Hello friends and welcome to a Pokemon news update video. My name is Lee also known as Osiris and in today's video We're gonna be discussing some real hot news that dropped yesterday within the Pokemon community And it's all related to the release of the crown tundra the second DLC pack that we're gonna be getting for the sword and shield Games later this year now if we jump over to Twitter we can see there was this tweet yesterday thrown out by Matt UK Hanna is his handle on Twitter and Matt threw this up He said thanks to those who brought this to my attention looks like item 1,606 for the DLC 2 is an ability capsule designed to change abilities 1 and 2 To a Pokemon's hidden ability and you can see the footage down below that Matt is giving the skull bunny on the screen a Kind of hidden item which is gonna be related to that 1,606 and when he does that it asks if you want to change the ability and you can see on screen It changes the ability of the skull bunny into libera Which is that hidden ability which is such an Incredible like it's an insane discovery that we've got now because hidden abilities are so hard to come by and they make the grinding process of Pokemon pretty tough and Sometimes really annoying as well. I know for a fact I when I'm shiny hunting and I've got I've got two blaze skull bunnies and both of them are pretty useless For competitive use and it's really sad because you grind that Amount of time to get these shinies and you get them and then you think well I can't actually use them But now when the crown tundra is released will have access to this item I will be able to use these Pokemon that were once maybe thought competitively not so viable I've got a bunch of shinies that are exactly like that So for me personally this news is amazing and just generally for the competitive scene and the entry level for newer players coming in As well as everyone else it just makes it so much easier and it just adds to the amount of great steps that Pokemon have implemented in sword and shield for competitive play, which is just amazing But what else does it mean for us? First thing I thought of when I heard this news was the fossil Pokemon because dragon vision dragon salt Do get access to sand rush It is their hidden ability, but we have no access to these Pokemon now They have not been released and I as you know if you watch my max raid update videos I have been clamoring and shouting and screaming for these Pokemon to be an event for the longest time and When crown tundra comes around it's not gonna be an issue anymore because we're gonna have access to these Pokemon straight away with this new ability, which is very exciting I think a really nice addition and Just so easy way for us not to have to wait for events for these Pokemon to actually get released And just opening up the whole decks that we've got access to which is amazing So the fossil Pokemon probably top of my list for sure And then you've got to think of the other Pokemon that we're gonna get when crown tundra drops and that's gonna be Tornadus thunderous or the genies They're gonna have access to that a defined ability in the last time that they had access to these abilities They were very very strong and especially in the competitive scene Gonna be extremely good pokemon, especially tornadus thunderous And just yeah, they're gonna be very very good and entice another one with the legendary dogs They're all got access to that inner focus hidden ability I'd say entice probably the one that benefits from that most obviously Not being able to be flinch so fake out immune It's not so relevant now with dynamax, but still helps out But the the fact that inner focus makes you immune to intimidate so those attack drops Makes enti really appealing um with that ability and there is a bunch of other pokemon You know like lugia with multi scale whole or with regenerator It just means getting access to these pokemon is a lot easier now And really opens the door up to making teams a lot easier Now we've got max mushrooms to create g max pokemon. So that's a really great step in the right direction We've got this new item So things really going in the direction that we want them to especially for those entry level Newer players coming in and just not putting them off with having to grind so much to get certain pokemon And it does you do think though in a way I'm like, oh man, I've grinded so much already just to get these pokemon and now it's going to be super easy But you can't think like that. It's um, it's just going to make things so much easier going forward Especially with a new batch of pokemon that we're going to get in crown tundra It'll just make getting those hidden abilities a lot easier. So it's huge news for us But I would love to hear what you guys actually think what pokemon are you generally looking forward to the most And making use of this ability capsule with obviously mine is going to be those fossil pokemon But I'd love to hear what you guys are looking forward to Using this item on and what other uses you could see. Do you think this item is going to be to come by? I'm hoping that it's going to be something that we can just purchase Maybe through battle points like we can get and the the current ability capsule that just changes The regular abilities and maybe it's something that we get from max raids Who knows? But um, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that that's going to be something accessible pretty easy for all of us to get Maybe something like a new item like we get we had the armorite ores to buy the The move tutors and things like that Hopefully we get a new item that might be able to allow us to purchase these pretty easily in game I think that's the one thing that i'm holding out for and I would worry about a little bit If these are too difficult to grind for then it kind of defeats the purpose of them with this new ability capsule mind I would love to hear your thoughts on what pokemon you're most looking forward to obtaining And using now in competitive player with this new ability capsule would be great to hear what pokemon you're really looking forward to Getting and maybe even shinies that you've bred in the past and being able to use now in competitive player So let me know down in the comment section and I'll let I look forward to reading through all of those Oh and another news I have also just recently released a c checking bot on our discord server So if you are looking to get yourself some shiny max raid den pokemon Then there is a c checker over on my discord You can hop over there the links down in the description and you can make use of that There's a bunch of people hosting shiny raids as well and uh get involved with that So as I say the link is down in the description There is a video I'll link that up in the top right hand corner now if you want to check that out And I'll take you through how to use the bot and also how to go through that whole Searching shiny hunting method as well for den pokemon I am but right we're gonna wrap it up. Have a great day. Take care of yourselves Be kind to each other and I will see you all for the next one. So until then take care and bye. Bye


I like to think that we've impacted the theater in a way of, in terms of vision and longer lobbed projects, and even in terms of having sort of playwrights dropping in and out, they've always had the MyEWritersLab as like a playwrights group, but in terms of us kind of going out into the world and putting MyE out there and just kind of traveling around and putting the theater as like sort of our home base, I think a lot of people are now associating us as part of MyE, as ambassadors to MyE, and sort of connecting a lot of young Asian American artists to us in terms of like, hey, you guys know MyE, can you sit down with this student in college and talk to them a little bit about playwriting, about the world, about theater, and about MyE? And so I think actually in terms of just that aspect of it, it's we've really impacted the theater. Yeah, I think that in a way like there's a continuity to this experiment because the MyE lab started in like 2004, and we gathered up a bunch of Asian American playwrights and we sort of keep on asking ourselves like, what does Asian American plays look like and like, why do you need a lab and we have to sort of keep on finding new answers to that. So I think that this is a huge experiment in kind of how do you keep artists engaged over a long term, and how does your work like evolve within a community and get disseminated out of just sort of our circle. And so even over the course of this year and a half, we've been indifferent to do that by our sheer existence and this has helped us to exist. For me, I mean, Mike and Rohana are not just individual playwrights, they're also married and they're also parents. And so all of that sort of happened while they were at MyE. In fact, they met because of MyE. So it's a unique, really unique relationship. And I feel like this residency has allowed these two to sort of, to sort of relax and feel more grounded and be able to work in a way that they would not have been able to do that to do and to tackle large scale projects, which is Asian American writers don't get to do. I don't know of any Asian American writers gotten this kind of residency, maybe except for David. But this is like a really big, big change for these two. And I'm, and I'm learning along with them. So that that's that I think they're, they're able to spread their wings a little bit more. And in a couple of two years, I've seen that. And I think Mike is has really softened as a playwright, mostly because of Zayden. I would also say that you're really a champion of like artists driven programming and very open about, like, this is how our funding works. And this is how our workshopping works and sort of like, what are you going to take? How are you going to take that and sort of model things yourself? And so this gives us the ability to do that and it's manifested in different ways. Yeah, and I think just even we brought Zayden, like toted up to meetings and brought him around and done a lot of things as an artist couple with a child. But I think at this juncture in our lives without the theater support, we probably wouldn't be like one of us would kind of have to take some time off and not be playwriting. And also, you know, I think they they they were able to ask for a more agency in their work, not just with me, but with other theaters, because they sort of have have experience with it. And so that the future, whatever they do in other theaters is not simply transactional, that there should be something else. I think that's what the evolving lesson is of this residence. Actually, for the HowlRound article two that we did, one theater said that they read it and then instituted a stipend for childcare for the directors for a program based off of that article. Or they found like an internet to watch a kid. By the way, it worked. Great. Thank you.


What is going on guys welcome back to the channel critical overlord here So this would be my recap for season one episode one of Chucky death by miss adventure Of course, yes, there will be spoilers So if you haven't yet watched the premiere that just occurred on the sci-fi USA Network don't even bother watching this video I have seen this episode of this would be my second time seeing it because I watched it many weeks ago And at the time of this recording this would be before I Have uploaded it to my channel But the TV series starts off with us getting a dream sequence of sorts and we're not too clear on who the who's dream This is but it's in the indication would lead us to believe that it's Chucky just because of how the things unfold We see a unknown little person. I'll just say going upstairs and what looks like it's dated in maybe the 1960s And he's wandering this person rather is wandering into someone's bedroom And it's a woman she turns around and then we flash to Chucky who's at a yard sale and we are introduced to the character of Jake Who is a resident of Hackensack, New Jersey? He will be our lead protagonist for the TV series going forward He's just riding through the neighborhood of Hackensack Which we know is also the hometown of Charles Lee with it We've heard so much about during the course of the franchise He is listening to Devin's podcast Devin will be a kid that Jake is also associates waiting He goes to school with he also does have a crush on him as we know Jake Will be our gay protagonist that we are following along with and going to learn a lot about throughout the course of this series Devin's making comments during his podcast about the Hackensack murder rate being through the roof and how it hasn't been this high since the Ray family murders in 1965 now this is already Little break crumbs for the audience to catch up on how will how we will learn more about what happened to Charles Lee Ray And how his childhood has shaped him into the person he is today Jake goes to a yard sale again He's riding through Hackensack. He stops at the yard sale by Miss Jolly's house or at Miss Jolly's house rather because she's hosting the art sale and she he buys Chuckie from Miss Jolly Takes Chuckie home and we learn that Chuck that Jake is a art Artist of sorts. He's working on the art sculpture. He tries to take Chuckie apart to try to make him a part of this sculpture But he's having some difficult time So he tries to grab a pocket knife to do whatever do whatever he was planning to do with said pocket knife Chuckie's voice box stops him from doing this also his father Luke comes home from his I'll just say grease monkey job And he comes down on Jake for just not wanting to hang out with friends or girls and just not being I guess a regular Teenager he also comes down on him for his love of art and it's almost impossible to make a living as an artist this seems to be stemming from his frustration with his now deceased wife because we learned that they're both going through a hardship financially and emotionally because they just lost Jake's mother and in that same respect Luke's wife and It seems that her aspiration as an artist was not something he was always in agreement with because they just could never make enough money from that Career path that she chose so he doesn't think Jake could do the same either So after that brief debacle We jumped to later on in that night and Jake Jake's Aunt Bree and his uncle Logan and his cousin junior come over for dinner Uncle Logan and Jake's dad Luke are twin brothers played both by Devin Sawa who I would say does a fantastic job in this pilot episode portraying both characters the interesting thing here that is Just making you feel a little bit more for Jake is how different his relatives are compared to him and his father they're clearly clearly more financially secure definitely living a lot better and At the dinner table Jake's cousin junior comes down on him for being gay He hassles him about it and after that spat at the table between the relatives Aunt Bree Goes upstairs into Jake's room and makes a phone call to someone who is not her husband This seems to be them setting up a potential affair that she's having along the way in this series She finds Chucky who was listening the whole time to her secrets that were being unfolded Because he was in the closet put there by Jake He is ignored by her after she finds him and she just goes back downstairs and her and her family leave Luke is presumably embarrassed by the dinner exchange that occurred and he goes upstairs to Jake's bedroom and takes that frustration out on Jake's sculpture Jake wanted to keep Chucky safe Takes Chucky to school the next day He is a student at Perry Middle School where he's bullied for being poor and just for being socially disadvantaged And there are some logical mistakes along the way during certain sequences that unfold like when Jake is in his Science room and Chucky is presumably doing the things that are unfolding that Jake wasn't doing But no one seems to have seen Chucky do this. So it's kind of like just some logical flaws with it He is bullied by Lexi who was also junior's girlfriend She bullies him in the hallways and in class by putting up a go fund me It's kind of more put more fun at him for being again financially disadvantaged and for being socially unaccepted at this school Jake again has a crush on Devin and the two share a conversation at lunch before Devin invites Jake to the talent show That's occurring tomorrow at the school Chucky is locked in the classroom by Lexi and Jake's teacher overnight Jake receives a phone call from Andy Who saw his listing on buying the doll because Jake actually will end up putting Chucky up for sale at some point during the episode? And he warns Jake about the doll being He warns Jake about the doll before losing reception I'll just say also earlier in the classroom Lexi does get tormented by Jake or not by Jake but by Chucky rather and She ends up leaving the school after threatening to have her parents Sue the school because she got in trouble and her parents have Official high rankings in the town of Hackensack. I think her mother's like the mayor or something as we found out previously So Chucky again is locked in the classroom overnight Jake receives that call from Andy at home after that call though where Andy warns him to check the batteries He ends up checking Chucky's batteries Chucky's batteries Of course being empty he recognizes that Chucky has been operating without the batteries He throws Chucky away and heads to the talent show that Devin invited him to at the school Where Lexi is hosting and she takes the chance on stage to have Jake expose his crush to Devin just to bully him even further But Chucky somehow has made his way out of the trash can back to the school She acts he actually interrupts Lexi on stage and he starts disclosing Lexi's search history on her phone Curses the audience exposes Lexi potentially cheating on junior with another character named Oliver Teases Aunt Bree's supposed affair that it's implied that she's having the entire audience is just soaking this all in as Jake is the Best ventriloquist ever at home Luke tells Jake that he got suspended and the two have another argument Luke goes down to check the breaker and is killed by Jucky via electrocution the detectives Tell Jake that someone broke into the school last night which explains how the doll ended up back at Jake's but the doll most likely got out on his own Chucky I'm gonna soon got out on his own and Jake is taken by his uncle Logan and Aunt Bree since his father Luke is now dead Aunt Bree as Jake what he meant at the talus show again hinting at that affair Jake doesn't know what she's talking about The only person who knows is her and Chucky the episodes ends by Chucky revealing himself to be alive to Jake and they plan revenge on Lexi After Chucky tells Jake that his plans intend to be killing Lexi for what she's done And he's just trying to manipulate this kid at this point turn him into a killer The flashback that started off the show is revealed to be that of Charles Lee Ray and it concludes with the flashback being set in 1965 and we see that that was him and his mother Let me know what you guys think about this down in the comment section below if you haven't already of course make sure you subscribe turn on post notification Miss video in the description. I've linked to my social media accounts on my Facebook story in Instagram You can message me there of course I'm sending movies news reviews library to cover in the future and with all that in mind guys I will see you in the next video


Welcome to the AWS Executive Summit presented by Accenture at AWS re-invent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin and I've got two CUBE alum here with me. Please welcome Mara Biserovic, Managing Director of Global IT Enterprise Architecture at Accenture and Chris Wegman, Accenture AWS Business Group Technology and Practice Senior Managing Director. Gentlemen, welcome back to the program. Hey, Jelisa, great to be back. Thanks, Lisa, great to be here. It is nice to be back in a way, right here we are at this hybrid event, but I wanna talk about what Accenture is doing with AWS serving its clients and then we're gonna get into your own internal use case, drinking your own champagne. Chris, let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to us about what Accenture is doing with AWS to serve its clients. Yeah, Lisa, it's exciting, as you said, to be back in this hybrid event. And for me, this will be my 10th re-invent. And for Accenture, we're in year 14 of our partnership with AWS and actually year six of our partnership called Accenture AWS Business Group. And the focus of the last year has been helping our clients come out of the pandemic stronger than where they started, right? And a lot of that has been around focusing our customers getting past cloud migration, past cloud modernization and getting further into what we now call the cloud continuum, starting to truly leverage all the AWS assets and capabilities and services to truly speed their transformation. A lot of our customers are needing to transform even faster today than they were before the pandemic. And we're focused on helping those customers do that with AWS services. So Mary, let's bring you into the conversation. Now Accenture's internal IT organization has been leveraging AWS and public cloud for a while. Talk to me about that. You completed the journey a couple of years ago, 95% in the cloud. Talk to me about what you're doing there. Sure, Lisa. So our journey into the public cloud is complete. As you said, we put a bow on that project a couple of years ago. We started in 2015 and we went all in on public cloud. So the number 95% represents a true measure of everything it takes to run Accenture. Everything addressable is in the public cloud today. So the 95% just represents a small component of things that have to live outside of the cloud. But other than that, our journey to the cloud is complete. Very happy being in the cloud because it has opened tremendous doors for us as a business. And I'm sure we'll talk about here as we go but it's fundamentally a different place we live in today than where we were before we were in the cloud. Mary, me said something really powerful there a second ago. The Accenture's journey to the cloud is complete. I don't think I've ever heard anybody say that. Talk to me about the impact, especially during the last 18 months that that cloud journey is delivered. I mean, one of the things I am extremely proud of for our collective global teams around the world when the obviously the, you know, when COVID hit and the pandemic engulfed the world, the only difference for us was that people just did not come into an office to work. Our capabilities in the cloud, our capabilities of having everything in the cloud really made it that much easier for our people to go to work. We weren't fighting over resources around infrastructure. People could just work from home directly. So I'm extremely proud of the collective global team that made all of that happen as part of that execution of all those things. So it was really a very proud moment I would say for all of us running IT. As well, it should be. Chris, talk about that from your perspective of facilitating that massive pivot 18, 19 months ago and what your group was responsible for doing to enable this cloud journey to be complete. Yeah, I always laugh that, you know, Mirom in our internal CIO organization as we call it is our, it was our first customer, right? You know, way back when I started working in this partnership, you know, we were already starting to leverage AWS S3 and EC2 and that insight extension. We took a lot of those best practices and started helping our clients leverage those best practices. So, you know, from an extension, we always kind of harvest from internally what we're doing.  So pass EC2, you know, pass S3.   And for our customers, that's, that's while it's, they're still early on in a lot of their journeys. That's a novel idea.  I think the other big part is, is the maturing security footprint, right? Obviously as, as you use more and more of these AWS services, your security posture, your presence, how you think about security, we created an asset called Secure Cloud Foundation, leveraging many of the AWS services in a security space that have come out like our duty and others, really to help make that security foundation stronger, make it easier for our customers, including CIO to leverage those services and truly enable that move further up the cloud or further down the continuum as we call it. Mary, I want to get your thoughts on security for a moment because we have seen such a dramatic change in the threat landscape in the last 18, 19 months. We've seen a huge spike in ransomware. It's getting much more personal. It's now a household word. We've got the executive order. We had this rapid pivot to, and hundreds of thousands of Accenture employees working from home. Talk to me about, you feel very confident in the cloud journey that you've done. Where's your confidence level from a security perspective? As you said, security is the fastest growth in our business collectively. Like you said, the bad guys don't sleep. We don't sleep either when it comes to security. One of the things that we're constantly thinking about is how do we turn on a lot of our capabilities as an example? Even I would say at an enterprise level, it's different when you're running a big multinational corporation, 650,000 people like we do, we can't just turn everything on and hope for the best. We are very scripted in terms of how we think about those services, how we think about the processes, how we work with our CSO organization so that we're very meticulous and very thorough in terms of what services we turn on, how we turn them on, when we turn them on, how long we make them available because this is the new world. We have extended our corporate structure out into the cloud. That means we have to think of different ways for how we want to consume those capabilities and services. So like Chris said, the journey to the cloud for us is complete. A lot of it was as I would tell you, a lot of it was lift and shift for less and we can talk about that if we get time, but it was more about getting into the cloud and taking advantage of the cloud where we are today because now that we're there, we get to take advantage of all those capabilities that are there. And I would say the best part of being in the cloud is also having the providers like AWS there with us helping us with that security posture. So it's not just us doing this by ourselves. So Chris, I'm going to talk about that Miriam, just said this was mostly lift and shift. Talk to us about that. Because when we talk to organizations in every industry, the cloud transition, the cloud journey is extremely challenging. It's complex. How did you do this? How did you facilitate this in a relatively short time period, Chris? Yeah, and you're right. Every one of these conversations I have with my clients, there's a huge debate whether to lift and shift or modernize or build new, build cloud native. So in Accenture's situation, very early on, it was identified that we can do a large savings by doing a lift and shift migration. We were not a big data center owner. That we're not a big capital intense organization. So for us, that journey, we had colos and that stuff coming up for renewal. And we knew that we could get some early savings there and really reduce our footprint and take that investment and then invest it into true modernization. So Miriam and his organization worked very closely to build the factory to do the migrations, get that done in a very short amount of time and then turn their attention on truly refactoring and rebuilding the applications. I'm super proud of the number of applications that we've rebuilt. I'm super proud of the number of applications that now are cloud native. And we live in these applications every day. They're everything from our performance to how we do our payroll and do our time charging and things like that. But which was a big reason why we can access our systems remotely and at home versus going into different systems to get to that stuff. So it was very much heavy lift and shift early and really focusing on modernization. And as Miriam said, getting, you know, now it's about living there and continuing to modernize, continuing to accelerate what we're doing in the cloud. And thanks for that, maybe Lisa a little bit like, so our journey lift and shift was a core component of it. But the minute we decided to go into cloud, one of the things, the first things we did is I said, no more VMs. So any new capability that we were going to build, a cloud native microservices base. And that's been our standard for the last three or four years. So any new capability that comes along today that we must do custom, we build a cloud native microservices because one of the other things that I've got on my plate is I'm trying to reduce our overall technical depth. So all of these IS platforms, I still have to maintain them, patch them, support them, upgrade them. And I would rather be much more efficient at doing those things as I can and reinvest money into refactoring and modernizing the rest of the application play through containers, through my services, et cetera, which then gives me the agility right back to actually go even faster to enable more services for the business. Speed is something that we've seen become even more critical in the last 18, 19 months where we needed to everybody pivot businesses multiple times over and over. But part of the challenge that I'm gonna get your thoughts on this is this is a big cultural shift. Talk to me about, you've been at Accenture for a long time. Talk to me about the cultural shift needed to facilitate this massive transformation to cloud and how Chris's team was a facilitator of that. So, what are the things for us? I have probably in the last five years spoken to a thousand of our clients around our cloud journey and this culture conversation always comes up. And I will say, the biggest thing for us was interesting, we had those same fears. We had some same, when we first talked about going to the cloud six years ago, it was very... Not everything was there that's there today. So the teams were extremely nervous and they were confident that we could never be as good in the cloud as we were on site. Yet, here we are six years later and we're constantly finding ways to add value and take, bring value back. And it's those same teams. And one of the things is just we gave them the challenge to say, hey, this is the future. We're telling our clients this is where we're going. We have an opportunity here to do something different and they took it. And the team really took it on and they said, okay, let's do it. And we looked at how we run in the cloud, the many different ways whether we're using reserved instances, whether we're using containers, whether we're using different computer capabilities. We went through all of it and we're running such a highly efficient machine right now that it's like, we're still able to continue to eke out savings, even five years after the program. Even two years after the program is complete, we're still able to get savings. That's outstanding. That's ROI that every business and every industry hopes to be able to achieve from this. I wanna switch gears a little bit now because this is actually pretty cool. Accenture is really focused also on sustainability. You guys have signed onto the Amazon Climate Pledge which if you don't know what the Amazon Climate Pledge is, this is back in 2019, Amazon co-founded this. Commitment to be net zero carbon across businesses by 2040 which is actually 10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement. Yoram, talk to us about that and from Accenture's perspective, why it was important to sign onto that. So on a personal level, I love obviously sustainability as a whole. I think about the world for my children that are growing up. So it's very important to me on a personal level as well but I would say at a company level what I love about the cloud is I am there right there with them. As they make investments, all of our enterprise capabilities are there. We are able to very quickly shift and use those capabilities. So as Amazon, for example, in this scenario, creates new capabilities, new compute offerings, new storage offerings, whatever it may be, they're doing it with the sustainability lens and me by being in the cloud already, I can then turn to start using those things too. So as much as I can, on that perspective, I'm in a great place as Amazon puts these sustainability capabilities out there, I'm right there consuming and making it more efficient. And then the other one is obviously as much of our workloads as we can, get to a cloud native perspective, microservices perspective, then we keep reducing that compute consumption and everything else that goes along with it. And lastly, I would say the other thing is we're very aggressive in managing all of our systems in terms of uptime. So for example, in a data center, most organizations don't think about turning off their development environments and everything else, but for us, we're very rigid in this process. And we have a target of all of our development environments being down 55% at a time. And primarily, that's also a sustainability plane in addition to a financial savings plan. Awesome, great stuff. Chris, last question for you as we wrap up here. What are some of the things that you're excited about that's coming in cloud in the next few years? Obviously here we are at re-invent, going to be hearing a lot of news, a lot of announcements about cloud in the coming days. What excites you most, Chris? Yeah, you know, obviously the machine learning and NAI stuff is always the most exciting things right now in cloud. And we've put a lot of those to use here inside of Accenture as well and in our Synops platform, which we use with our customers to run more intelligent operations. We use that internally as well. But one of the things that excites me the most is the continued innovation at the core, right?  That excites me every year. I look forward to seeing what they come out with and then how we're going to put that to use. Well, I look forward to talking to you guys next year. You've done such a tremendous job. You should be proud of the massive transformation that you've done. I imagine this would be a great case study if it's not already written up. It should be. It's really impressive. Miram and Chris, thank you for joining me at the summit, talking to me about what's going on with Accenture and AWS and some of the things that you are looking forward to. We appreciate your insights and your time. Thanks again, Lisa. Thanks, Lisa. You're very welcome. From my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. This is the AWS Executive Summit presented by Accenture at AWS Reinvent 2021.


Thank you, Lucia. Actually, thanks to everybody at SOAS who has been involved in my invitation and my visit here. I actually know how difficult it is to set these things up. It's a lot of work. And I really do appreciate it. It really is a pleasure being here. These lectures are a bit of an experiment for me. I'm using them to bring together things that I've been thinking and writing about over the last few years. But the truth is, and this is maybe embarrassing, I've been thinking about these things since I first got interested in Buddhism as a teenager. And while the material that I'm going to talk about, particularly today in the approach, might seem esoteric, particularly to the non-specialists here, my project is really to convince you that it's not esoteric. That it's important. The four presentations, which are today's lectures and then the three seminars, which are happening over the next three days, are intended in my own mind to constitute a whole. And that's a bit of a challenge. I'll begin today with what I see as an underlying paradox or loop that lies at the very center of and gives structure to Buddhist thought, really throughout Buddhist history. And then I'm going to argue that the place of the loop is at the very heart of the tradition so that any attempt to untangle the loop just yields another loop. Also in the spirit of the comparative dimension of the Jordan lectures, in my next two seminars, I'm going to move away from Buddhism altogether and move into Western philosophy and phenomenology. That's on Wednesday. And then into quantum mechanics on Thursday. When you hear Buddhism and quantum mechanics, you know that I've gone over the edge, I guess. But my object is to demonstrate that the loop that I'm going to identify today is not simply an artifact of some problematic way that the Buddhists set up the problem, that they're saddled with some wrong-headed metaphysical assumptions or whatever. My point is to show that the problem they're struggling with is not merely analytical but existential and that any serious reflection on what it is to be a human being is going to run into the loop since that reflection involves being both subjects and objects to ourselves. And that turns out to be really strange, not only to philosophers but to hard-headed scientists as well. And that's why I'm bringing in quantum mechanics. The final lecture on Friday is going to turn to Zen Buddhism or Chan, which is often seen as a kind of mysticism or anti-philosophy. But I'm going to try to argue that that really misses the point, at least when it comes to the sophisticated Zen of the Song dynasty period. And I'm going to argue that the Zen writings are rigorously philosophical, but to see it, you first have to understand the question to which Zen is an answer. So today, I'm going to start out dealing with some rather technical issues in the Buddhist tradition, drawing on medieval Indian Buddhist scholasticism. I'm going to try to go through it in such a manner that non-specialists, I don't know if they're non-specialists here, but I did the handout for people. I mean, if you know anything about Buddhism, you don't need the handout. But just in case there are non-specialists here, I really want to go through this slowly enough so that you really get what the arguments are about. There should be plenty of time for questions at the end. So again, even though there's going to be a bunch of terminology thrown at you, don't worry about that. Just notice how the argument works. If some of my claims about the existential nature of the loop strike you as implausible or forced or contrived, then I encourage you to come at least to tomorrow's seminar. And that's where I'm going to put Buddhism aside and to try to actually not just convince you but demonstrate that the loop is real. So today, well on a stroll with the physicist Abraham Pius, Albert Einstein suddenly turned to Pius and asked whether he really believed that the moon only exists when someone is looking at it. Einstein thought the idea bizarre and throughout his life he continued to insist that belief in an external objective reality is an indispensable foundation for the natural sciences. Einstein conceded, however, that this was a belief and not an empirically verifiable fact. To quote from Einstein, since, however, sense perception only gives information of this external world or a physical reality indirectly, we can only grasp the latter by speculative means. Now people have pondered the existence and nature of the mind independent world since the beginnings of philosophical reflection. But the modern form of the debate has been shaped largely by the critical investigations of Descartes and Hume and Kant. By the end of the 19th century, the debate had become rather technical and arcane, accessible only to specialists who had worked their way through Kant's transcendental arguments. But in the 20th century, the rise and stunning success of quantum mechanics gave a new life and urgency to the issue. Contrary to Einstein, who held that science necessitates realism, some scientists, notably those who came to be associated with the Copenhagen interpretation, came to the opposite conclusion. They felt that the indeterminacy observed at the quantum level calls into question the very existence of a mind independent universe. It appears that the physical stuff or at least the unimaginably tiny bits of stuff that show up at the quantum level don't exist until they are observed. Now as to what exactly it means to be observed and whether observation entails consciousness and whether consciousness entails discrimination, these are all areas of ongoing controversy and debate. But one result of the quantum revolution is that reputable physicists could now claim without irony that quantum mechanics provide scientific evidence for a kind of idealism. Now figuring out the early Buddhist view of the existence if any of a mind independent world is not easy. It's far from clear that early Buddhists would have been able to make any sense out of the question. One strand of early canonical thought which foregrounds dependent origination holds that the world we perceive arises together with mind. That is to say the material or the rupa dharmas that comprise the physical world, dharmas are these tiny little, they're Buddhist atoms, the stuff out of which the universe is comprised. So the material atoms or dharmas come into being if and only when causal conditions permit and the causal conditions include the presence of mental dharmas. In the classical dependent origination formula, ignorance, mental formations and cognition are antecedent to the arising of name and form. Name and form I'm understanding as the senseate world. But there's a curious variation on this in the Mahindana Sutta in which name and form is said to be dependent on consciousness but then the text immediately goes on to say that consciousness is dependent on name and form. This is sometimes called the hidden vortex and the vortex clearly foreshadows the loop that I'm gonna talk about today. In any event, given the doctrine of dependent origination, it doesn't seem to make any sense to speak of objects existing in the absence of an observer or a sentient being. But things are not so straightforward. There are passing references in Pali materials, for example, to material as such, dharmata rupa. A form of matter that appears to exist independently from sentient beings. Moreover, even in the dependent origination formula, it is unclear whether the list of causal relations are intended to be understood temporally or logically. And besides, the doctrine of dependent origination is part of a satiriological project. The goal of which is liberation from the cycle of life and death. So in all likelihood, the speculative question as to what might exist independently of mind would have seemed irrelevant, if not inimical, to that goal. Be that as it may, the emphasis placed on dependent origination suggests that the early tradition leans toward the anti-realist side of the metaphysical spectrum. Now Quentin Miesu has coined the term correlationism to refer to the idea according to which, and here I'm quoting from Miesu, the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from one another. In Miesu's analysis, almost all contemporary philosophy is correlationist in that it holds the numinal domain of the real, what he calls the great outdoors, or the absolute outside. To be off limits to serious philosophy. Continental philosophy, drawing from her Serlian phenomenology, abandons the real via the epoché and the methodological priority according to what, accorded to what is given in the immediacy of perception. According to Miesu, even analytic philosophy under the influence of Wittgenstein and the linguistic term, abandons the real as a something about which nothing can be said. Now, I don't wanna argue about the details and cogency of Miesu's critique, but I do believe that he has captured something of the current philosophical zeitgeist. And given the primacy placed by Buddhist exegetes on the co-arising of subject and object, of mind and world, Buddhism might well be viewed as the epitome of correlationist thought. But again, things are not quite so simple. It's true that skeptical arguments of the sort favored by Western idealist philosophers, arguments based on the experience of epistemic error or predicated on the contingent species-specific anatomy of our sense faculties, these kind of arguments were familiar to Buddhists from early on. The oft-used example of a rope mistaken for a snake comes immediately to mind. Yet despite their analysis of co-arising, early Buddhist thought is not in any simple sense phenomenology or idealism, much less analytic philosophy. If anything, the abhidharmakas are metaphysical dualists. The dharmas of mind are no more and no less real than are the rupa or the physical dharmas. And besides, the entire dharma theory presupposes a realist by which I mean a frame invariant or observer independent perspective. The abhidharmakas may be skeptical about the ultimate existence of compound things such as a cart or a pot or a self, but their skepticism did not extend to the transient dharmas of which the compounds are comprised. The intent of the myriological dharma theory is not to do away with the external world, but rather to undermine belief in an overarching self or a kogito. And this is accomplished by deconstructing experience into its constitutive elements. But the elements themselves are real. One might say then that the early Buddhist theory of dependent arising was pulling in both idealist and realist directions at the same time. On the one hand, there is no world without an observer, so mind and consciousness have a certain ontological priority. On the other hand, this observer emerges through the convergence of transient entities whose inherent properties are observer independent. And thus the domain of dharmas, we might call it the dharma dhatu, are is ontologically prior to observation. The resulting tension proved philosophically fertile. In fact, I would argue that the entire history of Buddhist thought can be seen as an ongoing attempt to grapple with this metaphysical riddle. One issue that is rarely, if ever addressed, is the chicken or egg problem, which came first, mind or real. Since Buddhist cosmology regards time as beginningless, the issue of how the whole thing got going in the first place doesn't really arise. It actually arises occasionally, but for the most part they'll say it's always gone, it's always been this way. But that still left plenty of other issues to preoccupy Buddhist skoliasts. What ultimately are dharmas? Do they have determinant natures, babava, or are they merely nominal postulates? Are material dharmas directly knowable? If not, if consciousness has access only to second order representations of physical objects, what warrants truth claims pertaining to the material domain? If there is no real world outside the transient flow of mind, how might we explain the experience of intersubjective cohesion and predictability? And if the co-arising of subject and object, mind and world is ultimately governed by karma, or the law of cause and effect, what exactly is the ontological status of this law? Does it belong to the domain of the absolute, the world, or to the contingent and conventional domain of mind? Now I will not pursue these complex in detail here. To do so would require rehearsing the entire history of Buddhist thought, which is not something I'm competent to do. My aim rather is to identify the underlying loop that runs through and structures the debates. A loop that entangles both realism and idealism, such that they cannot in the end be pulled apart. This loop, I argue, has its roots in the nature of what it is to be an embodied sentient being. We are at one and the same time subjects and objects to one another, to ourselves, I'm sorry. We are both inside the world and outside the world at the same time. As such, the idealist claim that the world emerges in us and the realist claim that we emerge within the world while contradictory are both true. And again, my talk tomorrow is going to try to flesh out and argue that position. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the Buddhists discovered or even recognized this loop. Rather, my claim is that the loop is an inescapable feature of our life world and thus any serious reflection on the relationship of mind and world is bound to bump into it sooner or later. Even modern physics, that branch of science devoted to the exploration of the elemental constituents of the physical world has come up against it. Note how contemporary quantum theorists working from the same accepted body of experimental data offer competing theories that run off in divergent, realist, and idealist direction. In my second seminar on Thursday, I will show that the rival positions advanced by quantum theorists, like the Copenhagen interpretation, hidden variables, many worlds, decoherence, relational quantum mechanics and so on, they end up replicating in many respects the positions founded in Buddhist writings. Now, Buddhist correlationist metaphysics may have brought the loop to the surface, but with a few notable exceptions, Buddhist exegetes were loath to acknowledge it. Philosophers in India were no more comfortable with contradiction and paradox than were their counterparts in the West. And thus, Buddhist exegetes did what they could to untangle or tame or flatten out the loop. Rather than conceding that idealism and realism are both true, much like the quantum theorists, they try to resolve the paradox in favor of one or the other perspective. That is to say, they try to articulate and defend an internally consistent, a non-contradictory, idealist or realist position. In doing so, they make use of a few key exegetical strategies. And one is what I'm going to call the fission gambit. This is a popular divide and conquer strategy that involves insisting that what is held to be single is actually multiple. Another, which I will call the fusion gambit, is just the opposite. It involves declaring that what appears to be many is, on analysis, just one. And another strategy is dialectical sublation, which is an attempt to resolve a dialectical tension by identifying and transcending the antinomies. As we will see, the use of such stratagems is often a clue that the author is caught in the loop and desperately looking for a way out. Now, my third seminar on Friday will end this series by turning briefly to the Zen tradition, which I will argue is among the few Buddhist schools that recognized, foregrounded, and even celebrated in both its philosophical writings and its religious practice, the paradoxical manner in which mind and world enfold one another. And rather than seeking to evade the loop through fission or fusion or sublation, they try to labor its structure and sort of dangle it right in front of your nose. So let's begin with the status of dharmas that comprise the building blocks of early Buddhist ontology. Are they empirical objects known directly by the senses or are they known inductively? Or in the end, are they merely nominal postulates? Now, given the witness of early Abhidharmaka sources, it would appear that Buddhist skoliasts drawn on scriptural counts originally held that all consciousness is conceptually mediated. That is to say, cognition or vinyana of an object is invariably accompanied by various associated mental factors, the chaitasika dharma, that contribute to the apprehension, conceptual identification, and affective response to the sense data. So to borrow from Brentano's terminology, at least in this, what I'm identifying as an early Abhidharma strata, consciousness is intentional in that there is no consciousness without content. For the Buddhists, content requires the capacity to discriminate. And by discrimination, just think of it very generally as the ability to pull a figure out from a ground. And in the early tradition, this discriminative capacity is linked to conceptual and linguistic capacities. There is, in short, no room for unmediated knowledge of the physical world. This is arguably a logical entailment of early Buddhist correlationism, which holds that thinking and being are inextricable. Note that in our early sources, nirvana is not merely the cessation of discrimination and cognitive content, but it is the cessation of consciousness itself. This, I admit, is somewhat controversial, but I have argued it, and I'm right. Okay. But I'm talking about a very early, sort of hypothetical strata. But this created a problem. The Abhidarmaka model of perception posited a temporal gap, however brief, between the apprehension of a material object, or the object field, the Vishaya, by sense cognition and the subsequent arising of mind cognition. This is not a crazy idea. It's the idea that initially there's some kind of raw apprehension of an object by the sense doors, and then consciousness kicks in and discriminates or recognizes what it is. It's a very, it's kind of natural epistemology. So it is mind cognition that discerns or discriminates the object via the application of names and categories. But if this is true, then the senses must first make, when they first make contact with a physical form, there must be an initial non-conceptual moment in which a sense faculty or sense cognition grasps its object directly or immediately. So despite the widely accepted view that sense cognition does not have access to conceptuality and hence not discriminate, that that's the view from the scriptures, the Abhidarmakas who are trying to make sense of the scriptures are forced to concede that sense cognition does apprehend in some manner a physical form. And this raised a host of problems. And it's the same problems that actually surround recent debates over qualia, including questions surrounding the content, if any, of non-conceptual states and whether such states can properly be described as being conscious, as opposed to constituting part of the subconscious or sub-doxastic background. See the problem, this is a problem, I've actually written about this in some detail, but it's a problem where the Buddhist debates start to directly, they look very much like contemporary debates between the conceptualists and non-conceptualists in philosophy of mind. Now the Vibhashika approach to this puzzle, I'm gonna be talking about Vibhashika versus Sotrantika, they're two different sub-schools within the Sarvasthi Vardhanas and these are major Abhidharma scholastic traditions in North India. So the Vibhashika approach to this puzzle is to divide and conquer. They distinguish between three different kinds of discrimination and claim that only the second and third kinds of discrimination, Abhinyurupana vikalpa and Anusmanana vikalpa, that they involve conceptuality, but in contrast, the first kind of discrimination, they call it Svabhava vikalpa, consists in the raw or unmediated apprehension of the object field in which the sense faculty, or according to some exegetes sense cognition, directly grasps the inherent characteristic of the object. So you see a field of red and you directly grasp maybe red. Unsurprisingly however, they have a tough time making conceptual sense of the content of this non-conceptual perceptual state. But this is the price they must pay for grounding perception in the unmediated sensory apprehension of the real. They want that they need there to be this initial, immediate grasping of a sense datum. The Vibhashika trivikalpa theory, this theory of three different kinds of discrimination, then paves the way for a correspondence model of truth that mitigates the correlation of slide into idealism. They wanna hold on to a real world that we have immediate access to, that's the argument. Now the Sotranthika analysis perception parts away with the Vibhashika model on several significant points. First, they reject the argument that the sense object, sense faculty, and sense cognition arise simultaneously. In the Sotranthika model, there is an initial moment in which a sense faculty, that's what we might think of as sense organ or at least the kind of strange mechanism behind the sense organ, it arises in tandem with an object and this serves as the cause for the subsequent arising of a raw sense cognition. But given the transient nature of Dharmas, the original material object is gone before the sense cognition arises. As such, sense cognition is confronted with a kind of after image or a representation, it's known as the akara of the object rather than the object as such. So in contrast to the Vibhashika analysis, the Sotranthika's hold that there is never direct contact between consciousness, including sense consciousness and the material dharma. So they're sometimes regarded as nominalists and they do seem to flirt at times with idealism. There's according to later doxographic accounts, the Sotranthikas eventually emerge into Yogicada which is often understood to be a Buddhist idealist school. But Sotranthika exegetes are in fact at pains to mitigate idealism, they don't wanna go there. And to this end, they argue that the akara or mental representation is simply mind itself assuming the form of the object. It's great. That is to say, while consciousness trades only in representations, the representations have a direct causal link to the object field grasped by the sense faculties and this makes knowledge of the objective world possible. So to conclude this little, I realize it's technical very quickly, both the Vibhashika and Sotranthika conform to scriptural orthodoxy in that they want to maintain that the material world arises in conjunction with an observer. But in their view, this correlationism is not idealism because the objects of raw sense perception, whether they are cognized directly as the Vibhashikas believe or indirectly as the Sotranthikas believe, they are real in and of themselves. They have Sbabava, they have some inherent existence. And presumably the Abhidharma has grasped the threat that idealism poses to the entire Abhidharma project. And thus they felt compelled to affirm the empirical status of Dharmas. However, both the Vibhashikas and Sotranthika struggle to make sense of the preconceptual, perceptual moments in which the physical domain is disclosed. They repeatedly characterize it as what it is to know blue as opposed to knowing conceptually this is blue. In other words, before the cognitive discriminatory apparatus kicks in, if you're just looking at a field of blue, they say, you know blue. You don't know this is blue and you don't know blue in quotation marks, but you know blue. But when you actually look at them to try to make sense of that, it gets really hairy. So one question it begs, for example, is whether the non-conceptual raw apprehension of blue is conscious in any meaningful way. Is that something happening consciously or subconsciously? Right, or is it just part of the cognitive machinery running in the background? Curiously, the question is not explicitly addressed until the fifth century compilation, which is rather late for this. This is by a fellow named Sangha Badra in his Nyaya Nusada. He actually tackles this problem by employing the fission gambit, right? He argues that we need to distinguish three different kinds of perception. There's immediate perception by the sense faculty. There's perception of what sometimes translated perception of inner feeling and perceptual awareness. And this allows him to claim that while immediate sense perception, that first moment of blue, may not be conscious in and of itself, it arises concurrently with the perception of feeling. And this involves some kind of inner awareness. The result is that in Sangha Badra's analysis, that initial moment of non-conceptual sense perception both is and is not conscious. A delightful example of the divide and conquer approach that is deployed to resolve potential contradictions. Now that both Vibhashika and Sotranthika sought to stave off idealism, suggests that they were aware of certain stakes. If the phenomenal domain that is cognitively available to us is not ultimately grounded in mind independent reality, in a dharma dhatu, however understood, how do we account for the intersubjective stability and cohesion of the life world? This is Einstein's position, by the way, right? He just said, we can't give that up. We're just gonna be unable to really account for how it all works unless we hold on to some kind of objective mind independent reality. There must be some fundamental laws of nature working behind the scenes that govern the dynamics of the virtual correlationist world that we inhabit. For Buddhists, these laws are the laws of cause and effect, or karma, that regulate interactions among these fleeting dharmas. But in their analyses of the nature of causations, Buddhists, like Hume, discovered that causation is more elusive than it initially appears. In short, they run up against the loop. To give a single example, one issue that the Abhidharmakas wrestle with is the temporal contiguity between cause and effect. Some of them insisted that you cannot properly claim that one thing causes another unless there is a gap between the two. They must be separate, or you can't talk about causation. If they arise together, you can't disambiguate which is the cause and which is the effect. But others disagree, insisting that if there were a gap, then a necessary relationship could not be definitively established. You would have conjunction, but not causation. In this latter view, causation proper requires the actual concurrence of cause and effect. So the Vibhashikas opted for concurrence. Their claim that cause and effect arise simultaneously is a natural corollary of their theory of the present existence of past and future dharmas. This is a doctrine that they're very famous for, that past, present, and future all exists.  For the Vibhashika, the present existence of past and future is necessitated by the doctrine of momentariness. A transient event that is already past can function as a present cause only to the extent that the past event still exists. It's not an unreasonable idea. The Sotranthikas find this nuts. They argue that it makes no sense to claim a cause-effect relationship between two concurrent events since the very notion of causation entails a temporal disjunction. But then the Sotranthika must explain how a no longer excellent event can have a causal efficacy in the present. And here they come up with a theory of seeds. Past events leave behind seeds that endure and later mature to serve as the efficient causes for present events. So once again, there is a highly technical and sophisticated literature on this topic that I'm not gonna go into here. My point is simply to note that the early Avidarmakas recognize at least tacitly the humane problem. That phenomenologically we are confronted with contiguity but not necessity. Yet they are at pains to avoid the humane conclusion that the so-called law of causality is mere conceptual imputation. They propose two competing theories each of which has an air of desperation about it. One claims that past events, albeit past, still exist and the other that past events are no more but their seeds continue. Here too we see the lengths that Avidarmakas will go to avoid slipping into idealism. The Avidarmakas have good reason to be worried. They're claimed that the self is an illusion that arises through karmically determined interactions of transient mental and physical dharmas is tenable only to the extent that karma and dharmas are real. In other words, if karma and dharmas are to be used to explain how the world appears, they must have some reality apart from those appearances. And yet asserting such mind independence existence seems incompatible with the very doctrine of dependent arising. See the problem? Okay. So this is where Nagarjuna will intervene. His project is to debunk Sarvasivadha realism which he regards as incoherent and inconsistent with the core insight of dependent origination. And his task will be relatively easy given that the Vibhashikas and Sotrantikas have already done much of the heavy lifting. Which is to say Nagarjuna will use the Vibhashika critiques of Sotrantika and the Sotrantika critiques of Vibhashika in order to undermine both their positions at the same time. And this strategy is evident, for example, in chapter one of the Mula Madhyamaka Karikas which takes to task the notion of cause and effect. Here Nagarjuna argues pitting Vibhashika and Sotrantika positions against one another that causation cannot hold if there is a disjunct between cause and effect, right? So if seed and sprout are temporarily discreet, you cannot establish a causal link between them, but they also cannot hold if they are concomitant, if the sprout is already somehow coexistent within the seed. The conclusion of Nagarjuna's complex argument is that an internally consistent account of the nature of causation is unavailable precisely because causation has no nature. It is not something that exists in and of itself but is rather a conceptual imputation. He then goes on to apply the same reducto ad absurdum method to virtually every other important concept in the Abhidarmaka arsenal, including motion, the senses, the aggregates, the defilements and so on. All such concepts are empty of own being. They do not astend actual things in the mind independent universe but are merely conventional or relational ways of speaking. This for Nagarjuna is the central insight of Buddhist correlation of teachings, okay? So far, so good. But then it would seem that Nagarjuna's reducto ad absurdum argument should apply to the Buddhist teachings as well, to the fornable truths, to the stages of awakenings, the three refuges and so on. If they too are mere conceptual imputation, it would seem that Nagarjuna's critique threatens to undermine the truth of the Buddhadharma, the Buddhist teachings itself. If everything is empty, as Nagarjuna claims, what grounds are there to privilege the Buddhist teachings over those of his rivals? This is the worry that motivates chapter 24 of the Kadikas in response to which Nagarjuna famously distinguishes between two truths, absolute or ultimate truth and conventional or relative truth. Buddhist teachings, he says, are conventionally true insofar as they point toward the absolute. This presumably will allow him to distinguish the conventional truth of the Buddhist teachings from the conventional falsehood of his rivals. I should point out that he actually doesn't make that move. He doesn't talk about conventional falsehood but it's implicit there and it's brought out by commentators later on. So insofar as the conventional truth of the Buddhist teachings are warranted in the end by their privileged relationship to the absolute, much will depend on how we understand the absolute. And here we see Nagarjuna and his commentators pressing up against the loop. In terms of logical structure, absolute is to conventional as realism is to idealism. So I'll try to unpack that. At first, the two truth doctrine might appear to be out of step with the rest of Nagarjuna's text and a skeptic might well view it as an apologetic leap to shield the Buddhist teachings from the full force of his own deconstructive logic. If Nagarjuna's aim is to purge Buddhism of misplaced dogmatic realism, right? The realism of the Abhidharma theory and to reinstate the early correlationist insights of dependent origination, why doesn't he just say, yes, of course, my critique applies to the teachings of the Buddha as well. They're empty. In that case, there would be no need to posit an absolute truth, a truth of emptiness. That, by the way, I argue, creates all the problem. That Nagarjuna boxed at this and instead takes recourse in the fission gambit, right? He's dividing truth into two, can seem like special pleading, right? By dividing it into two, it allows the Buddhist teachings to be true conventionally but not true ultimately, at one and the same time. So he gets to keep his Buddhist cake and eat it too. But whatever Nagarjuna's attempt may have been, the doctrine of the two truths, more so than any other Indian Buddhist doctrine, captures the philosophical structure of the loop. And I suspect this is why it has attracted so much interest and debate. The nature of conventional truth seems clear enough. At its most basic, it refers to the phenomenal world of our mundane existence. The socially and conceptually constructed world made up of carts and pots and cows and persons and all sorts of other things. It is comprised of the shared linguistic conventions, beliefs and practices that sustain what sociologists call the nomos. It is essentially pragmatic, which is to say that conventional truth claims are warranted insofar as they work for us and elicit general assent. The Buddhist teachings is conventionally true in that it is able to mitigate suffering. While the teachings of his rivals presumably perpetuate conceptual falsehoods and lead only to more pain. The rub is that the conventional truth of Buddhism liberates one from suffering precisely by pointing in the direction of the absolute so everything now hinges on how one understands this absolute. See, the argument is the conventional only makes sense as conventional vis-a-vis the absolute. But it turns out to be really hard to characterize the absolute. By definition, it is not relative or conditional and thus as an in itself cannot be understood in relation to anything else. Mahayana exegete struggled with the issue over many centuries given rise to multiple competing and increasingly sophisticated accounts. For our present purposes, I'm going to discuss the arguments under three broad groupings. Deflationary or sometimes analytic approaches, transcendental or phenomenological approaches and synthetic approaches that try to mediate between the first two. So under, and you'll see for those specialists in the room, you'll see I'm covering here hundreds of different exegetes. I wanna see if I can get away with this. Under these three headings. Under the deflationary heading, I would include positions classified as Prasangika or Rong Tong by the Tibetan Tibet, or those are two different ones by Tibetan doxographers as well as certain strands of Chinese Chan such as the Baotong school, Baotong here. According to this view, Nagarjuna's arguments demonstrate the necessarily contingent nature of all language. All denotation and predication is based on making distinctions, on slicing and dicing and thus truth claims are necessarily observer or context dependent. There is no escape from contingency. The, what Thomas Nagel calls the view from nowhere is just another view from somewhere. Since the very notion of a view presupposes a subject position, even to claim that all things are empty cannot be true in any ultimate sense since it pertains only to what can be said about the world and not to the world as such. So given this logic, what I'm calling this this deflationary logic, the distinction between the convention and the absolute is itself conventional since the absolute does not broke any distinctions. We then arrive at a very peculiar conclusion that absolute truth is precisely the truth that all truth is conventional, right? So the great outdoors is a chimera, a piece of philosophical nonsense. There is no outside, but we're not done. If absolute truth is merely the claim that all truths are conventional, then conventional truth is the only truth left standing. The very notion of an extrinsic or mind-independent world that might serve to ground truth claims, whether conventional or ultimate, is itself the product of our inescapably conventional and dualistic ways of thinking. So if conventional truth is the highest truth there is, it's absolute. It turns out that we've been in the great outdoors all along, right? This is, I think this is a Viconstinian argument, a kind of later Viconstinian argument. Here the loop rises to the surface. The absolute is precisely the conventional and the conventional is the absolute. They enfold one another as do idealism and realism. And I would note that there are good scriptural warrants for this line of interpretation in the Prajnaparamita literature where Samsara and Nirvana enfold each other and vice versa. So for much, so much for the deflationary view, transcendental approaches, so I'm now working with a whole other approach to the two truth dialectic. Transcendental approaches to the two truths are more typical of Yogachara, Tathagatagarbha, Shentong, some Svatantrika commentators and some Zen commentators. This line of interpretation rejects the deflationary or analytic position as incoherent and self-contradictory. But more critically, the transcendentalists claim that the deflationary view undermines the Buddhist path insofar as it collapses the gap between Samsara and Nirvana. Ignorance and awakening, path and goal. The transcendentalists hold that there is no Buddhism without a goal. And the goal, the final goal, is merely the realization that the convention... Sorry, did I do that well? Oh, I really, start again. Transcendentalists hold that there is no Buddhism without the goal. And if the final goal is merely the realization that the conventional is all there is, that there is no final escape from contingency, what is the point? So like Mieshu, the transcendentalists want to escape the correlationist circle. And they view the deflationary approach, the claim that the circle, seen for what it is, just is the real, they claim that that's a cop out. Now there are steep divisions among different transcendentalist approaches, but they are united insofar as they agree that the absolute is something that stands apart from contingency. It is the domain of the real, attained or realized or known by the Buddhas and advanced bodhisattvas. In a world it is near to vikopa. It is free of discrimination, free of ignorance, duality, discrimination, conceptual imputation. But what could it possibly mean to attain or realize or know such a state? One possible approach to the absolute is to consider it tantamount to the ascetic nirvana of the early shramana tradition in which nirvana is escape from samsara period. That is, once near vikopa or non-discrimination, the state of non-discriminative awareness is attained and the dualisms of figure and ground, subject and object, mind and world, or caste aside, the aggregates cease and with them cognition and phenomenality. One might characterize this as a higher order thought approach to nirvikopa if you're familiar with contemporary philosophy of mind, in which case the absence of conceptual discrimination means the absence of consciousness and the collapse of the world. Now this notion of the absolute is rather difficult to distinguish from death as death is understood by modern secularists who do not believe in afterlife. And it's easy to see why this Hinayana understanding of the absolute was associated rightly or wrongly with nihilism. And unsurprisingly, this reading never gained much traction among Mahayana exegetes. Nevertheless, it is arguably the interpretation of Nagarjuna recently advanced by Ann McDonald, if anybody's interested in her work. And I suspect that the threat of nihilism may have motivated at least in part the transcendentalist arguments. So now to come to the transcendentalists, their problem is how to positively characterize the collapse of subject object duality such that something remains in emptiness. Their solution is to claim that the state of non-discrimination, this Nirvikalpa, simply discloses what has always been present, the non-dual in itself from which the phenomenal world emerges. Indeed, according to this view, the very claim that the phenomenal domain is contingent is only intelligible against the backdrop of the real. Various terms are used to denote this non-contingent absolute, including shunyata, dharmatta, dharmadhatu, tatata, tatagatagarbha, aliavinyana, paratantras, vabhava, and so on, Buddha nature. They go at it. The challenge then is to make sense of what these terms are talking about. Given that first, it must be bereft of all sensible qualities and cognitive content and at the same time, it must be distinguishable from the heterodox, non-Buddhist, non-correlationist notion of Brahman. They don't want to turn into Advaita Vedantists. So in their positive accounts of Nirvikalpa, the collapse of mind-world duality, Mahayana transcendentalists fall into one of two camps. Here, I'm using the fishing gamut. They can either claim that mind alone remains or that the world alone remains. In the first approach, the falling away of subject-object duality discloses the ground of luminous mind, right? Or pure consciousness, amalavinyana. This luminous consciousness has in fact been present all along but was obscured by defilements and deluded thoughts. Writers frequently avert to analogy to explain how this can be solved. So they'll say luminous mind is like the still surface of a clear mirror that registers but is ultimately untouched by the transitory images that appear within. Or it's like the ocean. The wind blows stirring up waves that obscure the natural clarity of the water. As the waves and winds settle, the abiding clarity is revealed. This luminous mind strategy is popular in certain Yogachara, Tathagatagarbha, Northern Chan and Tantric traditions. Like the Abhidharmakas, they feel compelled to ground their correlationism in a non-contingent empirical reality. But where the Abhidharmakas made unconstructed cognition, the bare quail present in the first instance of sense cognition before conceptuality kicks in, these transcendentalists have this, now this non-conceptual reality as an enduring untainted background consciousness. The problem of course is that luminous mind begins to suspend suspiciously like an internal soul or an atma and this did not go unnoticed by critics. And that's why we have the alternative strategy which is actually less well known. The alternative strategy steers clear of the Atman problem by claiming that near vikopa or the elimination of discrimination brings an end not to the world but to mind itself. This approach has the advantage of derefying mind and consciousness and thereby hewing to the correlationist insight that consciousness being intentional, like that it has a subject-object structure, necessarily entails cognitive content. As such, the attainment of non-discrimination which is tantamount to the end of the illusion of an anonymous self or cogito that stands apart from the natural world is the end of consciousness itself but while the four itself ceases, the holistic in itself or the dhammadattu is left untouched. This is weird, right? This consciousness ends but the world does not. This is not like cessation, it's not nihilistic. To attain the absolute is thus to lose oneself in or reunite with the in-sentient natural world. Mieshu's ancestral world that exists prior to giveness, that's a little for those of you who know Mieshu. This is not nihilistic, it's not the hinayana insentience of utter nothingness but the quiescent insentience of grasses and trees, walls and fences, roof styles and stones. That's a traditional list given in Chinese texts. A roof tile, put it this way, is being devoid of any sense of self clings to nothing and therefore is free of suffering. In short, nirvikopa or non-discrimination is mindlessness, wuxin. This position is characteristic of Aksed Chan texts that explicitly defend the buddhahood of the in-sentient but I would also include in this category the robobuddha interpretation of Chandrakirti advanced by Mark Sitteritz, if anybody's familiar with that. And it also is, to my mind, reminiscent of the illimitive materialism of Quine and Dene. Now some might argue that the distinction between luminous mind on the one hand and mindlessness on the other is in the end merely rhetorical. That is to say they're both merely fingers pointing to the moon, the moon being the transcendent, non-dual, ineffable ground of being. Hence differences between these two transcendentalist positions have more to do with rhetorical style or pedagogical considerations rather than their ultimate purport. But Buddhist exegetes evidently felt otherwise and they invested considerable energy defending their respective positions. They were driven in the end, I believe, to distinguish their positions from the mindlessness of Narodasamapati which is a kind of meditative state akin to being in a deep unconscious coma. And also to differentiate their positions from the beings without conception. These are fascinating celestial beings who have material bodies but no minds. At the same time, so on the one hand they have to distinguish themselves from those kind of deep comatose or mindless states but they also need to avoid the monistic atman or Brahman theories of the non-Buddhists. And this didn't leave them much wiggle room. The eighth century debates between the so-called Southern and Northern schools of Chan as well as the Samyay debates between the Indian master Kamala Sheila and Mohyain were attempts to identify and delineate what little wiggle room they could find. Now there's one more approach. I'm coming to the end here. One more approach that we might loosely call synthetic and it tries to mitigate the tension between the antinomies of conventional and ultimate. These approaches draw from an attempt to synthesize the various deflationary and transcendental perspectives by employing a divide and conquer approach. I have in mind the Svatantika distinction between two kinds of conventional truth, the Yogachara doctrine of the three natures or Trisvabhava, the Tiantai claim that Nagarjuna possessed not two truths but three and so on. In each case, exeges posit a new category that is intended to mediate between or straddle across or sublate the antinomies of the conventional and the real or mind and world. Thus the Svatantikas come up with true conventional reality. Yogacharans speak of the dependent nature. The Tiantai exeges have a middle truth between the other two truths and so on. The point of these synthetic theories is at least in part to mitigate the strong correlationism of the deflationary approach which collapses the in itself into the for itself and at the same time to avoid the reification of the absolute that is endemic to transcendental approaches. The synthetic positions recognize the incoherence of standalone realist and idealist positions and aim for some kind of synthetic solution. They do so through a combination of fission and fusion through the proliferation of new categories and schemas that capture and ultimately resolve or sublate the contradictions. Yet insofar as they seek to reign in the loop to find a stable handhold in the unfolding of mind and world they are doomed to fail. In time another commentator will come along convince that with just a little more tweaking a little more fission here and fusion there they can make a go of it but they never succeed. And the problem is there is simply no place to stand either inside or outside the loop to take the loops measure. So to conclude many of the great debates in contemporary philosophy between analytic and continental philosophy between idealism and realism between non-conceptualism and conceptualism seem to share a similar underlying structure namely the paradoxical looping structure that I've tried to identify here. I would also include here the well-known debates between Herbert Dreyfus and John McDowell or between Charles Taylor and Richard Roarty both of these are happened within the last few decades. Now Medieval Buddhist Scholiasts wrestled with the same loop and so as we will see do quantum theorists. With a few notable exceptions philosophers tried to get a grip on the loop by hitching their cart to one of two horses. The first is the anti-realist or idealist horse that privileges mind or appearances and the claim is that there is no world unless and until it shows up for someone and thus it makes no sense to speak of a moon when nobody is looking. The second is the realist or physicalist horse that privileges the world. There is no mind in the absence of world and thus the moon is there irrespective of whether anybody notices it or not. That both positions are ultimately true is a claim that is rarely made much less taken seriously but given that the loop seems irrepressible and that 2000 years of philosophical debate in both East and West have done little to settle in favor of one side or the other perhaps it is time to take it seriously and to take seriously the notion that paradox is an ineligible feature of our world and that is what I'll be doing in the remaining three sessions. Thank you. Thank you.


Key stakeholders are the one-day public hearing on the new bill to repeal the Customs and Exize Management Act 2004 and replace it with the Nigeria Customs Service Establishment Bill 2021, have lashed out at its inconsistency with global best practices. However, Chairman of the Committee Hon. Leke at Bejidi insists the bill be thoroughly scrutinized before it is submitted to the House for further legislative input. The bill, according to the Speaker, Hon. Femi Bajabiamila and the Chairman of the House Committee on Customs and Exize, is to reposition the Customs towards better service delivery and to remove lacunas that have crippled the effectiveness of the service in revenue generation. The ongoing need to diversify our nation's economy to improve income from non-oil and gas sources. It is also evidence of the need to use the instruments of legislative authority to promote policies and enact mandates to encourage investment, enable commercial activity and promote enterprise in the country. Ensuring that the Nigerian Customs Service operates optimally in executing its statutory functions without corruption and malfeasance of any sort is essential to achieve these other objectives. And this is what we hope to achieve with the bill under consideration. Notable legislative initiatives in this bill are as follows. A. Collision of our Customs and Exize legislation into a single compadium of Customs and Exize Act to facilitate its reference and its knowledge-driven Customs and Exize policies. B. This act will position the Nigerian Customs Service to be financially stable in order to recruit the required number of officers they need to man our porous border stations. The Nigerian Customs Service recently currently have 15,000, three-and-fourteen officers according to information made available to us, instead of 30,000 officers needed for the service to function optimally. A. Customs and Exize Management Act is a convention. There are protocols and treaties, there are no domestic laws. They are entered into conventions, treaties, and protocols. And what you have in this bill are domestic laws, contravening all the protocols and conventions. So this bill does not stand it, it's not a domestic bill. They are trade bills, they are procedures. And all those procedures have not been met by that bill. The contemplation of an autonomous Custom Service is in abeyance with extant laws regarding the Treasury, supervision of the Treasury and all agencies which remit funds to the Federation Accounts and the Consolidated Revenue Fund. In line with the Finance, Management, and Control Act, the Federal Ministry of Finance, Budget, and National Planning is the relevant authority charged with the responsibility of ensuring compliance with the Custom and Exize Legislations regarding trade and fiscal policies and where appropriate apply other relevant provisions applicable to goods subject to such measures.