The assassination is a koan that brings to light the paradox at the heart of civilisation: what’s real is our experience of being alive, not how we can be quantified, but we pretend the opposite is true.

The new story becomes an invisible force which pulls us forward.

“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think”

The Symbolosphere, Conceptualiztion, Language and Neo-Dualism

science has transformed our understanding of time.

the old myths that we’ve inherited are no longer sufficient to give us meaning in our new changing world,

noosphere, the sphere of interconnected cultural exchange and cooperation,

even religious people would openly tell 00:08:19 you that all the gods in the world are fictional stories invented by humans except one not my God my God is is true but Zeus and Shiva and whatever other 00:08:33 gods other people have they are fictions invented by humans and um I think that again the scientific consensus is is is just the same view with an addition of 00:08:46 one additional God my God is also like Zeus and and and like Jupiter and like Thor and like all these others it is also a fictional story created by humans

In summary, phenomenology leads to finding the relationship between objectivity andsubjectivity, which is present in each instant of human experience. Transcendence is not reducedto the simple fact of knowing the stories or physical objects; on the contrary, it tries to understandthese stories from the perspective of values, norms and practices in general

there's a lot of information that is held in this implicit meta communication world

The epoche is always performed and we don't know it. We don't realize it. 00:19:42 This was said, for instance, by Michel Henry. But maybe even more strikingly by Jean-Paul Sartre in his book, The Transcendence Of The Ego

ideas or images that are generated in the mental realm

the nonmaterial consti-tutes a domain of existence with its own characteristics and with the abil-ity to exert downward influence on the material domain

we inhabit a world that isboth material and nonmaterial.

this is not to say that our inner life has some kind of a second grade um existence conventional reality is not 00:25:14 second level reality um because as the guardian and chandra kirti also emphasized we must remember that conventional reality dependent 00:25:26 origination is exactly the same as emptiness which is ultimate reality the only kind of reality anything that we ever encounter is going to have is conventional reality so when i'm talking 00:25:38 here about cognitive illusion i'm not arguing that the existence of our interstates um is illusory i'm arguing that the illusion is that we have immediate access to them as they are and 00:25:51 that their mode of existence um is um intrinsic existence so this allows us to understand the majority analysis of the most fundamental cognitive illusion 00:26:04 of all the illusion of the immediacy of our knowledge of our own minds and the givenness of our own interstates and processes our direct knowledge of them as the kinds of things they are independent of 00:26:18 any concepts that's the illusion that wittgenstein quine and sellers each in there worked so hard in the 20th century to diagnose and to cure but we can put this just as easily and maybe more 00:26:31 easily in the terms of second century indian madhyamaka the fundamental cognitive illusion is to take our mental states to exist intrinsically rather than conventionally and to take our knowledge of them to be 00:26:45 immediate independent of conventions this illusion is pervasive it is instinctive and it is profoundly self-alienating because it obscures the deeply conventional character of our own 00:26:57 existence and of our self-knowledge and this illusion is what according to buddhist philosophers lies at the root of our grasping of our attraction and diversion and hence at the root of the 00:27:09 pervasive suffering of existence

what is a symbol then this is the thing that really is the crucial question

you can think about the invention of powerful representations and the invention of powerful media to host powerful 00:11:27 representations as being one of the big drivers of last 2,000 years of the intellectual progress of humanity because each representation allows us to think thoughts that we couldn't think before we kind of 00:11:39 continuously expand our think about territory so you can think of this as tied to you know the grand meta-narrative of the scent of humanity moving away from myth and superstition 00:11:51 and ignorance and towards a deeper understanding of ourselves in the world around us I bring this up explicitly because I think it's good for people to acknowledge the motivation for their 00:12:02 work and this is this story of the intellectual progress of humanity is something that I find very motivating inspiring and is something that I feel like I want to contribute to but I think 00:12:16 that if this if you take this as your motivation you kind of have to be honest with yourself that that there definitely has been ascent we have improved in many 00:12:27 ways but there are also other ways in which our history has not been ascent so we invent technology we media technology 00:12:39 to kind of help us make this this climb but every technology is a double-edged sword every technology enables us has a potential de navels in certain ways while debilitating us in other ways and 00:12:51 that's especially true for representations because the way the reputations work is they draw on certain capabilities that we have so if we go all in in a particular medium like we 00:13:03 did with print so the capabilities that are not well supported in that medium they get neglected in they atrophy and we atrophy I wish I knew who drew the picture 00:13:20 because it's it's a wonderful depiction of what I'm trying to express here and even a little misleading because the person the last stage they're kind of hunched over is tiny rectangle we reach 00:13:31 that stage accomplish that stage with the printing press and cheap paper book based knowledge the invention of paper-based bureaucracy paper-based 00:13:44 working we invented this lifestyle this way of working where to do knowledge work meant to sit at a desk and stare at your little tiny rectangle make a little motions of your hand you know started 00:13:56 out as sitting at a desk staring at papers or books and making little motions with a pen and now it's sitting at a desk staring at a computer screen making a little motions with your on a keyboard but it's basically the same 00:14:08 thing we've this is what it means to do knowledge work nowadays this is what it means to be a thinker it means to be sitting and working with symbols on a little tiny rectangle to the extent that 00:14:20 again it almost seems inseparable you can't separate the representation for what it actually is and and this is basically just an accident of history this is just the way that our media 00:14:32 technology happen to evolve and then we kind of designed a way of knowledge work for that media that we happen to have and I think so I'm going to make the claim that this style of knowledge work 00:14:47 this lifestyle is inhumane

though personwareis intrinsic to being a complete person it can be continuously modified, evolve or otherwise developed([5 ]: p. 201). More importantly, it can, to a significant extent, at least theoretically, be dynamicallygoverned and authored by the human individual. Hence, the human takeover.

The social sciences remain normally silent about what mental platform is initially there thatthe personware is ‘installed’ on. The humanity of humans can be hardly conceived apart from theirparticipation in and entanglement with social systems, since it is only by virtue of their interactionswith the social system and its corresponding personware that they start making use of language andother symbolic systems. When considered apart from that, humans are alinguistic and asymbolicanimals [20 ].

Even though human existence in such a bare state may seem inconceivable, it is therenevertheless: every time a baby is born, a new, not yet programmed, prepersonal human is lookinginto somebody’s eyes ([27 ]: p. 133). This undeniable prepersonal presence we already call human leadsus to logically infer that humans do happen to exist prior to their personware [ 20 ,25 ,28 ]. It is thereforeour fundamental point of departure that humans are marvellous, intelligent, living cognitive agents inthemselves that can be said to exist prior to and independently of any particularly determined socialpersona. The point of acknowledging a prior prepersonal platform is not made towards arguing that ahuman can exist without any personware.

Human beings are different from what they seem to be thinking, perceiving, or saying asmediated by social symbolic systems [29 ]. They are different from how they are represented intheir own narratives, they are different from language itself. Interestingly, learning to consciouslybecome aware to that difference—the bare human spirit, the preindividual, or being as becoming asSimondon [30 ] puts it—appears to be the state of mind towards which many spiritual traditionsare guiding. David R. Weinbaum (Weaver) refers to this state as thought sans image [ 13], offering itscontemporary conceptualisation via the metaphysical theories of Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon andGilles Deleuze, in combination with the enactive theory of cognition [14 ] and inputs from complexityscience

This eventof cognition, or better yet the event of making sense – the primal mental event, allencompassing, both forming and dissolving boundaries, multiple4 and affirming, Ifind to be the proper stage to present my research

what happens um when we're thinking about our inner states one of the things that we need to recognize is that our introspection when 00:22:54 we we become aware of our beliefs our desires and our hopes and our fears and so forth is all done through language and on the model of language when i decide that i believe that john dunn 00:23:07 gave a great talk this morning when i believe that hal roth is a great scholar of zen and when i believe that alan wallace gave us a beautifully inspirational talk about the role of practice and contemplation in the 00:23:19 understanding of the self and i introspect that way i'm using those sentences alan gave that great talk john gave us a great talk about pramana and so forth as models for my inner states and i'm not 00:23:32 doing that because i looked inside and saw little english sentences in my brain i'm looking i'm doing that by using language as a kind of introspective model that's a matter of self-interpretation 00:23:44 it's easy to forget that because it feels so immediate so language gives us the concepts that we use to think about the world but it is also the model for the concepts of our propositional attitudes like belief 00:23:58 desire knowledge and so forth and as a model we have to recognize that the model the map isn't the reality to go back to what john uh reminded us of he reminded us of earlier introspection in 00:24:11 terms of language gives us an interpretation it doesn't give us an independent reality that is being interpreted and when we think about the madhyamaka 00:24:23 of nagarjuna and chandrakiri we remember that to be empty is to be empty of any intrinsic nature and if we follow chandra charity as i suggested earlier that means that it is to exist only 00:24:37 dependent on conceptual imputation and what i am suggesting now is that all of our inner cognitive states that we introspect we encounter only through a conceptual imputation only through 00:24:50 interpretation only through language and that is they exist conventionally not intrinsically even though they might appear to us to exist just as we see 00:25:02 them and to do so intrinsically