I want to gently push back on the emptiness thing. I'll be just another voice in the cacophony, but it seems like you take a very scholarly approach to emptiness (which is excellent and critically valuable) but what about the direct experience part?
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Replying to @meditationstuff @Meaningness and
Agreed that there are exoteric and esoteric usages of the term, and dharma battles, and scholarly debates. But, I'll personally bite "emptiness is a phenomenological referential quality that confers immediate knowledge of something like 'that seeming territory is actually map'"
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Replying to @meditationstuff @JakeOrthwein and
Well… most of the words in that are not used in any traditional explanation. They don’t unambiguously correspond to any traditional vocabulary, afaik? So what you are describing might be a thing, which might or might not be the same as some version of “emptiness”?
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Replying to @Meaningness @JakeOrthwein and
That's very true. But, if there's a landscape, and there's salient things in a landscape, and they're somewhat spaced apart. One can point, and even if the pointing is vague, people often look in the direction of finger and get same referent.
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Replying to @meditationstuff @JakeOrthwein and
Ah, yes, same metaphor I was using! So, my vague feeling is that the landscape is less distinct than it seems you take it to be. I am quite unsure about this, though.
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Replying to @Meaningness @meditationstuff and
Somewhat tangentially, I’ve been working on-and-off on a post that says “I don’t understand the map-vs-territory distinction” for about five years now. I’ve failed to finish it because I don’t even understand what I don’t understand… It’s been “nearly done” that whole time tho
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Replying to @Meaningness @JakeOrthwein and
It seems like some people seemingly intuitively understand it (e.g. LessWrong, general semantics) and some people seemingly understand it but think it's contradictory
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Replying to @meditationstuff @Meaningness and
I find it to be super useful, both conceptually/metaphorically and phenomenologically, but I haven't strived for deep self-consistency in its usage.
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Replying to @meditationstuff @Meaningness and
Phenomenologically, a shocking type-repeatable moment, when something seemingly "real and out there" becomes "in here and 'empty' or just a model or just a belief." I do think this can square w/ functionalism, enactivism, no-representation-anywhere (using these terms informally)
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Replying to @meditationstuff @JakeOrthwein and
So, fwiw, I agree things like this can happen, & can be mind- and life-altering at the time. My hesitations would be (1) reifying them as a clear-cut category could be counterproductive by leading people to try to produce a specific set of phenomena rather than allowing as-it-is
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and (2) relating them to “emptiness” may add unnecessary conceptual complexity and confusions due to the ill-definition of that word.
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