Made me tear up.

Somewhat but I have quibbles with solipsism as people very often mistake it for what I’m talking about. Solipsism, as a philosophical position, remains trapped in the duality of “self vs. world,” endlessly debating whether the world is “out there.” Zen, on the other hand, points directly to the experience prior to that division - the awareness in which both “self” and “world” arise as dependent, interrelated appearances. As I said, there is a whole world before thought. Solipsism still operates on the level of thought. Zen takes another step back from that, and that’s a very important distinction. Which unfortunately is very hard to explain because explanation itself is just thoughts. I can’t describe that which is inherently undescribeable.

The deeper point is that the observer itself is just another perception, not a fixed entity having experiences. The shared vocabulary we use isn’t proof of an external world; it’s just what happens when awareness interacts with itself, creating the appearance of separation and then appearing to bridge it with language.

Zen asks, what is true, before you think about it.

Edit: Solipsism is kinda like the immature little brother of Zen that’s (noisily) playing in the same pool but won’t go to the deep end.

I was, yes. I think even if I wasn’t I probably wouldn’t use those terms anyway since in online discourse it never looks good.

I feel a little timid about trying to answer this because at this point, I know that people can talk about these things intellectually forever and it just won’t… click. It’s so hard to write about too because if I tried to write in a way that very perfectly reflects my experience, the text becomes weird and cumbersome ( and then when I don’t, people try some gotchas like “ahaa but you refer yourself as “I”, doesn’t that mean you still believe in an individual self”, no but writing more precisely gets in the way of the message ).

First, believing whatever I want to believe is definitely a danger and actually you see this a lot in spiritual discourse that leans towards Buddhism, especially via New Age stuff and “McMindfulness”. Many people happily discard the mainstream beliefs but then they get hooked on their idea of what is true. But the merciless approach that Zen Buddhism has is that nothing you think about is totally true. It’s more like a reflection in a mirror ( Interestingly Plato was also alluding to this in his Allegory of The Cave, so this realization isn’t unique to Zen ).

That includes the concept of “objectivity”. Objectivity relies on the idea that there is some external third party to human experience. But once I looked, or more like was forced to face it, I realized that there is no such thing. I can exchange ideas with what appear to be other people and have an agreement. Like we can probably both agree that we’re looking at a screen now. I anticipate an objection here on the “other people”. I don’t know if “other people” exist outside of me but I know that I don’t have control over anything that appears in my mind. Something that I can call “other people” appears, and they have their likes and dislikes and it can be painful if I’m not respectful of that. This is where compassion teachings come in.

Oh and I’m not anti-science at all. Science is great at revealing patterns in the way things appear. Happy to go get my vaccinations and all that.

The way I was introduce to it framed it specifically as not believing in anything you can’t verify in your own direct experience. The book I read ( https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/89766/the-three-pillars-of-zen-by-roshi-philip-kapleau/ ) was actually pretty mercilessly pointing out how much of what I thought to be obviously true was actually just a belief. Meaning what I think is the average westerner experience of the world as explained by science. It didn’t offer me a set of ideas to believe in, it offered me a way of disbelieving anything I couldn’t know for myself to be true.

Like I said it was pretty world shattering. I realized there is a world BEFORE any thought and that is definitely more real than anything I can think about. I joined the local sangha because things got a little weird for me for a time and my friends kinda thought I was going crazy haha but in my perspective they were the ones alarmingly missing something incredibly important. And I still kinda think they are but it’s not my place to try to “convert” them. Since there’s no point. You need to have the active desire to actually understand.

Yeah, I had a world-shaking 180 for spirituality after I read about Zen Buddhism.

I was a really proud atheist and thought all religions were just believing in something supernatural. Until I actually gave an intellectually honest try at understanding them. Most theistic religions I couldn’t get on board with but after I read Three Pillars of Zen, something just clicked and I joined my local sangha. Also begun to understand a bit more about religiosity in general after, though I’m still not a fan of Abrahamic religions in particular.

Have fun reading that wikipedia article. My OP is specifically an argument against essentialism.

Do you want me to regurgitate my views on “decent person” or a “monster”?

Think for yourself. Starting with questioning if such categorizations are even useful or justified.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism

Alright, you win the argument.

He’s a compatibilist. Which I admit we can then break down into compatibilist determinist, which is a different thing from a (hard) determinist.

Which I characterize as a determinist who really doesn’t want to admit to being one.

Yeah I have read on empathy and mental health issues. Good vs. Evil aside, it’s a terrible and ableist lens to view people through. Sorry you had to go through that.

I agree that treating people with empathy is beneficial for their well-being.

Dennett is just a determinist who really, really doesn’t want to admit he is one (probably because he’d have to admit he’s wrong and everyone hates doing that, particularly white men at the top of their fields). I’ve read him and watched his debates.

I said “culturally Christian”. You can’t just shake off the centuries of Christian philosophy that has informed Western thought by just “not believing in God”. One of the symptoms of that specifically is the belief in free will, as Christianity requires there to be some kind of a pure, untarnished essentiality to people that can choose to be evil or good. It’s been hammered into us in media since we were kids, baked into everyday language.

My capacity for empathy has nothing to do with anything.

Again: I just happen to value human well-being, and as literally everybody in the universe, I will seek to act in accordance to my values, which usually easily puts me in the same camp as other people who value human well-being.

There are people out there who value “the word of the lord” or something like that more. Like they would prefer to kill wrong-believers because they value their religious text more than human life. They think they are “good” too. I don’t agree with them, but if MOST people did, then they would get to decide what “good” is.

That’s not how burden of proof works. Just because a lot of people (particularly those with culturally Christian backgrounds…) “believe” it’s real, doesn’t make it so.

That’s a lot of text, sorry, but it was therapeutic to type it out.

Actually I’m really glad if so. Thank you!

My point is that you don’t have to have a perfect support network that’s always there. Sometimes even indifference is better than actively having one’s teeth kicked in for trying to be kind.

I always got good grades

The fact that you had an education at all is also a support network.

I don’t mean to belittle your own efforts at all, but it’s easy to overlook a lot of environmental factors that help shape who you’ve become.

My OP on “support network” was vague on purpose. I’m seeing a lot of people take it to mean wildly different things.

How about not judging? How about just asking if they cause harm or not, and how to prevent that harm.

First I can look at my own values and discover that I happen to value human well-being. I like it when people are happy, healthy and free of suffering. It doesn’t make me a “virtuous” person, I’m a human too so I could be purely guided by self-interest.

Then I can look at science and reason and conclude that by those things, I can generally figure out what kind of things impact human well-being and how.

Then I can look at someone’s behavior and conclude that it’s either beneficial or detrimental to human well-being.

Then I can look at science and reason again to find out how to address that behavior in order to reduce (or even entirely prevent) harm.

I don’t need a moral framework for any of that, and I certainly don’t need to judge people as essentially “good” or “evil”.

You’d have to now prove that free will is real.

First of all, please don’t kill yourself.

Second, if you think you’re a shit person and want to kill yourself… how are you a shit person? I mean I’m merely assuming here that you think you’re shit because maybe you sometimes do shitty things, and because of that you should kys. If you at least recognize that you can do harmful things, you aren’t irredeemable, you can start taking steps to avoid doing that.

Everybody does shitty things sometimes, some more than others. I don’t think anyone deserves death but in terms of just shittiness, people who don’t even recognize that in themselves are way more unpleasant to be around. And if you have a great support network, maybe they don’t entirely agree with your self-assessment.