17 KiB
| title | date | techne | episteme |
|---|---|---|---|
| Milinda and the Minotaur | 2011-04-09 | :rough | :fiction |
One question plagues me, plagues me more than anything else. It undermines my rationality, casts doubt on all that I believe. Let me tell you a little story about it.
Milinda and the Minotaur
Imagine you are standing in front of a labyrinth, composed of lush hedges, expanding into the vast distance. You climb on a tree next to the entrance and can see the many twists and turns, make out same dead-ends, maybe even note a few promising paths, but the maze soons just becomes a uniform green canvas.
There are many rumors about the labyrinth, and while a few warn about a monster, most speak of the wonderful trees that are supposed to be hidden deep inside. O, what delicious fruit those trees have!
You want to confirm this, climb up on the tree again. If it is so great, shouldn't you be able to see it? But try as you may, you can't see them. Maybe a few openings, which could contain a small tree, or some glittering on the horizon, which may come from the golden fruit, but are you confident? Of course not.
Some of those rumors are more plausible than others, as you can see from your watch. There isn't any space for trees right at the beginning, which you can clearly oversee. The gargantuan tree in the middle of the garden also seems unlikely - while you can't see the middle, surely the tree would tower over it all, visible from everywhere? And if there really is a monster, it can't be too large, as the path is quite narrow and doesn't seem to widen.
Nonetheless, you embark on an adventure to explore the labyrinth. You gather all the maps you can find - even if they are wrong, and most must be, as they all contradict each other, they surely can't hurt. You intend to try them out and see how far they get you. You take heed of the warning that maybe there are no trees, that all the maps are only based on speculation, after all, and that you surely don't want to fall into a trap or encounter the monster. Regardless, you enjoy the scenery and the exploration, so the journey is already it's own reward.
You wander around for a long time and maybe even find some very interesting spots, meet new people along the way and once, you came to a little clearing, inside which stood a little sapling. It is not a tree, and carries no fruits, but the sight invigorates you because it makes the rumors a bit more plausible. Maybe, one day...?
Excited, you get out all the old maps you nearly forgot about and study them. Does any mention the sapling? You search and search, but they are all very confusing and incomplete and you can't quite be sure you are even reading some of them right. Some are easy to discard, they contradict your own notes of the maze. A few look more promising and you set out to follow them for a bit. But alas, you find yourself inside dead-ends again, but if you read the map a bit different, or accept that they may contain some mistakes, you still find some help in them. But is this true? Are the maps really essentially right or do you just want them to be true? All the little contradictions and mistakes, and the nagging doubt whenever they don't mention a flower or sculpture you found. If someone really drew the map from experience, wouldn't they have seen them, too, and written them down?
But there is this one map. It is very old and seems fairly unremarkable. Often, it just contains rough drafts, a few broad strokes on how the way goes. In many places, there are also revisions and additional lines, surely added much later by other wanderers, but a strong handwriting can be seen underneath. One night, when you take rest and the refreshing cool air calms your mind, you read it again, more carefully. And two things come to mind, features you hadn't noticed before or seen much anywhere else. Far away from the entry, the map suddenly gets more and more specific, noting seemingly random turns and hidden passages. And maybe even more curiously, there are no trees on that map. No fruits, no sights, nothing of interest at all, at first. But you look closer and think you can make out a pattern, a converging of paths and then you see it - there is a space at the end. You didn't see it because you always looked for drawings and notes, but it is the absence of lines that stands out. As if there was a point where there was no labyrinth anymore. As if it ended there.
This place captures your attention. How would you get there? There are many turns on that map, but no complete path. Often the notes don't even seem to fit together in any way, as if they not just contained gaps, but were impossible. But you can make out some spot not too far from here, so you decide to go, to see for yourself how good the map really is.
The new goal leads you along a very different way, one that you hadn't considered before. At times, it gets very confusing and the map offers no help, and sometimes, there are even thorns and thistles, but worst are the long stretches of boredom, when the labyrinth gets very simple and straightforward, but just goes on and on. You have no problem figuring out which turns will be a dead-end well in advance, but then suddenly, there comes one of those very specific notes on the map. The part of the maze looks like one you have seen many times before and you are already sure where to go, but the map urges you to take a turn right here. Your intuition and experience tell you that this will be a dead-end, one like many others just like it you have ended up in, but for some reason, you decide to follow the map.
To your surprise, the map is right! It really wasn't a dead-end and you can proceed. Maybe it is useful after all? But doubt creeps in again when you notice that the new path is very close to the old one. Sometimes you can even see it right through the hedges. Does it make such a difference? The map gets quiet again, but your intuition serves you well for the time being, when suddenly, just like before, the map notes an important turn. But this time you question its judgment even more because you can look down the way and clearly see that it is a dead-end! The map must be wrong, you can see the wall, there's nothing to be done here.
Disappointed, you turn around. The map is faulty like the others, after all, so there's no use staying in those tedious parts. Particularly the undergrowth really makes you wish to return to your old ways. But one night, during another rest, you read the map again. Maybe there is another way to read it... when you notice some of the random scribblings and your vision shifts, it changes of how you see the map. Those other lines are not about the general turns, but about the thistles and thorns! When you look back at your last few day, you now see that occasionally, you came to a well-known pattern and on your way through always encountered those painful plants, but if you had gone how the lines told you, a bit more inefficiently and seemingly in circles sometimes, then yes, it's true, you would have avoided most of them!
That's quite a level of detail there, something you didn't expect at all. Is it just a fluke? The next morning, you want to find out, so you follow the map again, back to the dead-end, but this time, you try to go more along the way the lines seem to indicate, taking detours, but to your surprise, you really have a better time. Rarely does the path get painful, and because you wander around so many curves and loops, even the boredom ceases.
You return to the dead-end. You can clearly see it there. If you follow this turn, as the map says, you won't be able to go on anymore. It is futile. Still, the recent discovery has made you more confident, so you just take the turn anyway. You might as well see the dead-end in all its glory. Just a few minutes and you are there, surrounded by thick hedges, with no hope of continuing your journey. You study the map, but there really is no other interpretation. Saddened, you sit down to rest.
You give up on thinking yourself through this, put away the map and stop thinking about what mistakes you might have made, about how you could have walked or what those lines really could have meant and just close your eyes and lie down to sleep, right where you are.
You sleep long, and even though it was just the middle of the day, you do not awake until the next morning. The sunshine finally wake you up and when you open your eyes, you see it. Right in front of you, there is a small passage, right through the hedge. You would have never seen it from above, but the twigs give away just slightly and form a narrow space you can probably crawl through. You have no doubts anymore. This is what the map meant, you understand now. You make your way through the dark underwood and arrive again on a more secure path. This time, you listen closely to the map, try out it's playful suggestions and over all this new-found joy, you nearly forget where you were going, until, after a long journey, something appears you have never seen - a straight path.
No turns anymore, no curves, just a straight path, that gets brighter and brighter, the further you go, and at the end of the path, the hedge gets thinner and spottier, until it finally stops altogether and the ground, which so far has always been earth and sand, becomes grass and then you see it, what you could never have seen from the entrance, because it is not a high tree, towering over the garden, but a wide and clear lake. The glittering, it was not from the fruits, but it is the sunlight, reflected in the calm surface of the water. There is no wind, no disturbance at all. You sit down at the lake, let your feet hang into the water, but before the peace of the sight can overwhelm you, you look onto the horizon and the lake just stretches on and on, and you start to swim, thinking, maybe, there is another shore...
What comes before a question?
There is an important fallacy, one that plagues all religious thought. I'm gonna call it the Unjustified Focus. What it means is that among the vast realm of possible ideas, one needs a large amount of evidence upfront to even consider one idea as worthy of investigation. You start with general evidence, then look for hypotheses that might fit them. Once you have narrowed it down a bit, you can start trying to disprove specific ideas. But you can't just pick any one idea and start the research with it. Imagine if the justice system worked like this - you can only start investigating a specific person after you have some evidence already that they might be relevant, not just on a hunch.
This is important, but hard to really grasp because it puts the normal order of an argument on its head. Let's look at an example. Imagine there's been a traffic accident, a car crashed into a tree. The police starts the investigation, when one officer suggests that it was clearly aliens. Aliens?, you ask, why aliens? And he explains, there is no evidence that disproves aliens, right? No eye witness that didn't see a UFO? And if aliens did it, they surely would leave no obvious evidence behind, and that is exactly what we find. And of course, if aliens did it, they would probably use a laser beam of some sort, so we would expect the car to be still hot, and just feel the hood, it really is hot!
The problem is hopefully clear. It's not that any of the three later claims is false - they aren't. The hood really is hot, there are no obvious signs and we don't have evidence against aliens. But that's irrelevant because we don't have any reason to think of aliens in the first place! We first would have to find evidence that clearly points towards aliens, then we could think about whether it actually is true or not. Just picking an arbitrary idea with no justification and focusing on that is invalid.
And that's the crux here. Instead of dismissing any specific evidence or argument, we need to dismiss the question. You don't just need evidence to answer something, but you already need evidence to even ask about it, too!
This has been a major revelation for me. Let me state it again because it is so important - to even start asking questions, you already need evidence at hand. If you don't have it, then all the further speculation is irrelevant, completely independent of the strength of any following claim.
This blows many religious lines of thought right out of the water. It matters not how convincing a case Christians, for example, make that God might have created the universe because before all that, they need to establish that they have evidence that we even should think about this. They get the order of proof wrong - they start with an conclusion "God did it" and then work backwards. And it all matters not, none of it. We would first need to have evidence that points forward, and until we have that, we can dismiss all further claims, unseen.
So if someone has no good reason to start asking questions, we can ignore all their answers, even if they might be valid or even true! That's the strength of this fallacy.
And this dismantles not just religious thought, but so many things. Whatever the ancient Greeks thought about atoms, we can ignore it - they had no way to observe them, so it is all meaningless. The old enlightened philosophers, thinking about human nature? All irrelevant - they didn't know about evolution, without which they couldn't have possibly understood the origin of any behaviour. If you don't get your first step right, nothing that follows it matters anymore.
How could the Buddha have known?
For a while, I thought I wielded not just Occam's razor, but Occam's meat cleaver. The power of the Unjustified Focus was so strong, I could take apart whole traditions in one precise strike. But then one thought came up, and with it doubt, a little at first, then more and more, until I realized that Eris had successfully stolen the cleaver right out of my hand and cut me in two.
"Does the Unjustified Focus really only go one way?"
The idea of it is, after all, if you haven't been through the maze, you can't draw a map. You can ignore the map of anyone that never entered it - it can't possibly be correct. But, that's just one direction. It also goes the other way
- if someone has an accurate map, then they must have been through the maze.
And with that thought, it all came down. I have been cheating, mentally. I had accepted ideas without considering where they came from. I took Buddhist teachings and practices, but never considered their origin. It is not that they might be wrong that got to me because I knew that they were right. I had seen it for myself. This didn't upset me. It's the implications that got to me.
If the map is reliable, then what about it's other features, the ones I wrestle with? And what about the one that drew it? How could it be conceivably possible that someone knew the details without having seen them themselves? But he claims that there is an exit. Should I then trust him?
And with this realization, the second fetter fell.
It makes no sense. Some common insights, sure. Even anatta, even that. It may, after all, be just a lucky guess. Philosophers have claimed nearly everything by now, so someone has to be right, after all. But all the details later?
If you had a map that was right the first few times, ok, that could just be chance or maybe you had a really good look from the entrance or collected all the popular stories you heard, hoping they'd converge to some truth.
But if the map just keeps on being right, even when you get deeper and deeper? Beyond a certain depth, there is only one plausible interpretation - the map is correct. But the map claims to lead you to an exit. If it is correct, that exit must exist. If it is correct, the one that drew it must have reached it.
The more I learn about his teachings, the more I see that they are true. His insight seems to be without limits. From every mystic I learn, I find flaws in their teachings. This is to be expected; no one could have understood everything, certainly not on their own. They all provide valuable insights, but also many clearly false ideas.
Only one seems immune. I run out of excuses. I fail to come up with plausible scenarios how he, in his time, could have been so wise. I find it harder and harder to dismiss the possibility that, really, he did achieve nirvana. That the teachings must be true. All of them. That I can no longer dismiss the parts I am uncomfortable with, the parts I don't want to be true.
It seems impossible. On what knowledge could the Buddha have built his teachings? He didn't know neuroscience. He didn't know evolution. He predates all of science. Yet, his teachings are true. How can this be?
And I think of Thích Quảng Đức. He didn't even move. Desire can be overcome.