Really enjoyed this essay on the emptiness (mind-constructedness) of our conceptual categories by psychologist and practitioner Ruben Laukkonen.
Mainstream cognitive science also argues that apparent physical objects such as a table or a chair is dependent upon a constellation of features, or statistical regularities, and there are ambiguous cases for every category. You can have chairs that look like tables and tables that you sit on. You can put your plate on a chair and eat from it, if you want to.
Subatomically, the leaf of a tree is continuous with the sky and the roots with the Earth. In philosophy, this is known as the problem of vagueness; wherein any object that we try to classify as a truly existing ‘natural kind’ breaks down upon careful investigation. Strict definitions cannot be found even for biological species.
It is illustrated by the Sorites Paradox, also known as the bald man problem or the paradox of the heap: How many hairs makes a man bald? How many grains of sand make a heap? It is, in every case, arbitrary. Reality is far too wavy, not particular enough, and perhaps best analogised by the color spectrum:
You see where this is going.
Categories, “things”, are man-made, mind-inferred, and therefore, empty of real, inherent, existence. All is inference is really a contemporary neuroscientific teaching about emptiness.
Great essay from Brian Klaas about the dangers of trying to solve everything with data. As much as it resonated, I think it’s important to keep this perspective in balance. While it’s true that converting life’s mysteries into puzzles is not ideal (specifically in spiritual practice we want to open up into the fundamental mystery at the heart of our being, as Ken McLeod puts it), moving too far in the other direction, assuming everything is a mystery that can’t ever be solved, is a kind of nihilism. We need to chart a middle way.
We have been sold the lie that the good life is one that is fully optimized, where life hacks obliterate any lingering demons of inefficiency, with successful days measured solely by the numbers of items crossed out on to-do lists. When trying to get to the airport on time, Google Maps is a godsend. But when we choose to take an optimized route to shave off a minute—even it diverts us from a slower but better road toward awe, or wonder, or exploration—we strip out and murder part of our humanity, sacrificing it on the altar of hyper-efficient, data-driven control.
13.8 billion years of the Universe’s tinkering has culminated in us, creatures with the most extraordinary and seemingly unique consciousness. It would be a waste to devote that cognitive magic and the overwhelming improbability of our existence to a Lifehack Lifestyle, with an unquenchable thirst for optimization.
Modern data wizardry allows us unprecedented opportunities to tame truly destructive scourges: crippling poverty, devastating disease, premature death. It will help us solve important puzzles. But we would be wise to avoid taming the wildness that makes us human—all while ensuring that we don’t make the catastrophic, Sisyphean error of imagining that we can and should try to use data analytics to tame the world’s enduring, unknowable mysteries.
Another interesting piece by “Bentham’s Bulldog” (lol) on the argument for God’s existence based on the fine tuning of various physical constants. The weakest part of the argument is where he tries to make claims about what the nature of the supernatural being is based on a kind of Ockham’s razor - a perfect God (whatever that is) is the simplest explanation. The essay doesn’t contend with all the ways existence seems random and downright awful for most living beings, which cuts against a simple notion of perfection. But the broader point here to me is to recognize the limitations of arguments in general. This is a much larger topic, but briefly, I think the fact that there is such heterogeneity in what (smart) people believe and the deep uncertainty at the heart of life’s mysteries (e.g. the hard problem of consciousness) should lead one to a kind of intellectual humility that gives up in the idea that argumentation is going to lead to a definitively correct conception of the universe. Now, as stated above, we have to be careful not to give ourselves over to nihilism by denying the utility of arguments in general, but the bigger the conclusion, the more we should rest in that uncertainty.
Regarding arguments, I think Rene Guenon said that ultimately all these spiritual schools can offer is a point of view, not some kind of total answer, and I think it's really the same for just about anything.