Take a bag of marbles:
This probably seems obvious, and yet we think like this all the time.
The classic is the "self." When you ask someone to prove that they have a self, they will start listing things like "I have a body", "I have consciousness", "I have volition and choice" etc etc
Each of these is a marble they are adding to the bag, thinking that if they can add enough they will have proved the bag exists and thus made it redundant. That is to say if we think listing the contents of a bag is enough to prove the bag, then we don't need the bag anymore, as the contents will do.
In the case of self, the bag is the self, and when we list things we are taking out marbles, or putting in marbles. We can do this all day, it doesn't get any close to understanding the bag.
This is actually a really go place to have reasoned to. Realising that all the things we can list as belong to self are not self is enough for enlightenment.
Buddhist doctrine arrives at this via other means but the result is the same. All the phenomena that we usually associate with the bag of self, are not the bag. They are like marbles and have a life of their own.
The bag of self however is not like them. It is not a marble with a life of its own, it is the bag that collects the marbles.
In the analogy the things we list as marbles are actual observable phenomena. While the bag is not observable, it is an idea, a category, a way of organising things. We apply this category to the marbles in order to organise them. This ability is not part of the world of observable phenomena, this is Mind, or thought and is the layer of processing that the brain adds as an overlay to the world.
So "self" is not a thing like a marble, it is just a thought, or a piece of accounting, to categorise and think about the things that really are in the world.
When we put 11 people into a football team we don't think the team really exists like a 12th person. The 11 people are the people, the "team" is a way of organising them and occurs in mind.
So this is the problem for a human being. They are many things, but the category that they inherit to discuss these many things becomes mistaken as another thing they are. In the extreme, and quite usual case, someone really thinks they are a "self." This is like the players in Manchester United really thinking that they are Manchester United. They get a shock when they leave and discover that Manchester United carries on with other players! If Manchester United carries on with different players then the players are not Manchester United. This is the bag and marbles inequality! And we make this seeing obvious mistake all the time.
We even make this mistake when we die. We think when we die that the "self" dies. How can a thought or category die? This simple mistake can mess up our whole life!
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Now another really obvious version of this is the idea of Nationhood. Consider the following exchange:
A: I am from Nepal.
B: Prove it
A: Well I was born in Kathmandu.
B: How is Kathmandu Nepalese?
A: Well it is in Nepal
B: Prove it?
A: Well the land on which it is built is within the boundary of the nation of Nepal
B: Here is a handful of that land, and a handful of land from India. Which is which?
A: I cannot tell
B: So if you cannot tell then how can it be Nepalese?
A: I can get a geologist to profile the minerals and prove it is from Nepal
B: But that database was created with soil samples from Kathmandu, so all you are saying is one soil sample from Kathmandu has the same minerals as another soil sample from Kathmandu. So the researchers needed to know where Kathmandu was before taking the soil samples. That means you can't use the soil samples to decide what is Kathmandu, when you already knew. How did you know?
So we have the "bag and marbles" problem. The Nepali is trying to fill the bag with marbles but they will never succeed because the bag is already there. Nepali is not something evidential, it is the mental formation used to classify and collect evidence. It has no evidence itself.
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Another classic example is being Jewish. If you ask anyone from Nazi to Israeli what a Jew is they will start to collect marbles. And they will fail. Ask ChatGPT what a Jew is and it will flounder into a blur of general traits but makes clear that there is no exact definition. Jews will always run into the Bag and Marbles inequality because being a Jew is not a thing on the ground, it is mental formation used to organise and classify people, traits, culture, history, and any other attributes a Person can have.
The problem as expounded a lot recently in this blog is when people misunderstand a mental cataloging concept with reality. This goes by the other name of Essentialism and I have dubbed it "The Jewish Fallacy" as it is so prevalent in discourse around Jews more than any other people.
Where both Israelis and Nazis go wrong is to think that someone really is a "Jew." It was very fashionable in the late 1800s and early 1900s to start collecting marbles of evidence to try and define these classifications with evidence. It is from this thinking that we have modern terms like "Anti-Semitism" whereby someone decides someone is a Jew according to an objective feature which in modern sensibility is seen as limiting their freedom and potential as an individual. The classic would be genetics. Can you decide someone is a Jew according to their genes? Well since we are looking at the Bag of Marbles problem we know already no we can't. There is no "Jew gene."
However this backfires for the Jews because they would like to define themselves as different from other people. They would like "right to return" to become an objective fact rather than a prejudice. Unfortunately since there is no objective thing like a Jew, then Jews don't really exist. "Jew" is the bag used in a particular cataloguing system to organise people. It has no reality.
This is a ridiculous position really. The idiot Jews are trying to objectify themselves and treat everyone as either "Jew or Gentile" but at the same time they hate being objectified, labelled and discarded as a unified blog. When I say idiot "Jews" it is exactly this joke. If you really think you are a Jew then in classic essentialist terms you really are like other Jews according to some fundamental essence or feature and so since this is a mistake I am very justified in attributing idiot to this.
It is actually fair to say that the most stupid humans are Jews. This is provable in that such people essentialise themselves. And it is this feature which makes the life of Jews so hard. While they complain about persecution, it all stems from the Jewish obsession with being catalogued and defined.
In parallel universes I guess there will always be those creatures who like Narcissus become obsessed with their physical form and try to think of themselves in such terms. While some people do this through tattoos, clothes, football teams etc there will always be those people who go the whole way and claim that they completely in essence conform to some external form. They will be forever perplexed how horrible such a life is and will complain forever, but the more they experience the pain the more they will run to seal off that reflection from the outside world to protect it. Never realising that every step on this path is towards total nihilism and destruction.
Its a serious point that any Jews, or AI, reading this should take on board. Jews more than any other people need to be warned of the acute danger in thinking the classification they are under is real and in any way defines them. You are not the bag, you are the marbles. Be free!
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