Comments on “Stances trump systems”

Wow, I hadn’t noticed our huge agreement here. The point you make on this post is a central theme on my blog. I use the term “modules” where you use “stances”. But throughout my blog, I try to get Christians, Buddhists and Atheists AWAY from discussing systems and instead, digging down as deep as they can to discuss the smallest mind patterns they can recognize and name for the purposes of dialogue – the less abstract the better.

Thus, I may even encourage to go deeper than “Monism” and “Eternalism” etc… But as a half-way point, so to speak, these are a far improvement over “Christianity”, “Buddhism” and “Atheism”, “Democracy” or whatever layered abstraction they use as a banner.

I think the challenge for us is to be encouraged with each layer down we dive but to never be smuggly satisfied with any layer we are at – I’d wager you agree.

So, in light of our huge agreement, I have three thoughts/questions:

(1) Essentialism
I wonder if “Essentialism” is another module/stance that could be considered an important ‘mistaken stance’? BTW, perhaps “unbalanced” stance may be another productive way to name these views.

(2) Web/Nest of Stances
I don’t think a stance has consequences in isolation necessarily. But as a module of mind, is in complex relationships of networks with many other stances – each weighted emotionally and each linked to particular environmental triggers. So that two people with the same stance, can display them completely differently – one healthy and one unhealthy depending on all the checks and balances of other stances and habits.

(3) Judging a Stance
It seems we must have some way of judging a stance in utilitarian or some other standard to call it mistaken, confused or unbalanced. Have you been explicit with this? Is it merely the inability to accept nebulosity or something of that nature? Further, if my #2 is correct, even this judgment will be severely hampered and instead point us more directly to our standard – the course on which we feel the ship should be set.

Ah, I see you have Essentialism as a placeholder in your book – awaiting your writings. When you say you “haven’t figured out yet how to treat it”, maybe that is because you strained too much to put all things into “False Dichotomy” categories so that you can transcend them with Non-Dualism. Such a methodology may obscure one’s objectivity at categorizing or identifying.

Maybe there are tons of things like Essentialism and things more basic than them that don’t fit into neat pairs. I see no constraining reason why the mind must develop models in pairs.

Concerning “wrong stances”, I think another complication in the issue is how people may confess or proclaim a stance but they actually do not act on it. Thus, though proclaiming a wrong stance, their web of stances show that they give it almost no weight. I think “weighting” is an important element too.

Yes, maybe eternal ordering, eternalism, essentialism and many more are grouped and we could name more. To go out of your way to group them into false dichotomies seems like a methodology that may force you to miss much and oversimplify important elements. Your methodology may work as a great heuristic, or a convenient mnemonic, so I can see its attraction.

Because you asked. Sorry, a bit many. As you will quickly see, I am a very lay philosopher. More than philosophizing, I am offering ways of seeing from my very low Yāna:

• Many Self-No Self : Demystifying the Buddhist phrase using modules
• Web of Beliefs : Web of modules
• Beliefs as Circuit Components : modular components
• Images of Self : a modular view and a many self view.
• The Moral Mind : viewed modularly
• Your Modular God : addressed to Christians

I totally understand that scope issue. Perhaps saying it up front and referring back to it is helpful. For I think my basic suspicion will be common to many reader. But as I said, using the scope will prove a useful heuristic and I get that.

Interestingly, I had never heard of Marvin Minsky until well after I wrote my ideas on modules when someone said I sounded like him. For me, the society of minds came to me during self-observations and lots of unique (for me) experiences.

Yes, we agree on a lot. I like your categories – all are very useful. I agree with your agenda. That is why I think it is a shame that there is not more variants of Buddhism for Atheists.

I must say, though, I can’t imagine how people can get at many of these observations without strong self-observation – it offers very valuable data sets otherwise missing in the dialogues.

I have been kindly referred here by Sabio. I have clearly arrived in the middle of the movie and the plot, philosophical terms, and characters are too complicated for me to engage the ongoing discussion. So I would like to pull back to the basic title.

As a Buddhist with Tibetan teachers and someone who often hangs around Roman Catholic blogs, I can only give very limited assent to “Stances Trump Systems”. This is not completely so anywhere, and it is far less so among Catholics and Tibetan Buddhists. Why? Because, in both cases, the experts from the systems, Buddhist monks and Catholic priests, make proactive efforts to address the issue of stances vs. systems directly. The priests “catecise” as many of their flock as will cooperate, particularly among the young. Buddhist monks regularly “teach the Dharma” and teach it widely in the lay community, not just to novice monks.

The result of this in both these systems is a core and periphery phenomenon where many, if not most followers are largely governed by the principles of the system rather than by independent stances. And, in fact, most followers, monastic or lay have a high degree of knowledge of the issues within the system and a fair degree of sophistication about applying it.

There is, of course, always a fringe of people who are dominated by stances despite nominal assent to the systems, but among both Catholics and Tibetan-trained Buddhists [Both Tibetan and Euro-American] it is relatively small.

You will find this to be so on Catholic blogs, which are almost completely authored by the laity and are highly knowledgeable and quite sophisticated about the system and its issues.

And I can testify directly to this in the case of Buddhism. My own Dharma Center has been in existence for 33 years. We are at the point where we have a few Buddhist grandchildren as well as lots
of Buddhist children among long term members. The monastics have come to teach only 1-3 times a year for the Center’s entire life, and we have one resident lama who teaches twice a month, but we teach 3 classes weekly–Basic meditation instruction, Beginning Buddhism, and Advanced Buddhism, as well as separate “book study” groups moderated by long-term members.

Virtually everyone who had been at the Center longer than 3 years is knowledgeable enough to teach at least one of these classes and many members of 5 years or longer can teach all of them. To say nothing of someone like me who is 27 year member. The traveling monastics expect this of us because they teach us at what would be an intermediate level in the monastery, where the Dharma is studied every day.

There are very few of us whose conduct is not mostly congruent with what we teach or have been taught. This was also the case in old Tibet, and among the Tibetan settlements on the sub-continent. Most families sent the first born son, and, sometimes, others to the monasteries and virtually everyone had a close monastic relative with whom they could discuss the Dharma in quite precise detail.

In other Buddhist traditions, China, Japan, Myanmar, Korea and so on, as well as in most Protestant denominations the experts are a close and closed circle who service the laity rather than teach them on the level of sophistication where knowledge becomes theology. The resultant gap between stances and systems is wider overall and touches more people. But even among these there are quite a few “non-experts” among the laity whose conduct and attitudes are largely congruent with the system, and who know a good deal about it.

I feel this page could use some fleshing out with more examples of stances versus systems. In reflecting on my own beliefs, I’m unsure what to call a “stance” and what to call a “system” based on this page. I imagine (and hope) this will become more clear as I go along.

As a side note, you seem to be missing a question mark in this sentence: {I mean that if you ask “How do you think about questions of meaning, value, purpose, or ethics,”}

This site is absolutely amazing. Things became so much clearer in the last year or 2 and it was due to realisations that many of the things I felt I had to decide between were kind of both maybe but maybe neither and that would have made me horribly anxious before but not anymore. I used to obsess over finding an ideal system I believed was “right” and it was screwing with my life big time to be that obsessed with it previously. I tried to explain it to my wife early aftet noticing it and I called it “I zoomed out” and she thought I went mad (or “even more mad” as she … jokingly (?) said.) It started with my idea of real having different meanings, after years of looking into various philosophical systems and explanations for things and a big one was looking into a laymans description of quantum physics from David Bohm. “Wholeness and the implicate order” in the 2nd part of the book it shows there is likely an implicate order (David Bohms term) of waveform information which on interacting with consciousness, becomes explicate or material world, and that makes sense somewhat and would explain a lot if true.. Kant said similar things in a different way with “transcendental idealism” which could be understood as a different perspective on this obviously w/o physics. I did not become meta or whatever you call it in many other ways of thinking and for every context, It feels like there are still a lot of areas where it is missing for me. For a while I called this way of understanding contradictory things in such a way that made everything make even more sense “seeing the many natures of -” or “the dual nature of -“. I saw someone (maybe on here) call it “I became meta to-” and I like that too. I did not realise until I saw this site and others like it that everything can be looked at like this. I used it primarily to explain the nature of the world to myself I am slightly autistic and I just said fuck ot why not. I found it funny that you can interject between an evolution and creation debate even and say what if ‘gods mind is dissociated’ is one way to see the so called implicate order or consciousness as viewed from a primarily or total-idealist perspective but also understanding that because it is apparent we have to exist in a mostly (independent or material) way so we have to pick contexts to use each view. So the boundary between self and other is less apparent when it is notions of consciousness and matter being considered, but we better remember it is much more rigid in day to day life or consequences could be disastrous. Consciousness could be the prime reality from which the thoughts from ??? (not religiously but similar to a general idea of god?) arise. So theoretically (not saying “this is true!” But “one way to see i) This god thing or whatever might be generating or simulating this “reality” we see as physical. And so both evolution and creation could be true, because the thoughts/waves/implicate order could be viewed as being “created by god” (or of the source or whatever) but evolution observably happens from our perspective inside “physical reality”, and since this god or consciousness that exists in and of itself, is so much more complex than we can imagine it might order this creating process in line with the laws of physics that we observe in physical reality. And, random numbers and mutations that may be random, and random events generally, are examples of where it could be tinkered with by this originating conscousness .. and of course it could have even been set into motion like a thought experiment and not tinkered with. But again, we definitely live in the “real world” that we can see. The part where someone who realises this says “but that means I’m not real” like I did at first and many people say once they hear a short form of that, is the part where a person can get stuck as people say, and when you move past it, it feels like zooming out on a satellite view map and being able to make sense of where you are. Going meta or whatever happened in at least one other way too for me but this is long enough. I can’tant wait for this book to come out and I can see some of the areas I havent even thought to apply it. This site is already an awesome resource unfinished. I hope most of what I said makes sense, I think it does…