence of the the stuff that you is fundamentally you think is fundamentally real on your conceptualization and so on you can see where this is all going right but um i think Perhaps we should sort of backtrack, because we were talking earlier about Kant and causation, right?

58:15So we should probably come back to that.

58:23Okay, so I think we have now a fairly clear idea of what emptiness means. And now we'll get back to the notion of emptiness of emptiness. And so this is where the Madiamakas really extend the notion of emptiness to the entire intellectual system and also argue that emptiness itself is empty. Now, what does that mean? Well, as we've discussed early on, they reject the existence of ultimately real things, the foundations of reality. But the arguments that they use for that can also be easily turned into arguments for rejecting ultimately true theories, right? Because we'll get problems with those as well.

59:22Now, if you think that there are no ultimately true theories, then you also can't say that the theory of emptiness is an ultimately true theory. That is clear. Now, that is certainly what is the case in Madhyamaka. and Nagarjuna is extremely explicit about that in saying that those who turn the theory of emptiness into a metaphysical view, so a view that they think is ultimately real, they are really beyond hope, right? So that is a level of confusion that is particularly problematic. And there you see the important difference, say, between the Kantian picture and the Madhyamika picture because for the Kantian, the distinction between the noumenon and the phenomenon is the ultimately true philosophical theory, right?

1:00:32So this is, if you think about things rightly and you follow all the arguments of Kant and you think they are all sound, then you'll end up with that view, but that's it. And then you've reached the truth, right? and you've sort of seen the ultimate structure of the world, even though you can't really speak into the noumenon, at least you know it's there. Okay, but in Madiamaka, this is not the case, right? So the idea is not that you work through all the arguments and then you'll end up with an ultimately true theory, right? It's rather the case that this entire artifice of Madhyamaka is as conventionally real as other conventionally real theories.

1:01:20But it's not anything that is ultimately real or ultimately true. And so I think this is an important point to get where they add discontinuities between the Kantian picture and the Madhyamaka picture.

1:01:30Jan Westerhoff:So the theory of emptiness and the school of Madhyamaka Buddhism is not true? It's not ultimately true, right? So, okay, so let me perhaps explain a little bit more what is meant by all of this.

1:01:51And we probably shouldn't forget that Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy is not just an intellectual enterprise, but a kind of sociological project. So it is something that is supposed to help you escape from existential suffering, the cycle of existential suffering, of samsara, of rebirth, and so on. And so that is the ultimate aim, and the Buddha himself was quite explicit when he said that all that I teach is suffering and the end to suffering, and that's it. So now, whether a specific theory is to be regarded as true or not, the focus that the Buddhists put on it is to which extent does it facilitate this sociological goal?

1:02:50To which extent does it help you to escape the cycle of samsara? And there, they actually, within Buddhist classification of different philosophical views, they argue that different views are more or less likely to help you succeed in that. right um so um uh if you um look at sort of these classifications of different philosophical positions that you find in madhyamaka takes of course madhyamaka always comes out of top right so that's the that's the that's the most sophisticated view you could have but then below that there are also various other theories like for example yoga chata idealism and abhidharma the views of the Abhidharma and so on that are all sort of steps in the right direction.

1:03:38And so to that extent none of these theories are ultimately true, including Madhyamaka, right? But they provide better and better means for escape from existential suffering, right? And I think it's important to be aware of a kind of difference within the Madhyamaka project and a project that you often find in philosophical discussion, and that is the question to whether the aim of philosophy is arriving at an ultimately true theory, or whether you regard philosophy or philosophical practice as a kind of medicine or therapy for the diseases of the mind, right? And this is not a particularly Buddhist idea.

1:04:26You'll also find that within Western philosophy. I find it in you know, Peronian skepticism. You also find it in the later Wittgenstein, you know, showing the fly, the way out of the fly bottle and so on. So you've got various parallels of that. And if you have that perception, that conception, then of course you wouldn't say, okay, so which of these therapies is actually ultimately true, right? I mean, that's not the point. The point is which of these work.

1:04:54Jan Westerhoff:Right, but then, okay, so, you know, I have various ailments in my life. I've had some chest pain recently and okay, I'm looking at the cup and I think the cup is made out of glass and I kind of think that the glass is made out of atoms of some sort. Maybe actually, uh, there are no fundamental atoms. Maybe it's gunk. Maybe it goes all the way down. There's infinite divisibility and nothing has for Barber. Um, chest pain is still there, you know, like how, how, how does this sort of revelation about the table or the chair or whatever help me? I mean, if we can't say it's true, we can at least say it's helpful, but how is that supposed to help me escape samsara?

1:05:35Yeah, good point. So what we are talking about here is, of course, the sociological dimension of all of this.

1:05:51And one notion that we haven't talked about at all is the notion of selflessness or anatman or anatta in Buddhism. And I'm sure your viewers are probably familiar with some of that. So it's probably not necessary to go into that much detail.

1:06:10Jan Westerhoff:By selflessness, you don't mean kindness there? No, no. By selflessness, I mean that there is no soul pellet, right? So there's no core to the mind or the personality that makes me, me, but it is just a causal connection of physical and psychological parts, right? And of course, that fits in very nicely with the merological nihilism that we've talked about early on, because, of course, a person is made up of bits, So there's my body that is made up of all that material stuff. And there's my mind with all the ideas and memories and thoughts and so on. And they all somehow hang together. But there's no whole.

1:06:50The parts are real. If anything is real, the parts are real. Of course, the Madhyamakas don't think the parts are real. But let's ignore that for the time being. But there is certainly no Atman, no self, no soul palette, no core to my personality. That makes me me. Okay. So we've got there. And that insight is regarded by the Buddhists as absolutely essential for escaping existential suffering, right? Because where does existential suffering come from? It comes from the misapprehension of this fact that there is no substantial self or personality core, that we still try to hang on to it as if there was one.

1:07:35and this ability or this mistaken tendency to hang on to something there isn't is fundamentally what causes the suffering. Okay, so now you can see how the notion of anatta or selflessness, which on the one hand you think, okay, well, this is just a theory within philosophy of personal identity, but now you can see how that has a kind of a sociological dimension, right? So if you see the world in this way, you might suffer less because you think, well, there isn't actually anybody who suffers. We got that idea. Okay, so now when we're turning to all of this metaphysical material, then the Madiamachus thought, okay, so with philosophical theories, the problem is not that you grasp at a substantial self that isn't there, which is a fairly sort of crude form of grasping or thirst or tanha, which is one of the fundamental forces that keeps you in samsara.

1:08:47But you can also grasp at theories and use them in a somewhat subtle way as a way of propping up the illusion of a self that isn't really there. So, of course, only really philosophers would be people who do that, you think. But the idea is that you have this idea, okay, well, so the world decides what is true. And I figured it out now and it came down on my side, right? And the theory that you hold is wrong. And so you can use that, of course, to prop up the idea that there is the me that is right. and use that as a somewhat more subtle but still potent form of self-grasping that is causing all these problems, right?

1:09:41So coming back to your chest pain, of course, no amount of thinking about philosophy is going to alleviate your chest pains and you'd probably better see a GP about those, right? But that is not the only notion that the Buddhists are talking about when they're talking about existential suffering, right? I mean, pains and aches and so on are parts of that, physical suffering, but they can sort of cause manifestation of that. And it goes into a lot more subtle forms of existential unease and dissatisfaction with the way things go and so on. And it's the suffering in all these forms that this union of philosophical theorizing and a tradition of practice is supposed to alleviate.

1:10:26Yeah.

1:10:27Jan Westerhoff:Okay. So, I mean, I've got to... A couple of thoughts, and I suppose a couple of questions. One is, I can understand how, of course, if everything is empty, then the self is empty. In fact, sometimes it can be helpful to think of, I found it helpful to think of medyamaka and emptiness as kind of an extension of the well-known Buddhist idea of an atta, of there being no self. You say there appears to be this thing called myself. It has perceptions and memories and all that kind of stuff. But the Buddhists will tell you, actually, what's really going on there is just a bunch of concepts that relate to each other.

1:11:04Jan Westerhoff:But there's no stuff. There's no intrinsic essence, I suppose. And then just to say that that's also true of the table and the chair and the world and everything. And then ultimately of emptiness itself. That's fine. But then it's like, if this is supposed to be kind of therapeutic, so to speak. And the Buddhist says, the way to escape suffering is to recognize that there is no self and there's no one that suffering is happening to. It's like, that's all very well and good. But that doesn't like switch off the suffering, right? So I kind of want to ask, in what way it is that a recognition of the non-existence of the self allows you to escape suffering if it doesn't actually get rid of the suffering?

1:11:44It just maybe makes you realize what it actually is.

1:11:47Jan Westerhoff:It's almost as if someone's come along and I'm feeling hungry and they've said, I know you think that you've just got this sort of feeling called hunger, but really what's going on there is your digestive system is connecting to your brain and sending neural signals. And that's what's really happening. That's really interesting. Now, you know, where's the sandwich? You're still hungry, right? So how does that help? Yeah, no, that's a very good point. and it's just like, you know, saying somebody stole your bicycle and then I come along and say, well, there wasn't really ever a bicycle in the first class because they're only the parts, right?

1:12:19The whole is not real, so don't be sad. And then you think,

1:12:23Jan Westerhoff:that doesn't really help, right? Okay. So, no, that's good. And that is, it would indeed be an unsatisfactory reply. And this is why I tried to mention earlier that we need to take into account that Buddhist philosophy is part of a kind of practice tradition. And so within Buddhism, you find a common classification of wisdom or pranya into three different types of increasing sophistication. So the one is the wisdom that you acquire from studying or hearing. This is just learning about philosophical theories. then the second is the wisdom that results from contemplation so you make these theories your own and you think about potential counter moves and counter arguments and basically what we've been doing here right so this kind of exploration of a philosophical theory you think of what it says and where the where the the breaking points are and you sort of fresh up test the whole thing and see does it really work um so that is that is the kind of wisdom that that you acquire from contemplation or thinking.

1:13:38And then there is the final one, which is actually the one that gets you liberated and helps you to escape essential suffering. And that is what is called Bhavana Mahi Pranya. Bhavana is probably the best translation of that is cultivation. It's sometimes also translated as meditation. But I think it's probably better understood as cultivation or training. And so what is meant by that here? Well, one important aspect of all of that is the idea that there is a difference between having a specific philosophical view and seeing the world in that way. And so Thomas Metzinger, he came up with this interesting idea of phenomenal correlates.

1:14:34So he argued that basically most important philosophical views also have a correlate of the way the world appears to you if you have that view. right so um say if you are and uh on the one hand you say you can believe things like you know solipsism there's only me or idealism everything is mental and so on and on the other hand uh you can ask yourself okay so what would it actually be what the world looked like if i actually believed that and i've actually really thought that this was mental right or if i really thought that you are just a figment in my imagination and this is this is i'm real but you are not yeah and okay so there i think most people would agree that there is a difference between that right between just holding a view being convinced by a view and actually seeing the world in this way yeah okay and now the the buddhists believe that you cannot just reason yourself into seeing a world in a specific way but that requires specific training and practice and sustained practice that sort of sits on top of having a particular view yeah and so that so in in a way what what you want to say here is that um uh now uh coming coming back to the case of the bicycle of course it doesn't help me if somebody then just comes up with mirological nihilism to comfort me when my bike has been stolen right but that is not the point the point is rather that if i were to see the world in that particular way in terms of emptiness and non-self and so on then that would automatically alleviate or particularly completely annihilate my suffering about the bicycle right of course in a way that doesn't really help to somebody who isn't there yet right but that is

1:16:35Jan Westerhoff:the the that's like the promise yeah that is that is yes let's say okay so this is where this is this is this is a goal right and you can do all that philosophical reasoning in order to show why that goal would be a good goal to get to right but then the next thing is actually getting to that and that is and i think this is probably one of the key differences between you know buddhist philosophy and contemporary analytic philosophy is that that is not the end of the project right it's an important step in the project but that's not that that's not what the aim of the whole thing is this is why i mentioned earlier the difference between looking for an ultimate literal theory and regarding it as a kind of cure so then like this concept of of emptiness then i mean we've literally explained what it is and we've helpfully used this concept of myriology in relation of parts and holes and said okay emptiness says that there just is no foundational essence to anything so then like just naively i want to help get like a picture of this in my head because I understand those words.

1:17:33I get what that means, but it hasn't quite sort of slotted into place for me in that like, I'm sat on something right now.

1:17:41Jan Westerhoff:Like I'm, what is it that I'm sat on? Right. And I kind of want like the best imagery you can think of to help think about this in that when I, when I explain miriological nihilism, I say to people, well, what you're really sat on is like, kind of like a bunch of atoms in an arrangement that looks like a chair. And people go, that, that makes sense to me. Or maybe for the idealist, they might say that what you call physical matter is really just experiential you touch it you feel it you see it it arises in mind and people go okay that that kind of makes sense to me so how would you sort of paint the picture of emptiness to make sense of the phenomena that i'm that i'm experiencing right now what am i sat on you know yeah well i think the the the the if we think of it in kind metaphorical terms is that in the picture of the world with intrinsic nature with Svabharvas, you've got you with your substantial self and then you've got the world around it and it is permanently creating resistance to your wishes and desires and you sort of bump into it and those collisions between the self and the world create suffering.

1:18:48And now on the picture of emptiness, of course, all the solidity, both of the world and of the self, go away this way. I mean, first of all, conceptually, but then hopefully also experientially. Right? And I mean, this is connected with another key concept that we didn't really have time to talk about today, dependent origination, or platitya samadpada, so the interdependence of things, if you might want to turn it that way. Right? And then so metaphorically, you might I'd say, okay, well, if you realize that view, then it's no longer the self-hitting the brick wall, but it is actually the causes and conditions that create the one passing

1:19:35Jan Westerhoff:through it on the other because neither of them has any solidity. right now this is of course not meant to be literally passing through walls but i'm trying to come up with an image here of seeing that what is causing the causing the existential suffering according to these theories is the mistakenly attributed rigidity both to yourself and to your others and you think okay so all of this stuff changes you know we get old we get sick we lose our faculties but in fact we want to hold on to this but the world is sort of conspiring against us and we can't do anything about that and that causes a lot of crisis but then if we realize that in fact there isn't anything there there right there isn't any core such that we must hold on to it because it is sort of precious and it's me and it makes me me and if it goes away this is kind of terrible and so on once you not just intellectually let that go but actually let that go in experience then you will end up with a position where the where you're still in public of course but the suffering dissipates yeah so um but i think you know i'm i'm just a sort of philosopher i think these are the kind of the questions that you need to talk to a meditation master yeah yeah sure so that's why that's why i want to know the philosophical view about like the the nature of reality and i kind of want to say like why why not why not just why can't i just posit that there is some foundational stuff like i you know i i when i when i speak to uh when i speak to a hindu right they will believe in the self but they'll think that the the idea that everyone has an individual self that sort of individuates and is real is a mistake like if you ask me to paint a picture of where i think is like the the middle metaphysical way i would say well on the one hand you've got a bunch of people who think that objects really exist that the lamp just has intrinsic existence that you're a self that i'm a self that there are billions and billions of selves um on the other hand you've got these buddhists who think that kind of like there is no self like there's literally no such thing as a self at all and in the madhyamaka school everything is empty there's there's no ground whatsoever and i want to say that like a middle way to me seems like something yeah i i've spoken to advaita vedantists on the show and they say yeah like like there is this thing called the self but there's only one of them and what you call your individual self is an illusion but there is something with intrinsic essence and that is the self and that is the same thing as brahmin and i kind of say like where where is it that they're going wrong for the for the magi amaka school at what point in their chain of of reasoning in saying there must be some foundational essence and i know what that essence is because i'm experiencing it like take consciousness or experience itself the one thing that most people will admit is truly undeniable that is i am having an experience right now maybe i'm having an experience of redness you know i see like a red light and it's shining in my eyes and that's that's that's real it feels weird to me to say that say the experience of redness that smooth experience that i have is empty that there's no substance that there's no intrinsic nature that there's nothing actually really happening there what would what would i want to break it down to the foundational sort of thing which i think is consciousness what is that made out of what is that dependent on what is that like what is non-ultimately real about just the direct experience of of redness or pain when you when you feel the pinch in your hand or something like that right okay so i mean one step back i mean in in case of advaita vedanta Shankara was described as a crypto-Buddhist.

1:23:32So where exactly the distinction between these schools is probably a topic for another podcast. It's certainly Shankara was very adamant that his view was not Buddhism. And the Buddhists are also very clear that their view is not Advaita Vedanta. But depending on how you spell them out, it's kind of difficult to see where this is going. But let's put that in a box for the time being. Because what you're really interested in, I think, is in the manifest undeniable reality of consciousness.

1:24:40Yeah, sure. yogacara idealism so another another form of buddhist philosophy as a form of illusionism so particularly marxidrat he defended that view um but um so you said okay so that we have the experience of red and surely that is real right um uh right on first of all on the one hand uh you would probably also you know you you look at some uh visual illusion right so two lines looking the same lengths but that they aren't you look at them they seem to be of the same length but you know that they are not right you cannot deny the fact that they are appearing to you in that way but you know that the way your visual processing works and mistakes them for this way so to that extent just the fact that something is given to you doesn't allow you to say that it's right because it might be that it's even though they they look they look the same lengths they aren't right that's fine yeah yeah so that is that's that's sort of one one issue where you should take into account so just because something appears to you it doesn't necessarily mean that therefore the appearance actually is unmistakably genuine as you can see from all kinds of illusions but i think the more important point is that what what is um what is wrong with the from the Madhyamaka perspective with the view of taking consciousness as ultimately real.

1:26:06And of course, the Madhyamakas argue against other Buddhists who take a very similar view to that, namely the Yogacarans, some of which are interpreted as saying that consciousness is ultimately real, and the Madhyamaka says, no, no, no, they've taken a wrong turn somewhere.

1:26:21Jan Westerhoff:Yeah, the Yogacara is often thought of as an idealist school, whether that's accurate is, of course. Yeah, that's again a debatable question, but it's certainly the case that this is the majority interpretation of the school. And it's also that when the Madhyamakas criticize Yogacara, they criticize it as a school that thinks mind is ultimately real. Okay. And so why do they think that's a problem? Well, the issue is, again, that as soon as you've got something ultimately real somewhere, you've got yourself an object of grasping that you can use in order to hang on your process of subjectification of the self by connecting it to something that is ultimately real right so it works in this kind of at once removed now the problem is no longer that you sort of believe in an art man but you've got something else and You think, okay, so that's actually the foundation of the universe, and I've got that right, and therefore I sort of have to share some of the ultimate realness of that that is in there.

1:27:32Yeah.

1:27:32Jan Westerhoff:But firstly, I mean, does that actually make it false just because it's got this unfortunate implication that there's something which you're kind of grasping onto? But also, do you have to do that? I mean, like I think an Advaita Vedantus would be very careful to say that if you believe that you as an individual are having, as a self, are having an experience of redness, then you're wrong. That in fact, there is just the experience. And I also understand optical illusions. I think they're fascinating and they prove that the content of our experience can be mistaken. But even the illusionist about consciousness, I just had Keith Frankish on my show.

1:28:12Jan Westerhoff:And he will be the first to tell you, he's like, I don't think consciousness is an illusion. I don't think that there is no experience happening. I think that what illusionists are really talking about is the self. I think that so much actually of our conversation about consciousness is really about the self without people realizing it but consciousness itself isn't the redness i mean that that redness is is one of the sort of is is the content of the conscious experience and even if you're having an illusion even if there's an optical illusion in front of you there is some kind of experience happening and i feel like i can admit of that without admitting of there being this thing called the self without feeling as though i am using that as a way to grasp onto the sense of Alex that I can't let go of, but just rather to say that it strikes me clearly and distinctly, as it were, that that is a thing with nature, with essence.

1:29:08Jan Westerhoff:And if there's anything that I could sort of point to, to found my metaphysics of intrinsic existence or whatever, it would be experience. Not that particular experience, not that experience of redness or this experience of the chair, but experience itself. The Buddhist emptiness idea would have to say that actually that somehow decoheres, that it's actually still, no matter what you think, it's still dependent on something more foundational. It's still causally or ontologically or myriologically dependent. But I say that experience is happening doesn't seem causally dependent because it's not about particular conscious experiences.

1:29:48Jan Westerhoff:It's just that there is experience happening. It doesn't seem to be made up of parts, so it doesn't seem to have any myriological dependence. And ontological dependence, I wouldn't even know how to begin addressing that. But it certainly feels very real in a way that doesn't seem to decohere like a table or even the self does. So if you think you have an experience of redness or something like that, so you would not think that it depends on causes and conditions? Well, this is the thing. I feel like that experience of redness must do because there's something which is sort of causing that particular experience.

1:30:23But the thing that I think is real, because of your optical illusions point in part, is not the redness per se, but that experience is happening. that it's like the this is the thing like the the like the um the sankya school within within

1:30:38Jan Westerhoff:hindu philosophy which has this kind of dualism not between mind and body but between like the the seer and the scene if you like the the sort of the the self which sees and everything which it sees and i feel like everything which is seen which includes internal things like like redness or or or hunger or whatever is separable from the thing that that that sees and this is the sort of hindu intuition is that all along like with all of those experiences with the sights that that you see with the with the sounds that you hear there's there's some kind of perceiving self and that's separate from the contents yeah i guess it's that perceiving self which i'm pointing to as the thing which strikes me as maybe having uh intrinsic existence that doesn't seem necessarily at least to require decohering into parts or ontological dependence and i feel like that's kind of what someone like an epitaphysantist says they say i totally agree with you that like everything is dependent on something else everything decoheres everything is actually sort of ground except for this this this self this perceiving self through which everything else that we're talking about everything the table the myriological symbols the concept of myriology all of it like like lands upon this this seeing self yeah yeah i suppose one one of the questions is to which extent you think okay so you need this as a theoretical posit in order to keep the whole system ticking along right you still need some you need some fixed point to have everything revolving around it of course and that brings us back to the um to the discussion we had earlier on whether that is necessary not and so on so yeah so that's that's one question the the other question is whether this substantial self that you have in mind here is actually something that is experientially accessible to you in some way right so on the one hand you could say well this is so the absolute self and whatever that may be is pretty much like the you know the kantian numenum it we know that it's there for theoretical reasons but it is not a subject of our experience right and um so that so if you say that that's right so it is actually not a not a subject of our experience then you might wonder okay so what is all the fuss about because it looks then like an idle wheel that is not actually doing anything theoretically because we don't need it presumably if we can have this kind of foundationless metaphysics and there's also nothing that shows up experientially, so it's not even an appearance.

1:33:19And then the question is, what is this actually doing here?

1:33:23Jan Westerhoff:And I suppose that the Madhyamaka conception would be, well, they don't deny that conscious experiences are conventionally real, right? So that you have an experience of retinas and so on. So it's not the case that they would say that this is not happening, But this is all itself dependent on causes and conditions that bring it about, and is presumably itself causing other things, causing your further experiences, causing experiences of other people, and so on. So, and it's the emptiness of the conscious experience is not that it's not there, but the emptiness is that there is nothing there that stands on its own independent of various dependence relations, parthood relations causal dependence relations super impositions by the mind and what have you right so it's this kind of network of interdependence that is conventionally real and that appears to you and it's the insight that it is only conventionally real which is supposed to bring about the kind of sociological effects that we've talked about okay so look there's been a lot here today and but in in another sense it's been there's been nothing because we've hardly scratched the surface as well as well as there being no intrinsic essence of anything we're saying but i mean i guess to my the picture i get in my head at the end of this is is that like when we talk about emptiness we're saying that that reality whereas most people kind of imagine like layers right they imagine that you can kind of zoom out or zoom in and you can break stuff down this is more of a picture of like i'm kind of picturing a bunch of nodes floating around in space and they've all got lines between them and that's what reality is there is no there's no foundation there's no totality there's just a bunch of interrelated um sort of stuff that is there but is only defined in relation to the other things that it sort of connects to and depends upon.

1:35:42Jan Westerhoff:I suppose it maybe functions a little bit like language in the way that if you open a dictionary, a dictionary is entirely self-referential, right? Like every single word in the dictionary is defined in terms of other words in the dictionary. If you went looking, if you followed the chain of the dictionary, you could say, well, that word has to be defined by another word and that word has to be defined by another word and so on and so on. And if you kept following those words in the dictionary, you'd end up sort of going in a circle right there would be no there's there's no like first word there's no foundational word there's no word which just stands on its own as a as a word and i suppose reality would have to function a bit like that that there's no foundational stuff that there's no foundational substance there's no foundational cause it's just a sort of interconnected web of of like interdependent stuff something like that because it's really difficult i have to admit to kind of picture what it is that we're talking about here you know and that's sort of the best i've got yeah i mean this is i mean what you've mentioned there's this is called the symbol grounding problem semantics which is i mean which is this is actually quite a fairly controversial issue because uh you might also think well there are certain words that you know get their meaning just by direct pointing.

1:36:58Well, yeah, that's the thing. So, because if you, I mean, I'm very sympathetic to this, you know, it all floats in the air idea for obvious reasons. But, I mean, this is also, it has also interesting implications with all kinds of things. For example, if you think there is something that an LLM is missing in being able to understand language and you think, well, it's a connection with the things, they know all the connection between the words, that's why they can generate texts, but they don't actually have any sort of direct connection with any or any of the reference if you think that's not necessary then you would probably think that you know what the speech that is coming out from an llm is is not fundamentally different from the one that comes up from human right let's okay let's let's let's put that to one uh to one side now what i mean what you described there is i think there's um uh very kind of ontological coherentism right which is i think is is is a perfectly good model to have for much of what the Madhyamakas are saying.

1:37:54I think the important point, just to keep in mind here, is that you've got this picture in your mind where you've got, you know, it's like the net of Indra with the nodes connected and hung up in the empty space. The important point is to not then get to the conclusion and say, I know I've got the structure of reality, right? So that's what it's really like. Because that is exactly the kind of step that the Madhyamakas don't want to make. I can say, okay, so seeing the world in this way is helpful for achieving the effect that this is what's supposed to bring about, namely the eradication of existential suffering and so on.

1:38:36But it is not an ultimately true theory of the world.

1:38:41Jan Westerhoff:It sounds a little suspicious, no? Like for someone who's not heard of this before, it sounds a little like there's this idea that I've got, but if you press me on it, I'm going to tell you, no, well, I never said it was true. I only said it's going to help you. And is that, is that where this bottoms out? Would it, would it be no problem for someone at the school to say like, maybe, I mean, it's not true. I'm not interested in truth. I'm just interested in whether it helps you. Is it really just be a sort of therapeutic thing? In other words, is it even appropriate to call this a metaphysical worldview?

1:39:25Right. Yeah. I think the differentiation we should not lose sight of here is the differentiation between conventional truth and ultimate truth, right? So at the conventional level, we have all the standards of reasoning and evidence that we use in philosophy and so on. And then Then we can debate whether Advaita Vedanta or Madhyamaka is the preferable viewpoint for all its kind of systematic reasons and so on. But then none of this has any implications for what is happening at the level of ultimate truth, how the world looks for the enlightened mind. So the opponent that you have in mind here is probably not somebody who would say, I never told you it was true, because that's not the point.

1:40:09The Madhyamaka still is able to differentiate between what is conventionally true and what is conventionally false. right so that is that is always that's always the case but there isn't anything there where you would say okay well this is this this is where the buck stops ultimately yeah it's just difficult to

1:40:29Jan Westerhoff:imagine isn't it like like that the world is is just groundless it begins to feel like what you're asking me to theoretically do is literally just remove the ground beneath my feet or say that the the ground beneath my feet is being suspended by the ceiling and the ceiling is being held up by the ground or something like that like there's a big pole connecting the ceiling in the ground and if you ask you know what is the ground it's the thing that's being held up by the ceiling and what is the ceiling what's the thing that's being held up by the ground they're just connected by this this pole or something and it just feels to me that if that's all there is and there's nothing outside holding the room in place there's no foundation that we've we've sort of lost any kind of ontological grounding maybe that's the point that is exactly the point you get a similar a similar sort of vertigo effect if you ask yourself coming back to the kantian numenum right so what is that actually that you know supports the phenomena and you'll find some Some of the later comments of Kant on that when he said, well, the noumenon is an ens rationes, a thought thing, right?

1:41:41So it's something that is thought up by the mind. Then you think, okay, now hang on a moment. So how can it be both a thought thing and also the support of phenomena? And then you get a similar thing. You kind of lost your bearings here now. I think with Madiamaka this is actually the point yeah

1:42:01Jan Westerhoff:that's why I like Schopenhauer I love Schopenhauer's sort of response to Kant because he comes along and says look I mean it's there's one thing which you experience both as a phenomena and a noumena and that's your body and you know what it's internally like to have this thing which he calls will and it just becomes this sort of form of idealism of saying that the noumena is the same thing that I experience in myself as the noumena which is the will And again, it seemed satisfying to me. I think you're quite right. Kant has this open question, which leaves you with a feeling of vertigo, until someone like Schopenhauer comes along and says, well, you know that thing you've got inside of you called will?

1:42:37Jan Westerhoff:That's what everything's made out of. And suddenly, my feet are back on the ground again. Maybe you're more comfortable than I am sort of being suspended. Yeah, I suppose it is. The question is whether you need this kind of metaphysical peg you need to hang yourself on, or whether you are, this kind of feeling of suspension is less vertigo-inducing than the idea of having a foundation. Yeah, I must say, at least for the time being, I know this is supposed to relieve me of suffering, but if anything, it's given me a bit of a headache and made me feel like I've got vertigo. But fascinating nonetheless.

1:43:08Jan Westerhoff:I think the extent to which that's true of me, and of course I'm joking, I don't really have a headache, But I think maybe it does just betray how uncomfortable I am letting go of an ontological foundation. And maybe if I spoke to some kind of Buddhist meditative expert, they would say, well, there's your problem. You need to learn to let go, my friend. And maybe I'll get there one day. And I'm not sure if it'll be through metaphysics. But whatever the case, emptiness has been the sort of name of the game today. You've got a couple of books which I point people to. We said before we started, you sort of wrote an exposition on Nagarjuna's work, which I'll link down below.

1:43:48Jan Westerhoff:but you've also got a book called The Non-Existence of the Real World, which is not explicitly a Buddhist text, but tries to approach the same issues from a sort of analytic philosophical perspective, which is well worth reading if people want to go deeper on this. So thank you so much for your time today. And I look forward to seeing what people make of this, because this will be the first time I imagine a lot of our listeners have been introduced to this concept of emptiness and intrinsic nature and whatnot. So who knows what they're going to think. But thanks for your time. Thank you.