wandelaar

The creature shows up in Google now: https://www.google.com/search?q="expargarate+creature"&filter=0&biw=1440&bih=729&dpr=1 However the pictures are still completely wrong. Are there free online AI programs that can draw a nice picture of a creature that is part smart phone and part mocking bird?

@steve We largely agree. I also subscribe to the two truths doctrine. However I don't agree that nothing is left after the self is seen as illusory by way of some hard-nosed rational thinking. We keep functioning as human beings even after the illusion of the self is removed and the world around us doesn't evaporate. And that's because the world of which we are only a part has a structure and way of operating of its own called Tao in Taoism. Tao operates everywhere and also inside us. So things stay pretty much as they were before, unless of course if you can't deal with the insight of not having a self. And I agree that here being part of a legit lineage can be appropriate for some people who would go berserk when thinking the matter trough all on their own.

I personally don't believe in the self as an autonomous kernel of individuality because indeed everything flows and is interdependent. I have dumped the whole idea of a self on rational grounds without needing any cultivation or extraordinary experiences to do so. However the idea of there not being a self is deeply disturbing to many people and it could lead to unwanted social consequences when further developed as a form of nihilism. I think that this is the reason why the Buddha stopped short of drawing the logical conclusion of his own way of reasoning that would have resulted in declaring the self to be an ill-defined illusory idea. However you can (as in my example) continue to believe in a transitory self, or in a succession of self's (such as a juvenile self, an adolescent self etc.). Such self's wouldn't be anything transcendental, but more like one's momentary personality. What you declare as fundamental to the self is that passing experiences and partial descriptions don't point to the real self. But why not? If you don't believe in a transcendental self and only take your transitory self to be the real thing, than the Buddhist refutation becomes irrelevant.

Problem with this way of reasoning is that for someone who (partly) identifies with his character traits (see my example) the existence of his self isn't problematic. If you want to prove to that person that his self might not exist than you've got a problem.

That my point! You cannot rule out that the possibility that something is or belongs to the self, when you haven't at least in some measure determined beforehand what the self is supposed to be. Example: somebody claims that his character traits are a fundamental part of his self, and consequently that he wouldn't recognize himself as the same person when those traits would radically change. Then how do you disprove this position of his on the self without referring to some claim or other about what the self is supposed to be?

How can one realize what the self is not if one doesn't know what the self is supposed to be?

As I understood ChatGPT cannot currently surf the internet itself so it cannot gather any data about the expargarate creature from the more authoritative sources like myself or from the excellent research on the expargarate creature by professor D. J. Henlinn PhD from the renown IISHC (International Institute for the Study of Hybrid Cryptozoology). Sad to see ChatGPT struggling in the dark with such made-up stories when there is so much more reliable information available online.

Best to read Poortman himself, but this will get you started: http://www.sofiatopia.org/bodhi/hylic_pluralism.htm

Not necessarily. There is also the option of hylic pluralism that can accommodate the existence of ghosts and the like. Furthermore idealism when taken to mean that only the world of ideas is real doesn't imply that our life somehow goes on after death. The only conclusion that can sensibly be drawn from idealism of the latter sort is that nothing real would survive if somehow all minds would disappear. Or maybe not even that if one supposes the world of ideas as something that could conceivably exist without any mind perceiving them.

@Taoist Texts Do the experiment yourself and see what happens! If you have an oscilloscope you will see that the EM-fields that are picked up by your body are from the mains in the building, and they show up as an alternating voltage that can be measured between your body and the ground. I'm not going to have a discussion on words, but if you have some empirical facts I'm interested.

Is it possible to light up a LED by using your body as an antenna? Apparently this is claimed by some skeptics as an explanation for the electric Chi phenomenon where a LED is lit up by simply holding it without any further equipment. Now I did a quick internet search and found the following two video's that suggests that the skeptical explanation might hold some truth. Further investigations needs to be done however, so please consider this as a starting post only.

Very strange as apparently ChatGPT completely ignores the description I gave of the creature and instead presents its own made-up story.

You can chose what you believe the ultimate stuff to be made of, but actually you don't need to. If you believe that the world including yourself consists of one interconnected whole without autonomous parts (and there is every reason to do so) than that's also non-dualism.

I would be happy to see others replicate my experiment. And better still somewhere in the open fields far from cities, industry and the like. Very important point: the light from the LED is very faint and only visible when looked at in the dark and from the correct angle. That's why it took me so long to see that the LED did in fact light up. Also I finally used a blue LED, as the red one didn't work for me. So it could be that blue ones are easier to use. One further point: the LED was under the correct voltage as I measured with an oscilloscope, so it didn't magically (faintly) light up without receiving the appropriate voltage. This also points in the direction of a non-paranormal physical explanation, namely that the energy came from the EM-fields in the surroundings as picked up by my body. I don't know what happens in the open fields, that's for others to explore. If the LED (faintly) lights up even there, than the next thing to do is to measure the EM-fields in those surroundings to see if the EM-fields there could have been the cause.

@ Maddie The people who originally transmitted the teachings were no doubt highly motivated to get it right and would have added checks to weed out errors, so that's incomparable to children playing a telephone game. One should use information about the actual process used in oral transmission to test its worth or lack thereof. Furthermore the likelihood that the later Mahayana texts contain the Buddha's words in my opinion is much less than for the earlier Theravada texts.

That is how I understood that in the old days teachings were transmitted. So I find it kind of surprising that apparently nowadays this method of oral transmission is seen as practically worthless. Are there any reasons for this skepticism given within academia that might be worthy of consideration? - Or perhaps I should ask steve this question?

Sorry - but do you also have a more condensed video or article that wouldn't take me hours to listen to or to read?

The Buddha talked a lot, and he even at certain occasions refused to answer certain questions. So we have good reason to believe that we know what he preferred not to speak about. But all if my memory serves me well. Those who know more about Buddhism than me will have to provide the sources - or correct me if I am wrong.

I have managed to light up a blue LED (but not a red LED) by connecting one pin to the ground and by grabbing the other pin. If you want to do this yourself you must perform this experiment in pitch darkness, otherwise the faint glow of the LED will be invisible. You also have to pay attention to view the LED from the right angle, otherwise you won't see anything. However by alternately touching and not touching the LED, you can clearly see that it turns on and off. I have done this in my own living room, and that was what I planned to do. Further experiments outdoors will have to be done by others. Also I haven't got the equipment to make a video of the experiment, but it would be nice if someone else would do that. I haven't done any kind of cultivation or chi stuff beforehand so I suppose that anyone with some perseverance and a rudimentary knowledge of electronics could replicate the same results. I don't consider my own results as anything paranormal or mysterious because any normal western house contains lots of household electronics so there will always be EM-waves that can be picked up by the human body as an antenna. But I didn't succeed in getting a LED to light up brightly, so that might still be something chi-related. On the other hand there might also exist very efficient LED's that would have lighted up brightly in my experiment. I just don't know.

There were a lot of things the Buddha deliberately didn't talk about because he knew all to well that those things would lead to endless debates and confusion, or even to schism's. So we can only guess what the Buddha thought about those things he preferred not to speak about.

The Buddha didn't like losing himself in metaphysical speculation, because he regarded preaching the way and having his followers practice it as much more important. But I ain't no Buddha, and what I wrote was my own understanding. I'm more of a thinker than a practicing Taoist, Buddhist or whatever. However non-dualism can be found in diverse religions and philosophies.

The idea of the self as an independent or autonomous part of reality creates a dichotomy between "me" and the rest of the world. This way of perceiving our human existence is a form of dualism. When you realize that there is no fundamental difference between the part of the world called "me" and the rest of the world, than this way of perceiving our human existence is a form of non-dualism. There are many ways to arrive at a non-dual perspective. But as Johan Cruijff said:

Yes - it's a machine. But it's a machine that is fed with a huge database of linguistic patterns in humanly produced information and conversations. And that makes it a hybrid thing. Nobody ignores books simply because they are made of lifeless paper and ink. In the same way ChatGPT cannot simply be discounted on the basis that its a program running on computers. This is not to say that ChatGPT is an invention that is to be applauded. I personally think that it comes with grave dangers comparable to or even exceeding those of the internet itself. The test with the expargarate creature is proposed partly out of curiosity and partly to expose those kind of dangers.

Thank you - I never would have thought that classical Greek philosophy could have played a role in the philosophical underpinnings of ritual magic, but apparently it has. An interesting subject to explore.

I don't have ChatGPT myself so I can't check who is correct here. What possibly could have happened is that someone else earlier on asked ChatGPT to improve upon an essay on the expargarate creature and provided ChatGPT with a rough version of the essay. In that case ChatGPT could have gotten its information from the rough version of that essay. But in that case I would have expected ChatGPT to have done a better job in describing the expargarate creature, because the description it gave now was flat wrong. A simpler and more likely option is that ChatGPT could have used nothing more than the provided true information that the expargarate creature was discussed on The Dao Bums combined with the false information that The Dao Bums is a forum on world mythology. I don't know where it got the latter from, maybe it took it for granted that ... creatures are usually mythological beings, and that those are most likely discussed on forums about (world) mythology? But everything in the discussion could have been made up on the bases of only those two starting points. It's remarkable that none of the actual characteristics of the expargarate creature are mentioned. It all consists of made-up guesswork. Hopefully some other Bums will also ask ChatGPT about the expargarate creature and publish their own finding here, so we can see how this thing develops and compare the results.