All Things Are Empty – Intro to Madhyamaka Buddhism

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Come to my North American tour this November: https://www.alexoconnor.com/p/tour.

My man, we need a response to Joe Schimd

Hi Alex. Great talk. I find Madhymaka a bit confusing/sometimes insufferable too, even though I love some of the practitioners eg the Dalai Lama.

One thing I find interesting is how you always assume this thing called consciousness is different from everything else. One thing I like about their world view is they say everything is empty/only causal. Then they say even that idea is empty (in my extremely basic you tube understanding)

You on the other hand insist that this thing called consciousness must be real, and different from brain function.

But each aspect of the world looks like it stands on its own, and each action feels like it has free will. It is only when we study a life time and a whole universe that we realise this is at least 99.99 percent false and all causal (and there is no actually proof for that 0.001% either, but we allow it for the sake of argument)

I saw a video where you said brain function is not the same as consciousness. But if we are able to map every firing of every neuron over a person's life there is a very good chance we may see they are the same thing. All we would need to prove is an exact experience matches an exact brain firing. With the tiny amount of understanding I have about brain chemistry and body coordination, I would be inclined to believe that would be how it worked (physics teacher, not my expertise)

So when we acknowledge as time passes even the wave function can be explained by math (ok, probabilistic math, but still math) what makes you think this one aspect of our life that we have is divorced from this web.

I am a secular Muslim. But only by faith and honestly an appreciation for its aid in me living a good life and dieing in peace. I am ok with an argument that there must be a primary cause. But it seems to me to be AT LEAST as fanciful as this version of emptiness.

Thanks for your great work. 😌✊🏾

Yes I agree. "Let's just stick with c*nt for the time being" ….. deep!

Glad to finally see you investigating this. That being said, there's quite a significant number of scholars that would probably have been better placed to explain Prasangika Madhyamaka. There are many geshe's or geshema's, for example, who have an excellent command of the English language – Ven. geshe Dorji Damdul or Ven. geshe Lhakdor would be excellent interlocutors if you want to get an understanding of Madhyamaka. Geshe Namdak (Dutchman) is right there in London, too.
Additionally, I'd argue Madhyamaka is not a great place to start. It's like reading Shakespeare as a beginner in the English language…

Don’t get hit by the second arrow. Regarding how an awakened experiences pain. A hint may be given in the Sallatha Sutta. When an ordinary person is hit by an arrow, a story around the event will begin, ”this is terrible”, and so on, this will cause additional pain, as being shot by a second arrow. This second arrow won’t hit an awakens one.

Amazing episode! I wish Westerhoff had more time to go into his arguments on causality.

Nagarjuna's response to the advaita vedanta argument is that while there is no necessary relation between the experiencer and any particular content of consciousness, you cannot conceive of 'experience' without SOME contents per se. Call it, contentuality (or intentionality). So while there is nothing which dictates that the field of experience must be composed of e.g. redness, there is something which dictates that the field of experience must have some content, qua content, and that sans this, whatever we're talking about starts to sound like something very much OTHER than what we mean by an 'experiencer' or by 'experience'. You end up, if you pursue this line of vedantic thought, with a 'bare experiencer' without experiences.

In fact, when you try to conceptualise a field of experience, your mind automatically assigns it a content (e.g. for me it's similar to my thumbnail picture), so even your visualisation of an empty field contains content. Nagarjuna has arguments for why conceptualising a contentless experience is nonsensical; they're somewhat similar to Berkeley's arguments against matter, but of course the aims of the two thinkers are different, and Nagarjuna uses the logic to attack both Materialism and the Berkleyian type of substantial Idealism.

So the conclusion is that the experiencer cannot be separable from experiencing or from possible objects of experience. At the same time, flipping things around, we know that there is no single object of experience which GROUNDS the experiencer. Like above, 'this apple' cannot be a sole and unitary ground for 'experience'. So the 'experiencer' is necessarily dependent upon possible 'objects of experience', and necessarily grounds particular 'objects of experience'. I use scarequotes because atm we're using a dichotomy between experiencer and objects of experience as an expedient explanatory tool, but Nagarjuna is not a dualist.

This solution of collapsing experiencer and objects of experience into one can't therefore be a resolution of the subject-object dichotomy which falls on the side of the Subject. Nor can it be one that falls on the side of the 'object'. It's inbetween. I.e. experience and its contents are reciprocally and mutually interdependent. I like this bit because you don't 'lose' the real world and retreat into an odd kind of solipsism. Going further, the experiential ground and the content of that experience are mutually determining (the content determines the nature of experiencing, the experiential ground shapes the content). What we have then is this 'between', from which we later derive on the one side 'experiencer' and on the other side 'objects of experience', despite both being existentially co-implicated in one another in a necessary, irreducible way. One of the delusions is taking this derived dichotomy, and smuggling it back in as the 'ground', oft-called the 'subject-object' split.

Nagarjuna then goes further to say that only this implicated mix is there, and that each of experiencer and content without the other is a red herring that (may) have some explanatory use but ultimately leads to delusion. Let's for now call it some kind of physico-psychic 'stuff'. If we were being metaphorical we might say that instead of a mechanical object-universe, or a psychological subject-universe, it's a vital animal-like universe.

He then goes even further to warn against reifying this experiencer-content fusion into something substantially real. I think Leibniz is maybe relevant here…. Nagarjuna shows that each experiencer-content fusion is — irreducibly — implicated with with other 'minds', which can be and always already are possible objects of experience. Likewise, 'you' (this experiencer-content fusion) is a possible object of experience for those other minds (those other experiencings). So you end up with a vertiginous infinite ricochet of mutually plummeting gazes, so to speak. It's about recognising that each 'mind' (experiencer-content fusion) gives each other mind its existence, in a mutually interpenetrating way. It's a holographic model, in some ways. Each experiencer-content fusion contains each other, which contains every other one in turn. Indra's net, but the nodes on the net are created by all the other relations and nodes. This then leads to ethical anti-nihilism, and non-determinism, in that

a) your existence existentially depends upon the existence of everything else, such that 'you' and 'everything else' are only conventionally useful designations.
a.2) everything else's existence depends upon 'you', so neither can you neglect your 'self'
b) 'you' aren't a static simple being afflicted by a world of demonic causes, but are a physico-psychic distribution across a causal field. The causes 'determining' 'you' are part-determined by 'you' in turn. In fact they aren't 'outside', and so it is inappropriate to use language describing them as something acting upon you as a subject. They constitute you and you constitute them. One helpful way is looking at the self as a local causal field, including but not limited to a body, and connected to wider global causal networks. You still have conventional causality in that the body's causal efficacy is largely dependent upon space and time, but you also have liberation in that space and time are dependent upon and shaped/constructed by your body's causal efficacy.

I definitely reify Nagarjuna's sunyata more than he would have liked (I'm still an atheist rather than a buddhist), since i turn it into a metaphysics. Where I think i'm maydhmaika-aligned is that for me, the emptiness of emptiness is not saying 'nothing is true', but saying that madyhamika is 'corrective.' It is not that something called 'emptiness' exists as a real void within the heart of everything. Rather, sunyata, or emptiness, is ITSELF dependent upon and made necessary by the cognitive tendency to assert svabhava. It is a corrective/cure, that depends upon the ailment it cures. It is a truth dependent upon a tendentious mistake which we're always-already falling prey to.

This is the kind of 'ultimate' view (obvs i'm not enlightened, so technically it's not, but ygm). Nagarjuna is way more interesting when he folds this back into conventional reality, and imo solves the 'postmodernism' issue without ignoring the accurate criticisms pointed out by various philosophers grouped under the (unhelpful) label of postmodernism.

Carlo Rovelli I think has come up with some quantum physics applications of Nagarjuna's ideas too which are taken pretty seriously.

Leave the table alone

As someone else said, try to bring a speaker specialised in Kashmir Shaivism and Abhinavagupta's thought system.

Everything is an object in consciousness, except the thing being conscious – Objection your honor!! Presuppositionalist special pleading (by Alex the idealist) – attempting to sneak in the observer as a kind of special self thingy akin to a god (ie bollocks)

My kingdom for a horse sunyata

Himmler can't even pronounce the word budhha and nagarjuna probably 🤦🏻🤦🏻
Its budhha and nagarjuna, not budhhaaa and nagarjunaaa, those would be women. They were men not women 🤦🏻🤦🏻

I really liked vasubandhu the older and vasubandhu the younger, like being called peter from zéro to 2026.

Maybe the human key for being, a pyramidal neuron calculus, is activated by neutrinos ? each time a neutrino triggers the key pyramidal neuron you think therefore you are, no less … no more ? if this key fries you know but you are not.

Pachamama knows she too needs a neutrino detector. ,😁

Nagarjuna has a good principle for ahimsa, to not harm : the sunyata of the reifications of array interdependence, like Neo with the architect , therefore your pyramidal neurons are logically set ahimsa, the stick is not a snake or your hate is a spike. you have to see clearly to aikido the musht white nalagiri elephant.