Comments on “Terminology: Emptiness and form, nebulosity and pattern”

I hope readers will take this site just as what it is, and evaluate it against their personal experience of struggling with problems of meaningness.

Importantly, this isn’t meant to be Buddhism at all. In fact, what I was trying to say in this piece is that I want to leave the relationship between Buddhism and what I’m doing undefined; and that’s why I’m avoiding using the word “emptiness.”

This strategic ambiguity is to avoid having to argue with two hypothetical responses from Buddhists:

(1) This is Buddhism; you are ripping off Buddhist ideas and presenting them as your own.

(2) This is not real Buddhism; you have a wrong understanding of Buddhism and your distortions will lead people to hell.

The answer to (1) is that I’ve explicitly said that I’m inspired by Buddhism and much of whatever is of value here comes from there. I’m not presenting any of it as original. (Some of it might be original, but I don’t want to bother figuring out exactly what. If I were trying to get famous or a philosophy job or something, I’d have to do that, and explain how fantastically important and brilliant my contribution is, but I’m not.)

The answer to (2) is that I’m not claiming that any of it is actually Buddhist at all. No one should come here looking for information about Buddhism, and if you take what I say as Buddhism, it will probably send you to vajra hell.

I’m afraid that, at this point, I haven’t got enough of the introductory material up on the site for it to be possible to see what I am trying to do.

I got sucked into writing the metablog series about monism, because that’s what I’ve been studying myself in the past few months. Unfortunately, that derailed my work on the overview. The new pages about nebulosity are a return to that. More coming soon, I hope.

(But in the mean time, the last few pages of the monism series are languishing—not to mention my vampire novel. Aaack!)

I'm wondering if you can say anything more about 'I think that it is probably possible to give completely clear and precise explanations of “nebulosity” and “pattern.”'

Mmm. Not much, at this point. It will/would take building up an enormously greater amount of background conceptual machinery. So far I’ve been trying to write the book for a hypothetical “general intelligent reader,” which makes getting to anything really difficult very slow. I may skip ahead at some point and present that part of the story in a form that assumes fairly deep knowledge of several branches of philosophy, mathematics, and physics.

Part of the story is foreshadowed in “Boundaries, objects, and connections, though.