Metaphyics = magic

This could be a depressing post for some. 20 years ago I would have not liked reading it.

What is the world made from?

What is a wall made from?

One perfectly good answer is: bricks. Another perfectly good one is atoms. And another, slightly less satisfying, but perfectly good one is: energy.

Energy is very close to the bad answers.

The point is that the world is divisible all the way down to the the plank length, or perhaps we are still to discover smaller. Who knows. But we go looking and we find things that compose other things and we say they make them.

There is another way of thinking though which answers: matter. Who knows what matter actually is. Its a lose idea that simply derives from a feeling that there is a "solid" world out there and it must be made of something. "Matter" is metaphysics and it is junk.

No one too worried about that.

But then there is the other great question. What am "I" made from. Well some say "matter" so that is junk. I'm pretty sure no one thinks "I" is made of atoms. But there are ideas that "I" or at least consciousness is made from "quantum superposition state." Well possibly it is composed from such things. But like with things in the world there is no substance or stuff like "matter" that we are made from. In the case of "I" it is for many something like a spirit or soul. Some generic unspecified stuff that the self is made from. But it goes in the same bin as "matter."

Have I said enough to pick out a particular view of the world that it is made of things with a fundamental "essence." A cat is a cat because it has some "catty" thing inside it. And I am a conscious, thinking, feeling, breathing human because I have some "soul" inside me. All such thoughts fail because we simply take the thing we are trying to explain and make a "substance" which we feel effuses through the thing to make it what it is. This is pretty much what metaphysics is. In the bin.

So this is a bit depressing now because we think OMG is my whole life, existence identity no different from a table? How bland, soulless, poetry-less, pointless, arbitrary, valueless. It looks like all the joy and "stuff" is sucked out of life and we become inanimate beings.

Now this occurs because we are "bound" to the world. Well partly because we may have relegated the world to a boring place of "matter" so very much our own fault, but some are more scientific yet it offers no relief. When we find that a human body is just made of atoms we have the existential crisis that "I" am nothing but atoms. I remember a girl after some LCD drug experiences having a complete breakdown. She understood the powerful effect of the chemical on her body and feelings, but she then came to view her whole existence and "self" as nothing but chemicals. She was bound to feelings. They gave her, her compass in life and she then lived a life of aesthetism enjoying the world and the feelings it gave her. To suddenly have this equated with a chemical she took undermined her whole existence. I have no idea how this went for her, but eventually hopefully she realised it was right, but her mistake was to think she was "feelings." To think we are made of feelings is just more junk metaphysics.

I can wrap this up quite quickly. All the things we think we are can only be ideas, appreciated by our brain. Our eyes and ears don't see things that are "made of things." A song of a bird is just that. With analysis from our brain we can break it into things like frequencies and notes. But in our ear it is just sound. If we wanted to start thinking of substances we would ask what is "vision" made from, or what is "hearing" made from. Odd questions that really have no answer. Sound is just that, sound. It is not made of anything. I know "qualia" were hypothesised as the components of sensory experience, but achieves nothing. All metaphysics is just thoughts. And as such it only answers analytic questions like what is the wall made from? Answer bricks. How many are there? We count. This is brain stuff. This is what the world is made from.

Still depressing? Well the thing to realise is that we are neither our senses nor our thoughts. Perhaps some will think well I am inside the Mind looking out at the senses and the thoughts. And where is the Mind? asks Buddha in the Shurangama sutra. Well listener who thinks the Mind is watching the sense you have a problem because the Mind cannot be in the senses while it is watching them, so it is not in the sights or the sounds or the thoughts! So they say there is the sense of self as a separate consciousness. Unsure of this at the moment. Perhaps it is this consciousness that we confuse with the Mind above. But of course the consciousness of self just occurs in the Mind also. We cannot even say that the Mind resides within me! And perhaps we ask so what is mind made from? So big step back to seeing that as a thought and an analytic answer can only occur within the Mind itself. The Mind is made of such thoughts and answers when they happen!

So we see that metaphysics and all the thinking surrounding metaphysics is just trying to create a concrete foundation for some beliefs we have. Wrong beliefs. And from this we hope to get some certainty and solidity to the world. And when that goes wrong we tend to panic and make up some more thoughts to fill the gap. It gets pretty crazy with people thinking about multi-dimensional beings, or multiple universes or universal consciousnesses. I mean maybe these are true, but they are not actually answers to what we are looking for. We are not looking for substances to lay down under a belief in our self. We are looking to unbind from all that. Like the girl if we identity with things in the world then we are going to get nasty surprises when they try to shake us off.

There is no reality in metaphysics. It is simply our brain looking to avoid reality and create ways to carry on believing we somehow exist amongst and are bound to the world.