Views Are Unavoidable; Attachment Is Not
Continuing the Buddhist Revolution series, let us examine ignorance among greed, anger, and ignorance: the illusion that I know and attachment to views. The instruction not to become angry and Jesus’s instruction not to judge are connected to the fact that my judgment can be wrong. Before removing the beam from my own eye, I should not judge others recklessly, quarrel, or fight as if I were one hundred percent right. I bear responsibility for the harm produced by such certainty.
Human beings cannot live without views. The problem begins when I clutch, “My image is unconditionally right. This is me and my value, so it can never change.” If I understand that the judgments and logic I call truth can be wrong, I can use views without attaching to them. This is why the Buddha said both that we must escape attachment to all views and that doing so is extremely difficult.
Two Ways to Break Attachment
There are broadly two ways to address attachment to views. One is observation and understanding: recognizing that what I believed was an image rather than perfect truth and experiencing the shell around me break. The other is temporarily stopping thought. Views produce thoughts, and thoughts move emotions, so yoga, meditation, samatha, and calming practice can stop thought and enter absorption.
This episode follows the first path, understanding that my view may not be right. Knowing “I do not know” is necessary to release stubbornness. Though this sounds contradictory, it resembles Socrates’s attitude: “I neither know nor think that I know.” Only clear knowledge of my ignorance creates distance from what I believe I know.
Bacon’s Idols and the Limits of the Human Species
Francis Bacon described four idols that produce error when people discover laws. Having already discussed the idol of the theater, we begin here with the idol of the tribe and later move to the cave and marketplace. The idol of the tribe means the tendency to judge wrongly because of the sensory and cognitive structure of the human species itself.
Observation is the starting point for understanding the world. But if observation cannot show the whole world, laws built from observation can also be wrong. Humans receive information only through their senses, and those senses capture not reality in its entirety but only the portion available to humans. Before speaking of truth from limited information, we must allow that we may be frogs in a well.
Invisible Light and Inaudible Sound
The eye sees only the visible spectrum. Infrared light, with wavelengths longer than red, leaves a remote control but cannot be seen. Ultraviolet, shorter than violet, is also invisible yet can burn and harm skin. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves too, and still shorter, higher-energy forms of light exist. Our eyes see only a tiny part of the light around us.
The ear is similar. An ultrasound device can image a fetus while we hear nothing. A bat emits ultrasound in a dark cave and hears its return from walls, but humans cannot hear it. We also fail to hear extremely low frequencies. A sound does not cease to exist because my ear cannot hear it.
A room without noticeable odor to a person may be full of odors to a dog. Sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch all operate within human limits. We therefore cannot conclude that something does not exist because we do not sense it, nor can we say that what we sense is the world exactly as it is.
Looking at the Same Thing Is Not Seeing the Same World
Senses are not identical even among humans. People with eyesight of 0.1, 0.6, and 2.0 receive different resolutions from the same scene. Billions of people cannot all possess identical sight. Even people classified as having normal color vision differ in sensitivity. The same yellow flower can appear intensely yellow to one, pale to another, and nearly white at an extreme.
Two witnesses at a nighttime killing may report different clothing colors. One may say black; another may say yellow and blue. Lighting, eyesight, color sensitivity, distance, and momentary attention differ. We imagine that we all feel the same world in the same way, but each receives a world with a different sensory resolution.
If the senses do not receive all reality and different people perceive the same scene differently, laws built from that information cannot be guaranteed perfectly right. They may work under limited conditions without being true under every condition. The first lesson of the idol of the tribe is the incompleteness of the senses.
Confirmation Bias Shows Us What We Want to See
Beyond sensory limits lies cognitive bias. Consider confirmation bias. I say there is no rebirth; another person believes there is. The two can read the same Diamond Sutra, Atthakavagga, or Heart Sutra and notice different passages.
The believer sees a story of the Buddha’s past life and says, “Look, the Diamond Sutra teaches rebirth.” Denying rebirth then seems like denying the whole sutra and Buddhism. Instructions not to form images of existence or cling to views may appear unimportant.
The person denying rebirth is not free of bias either. That reader may dismiss references to past lives as a literary device while emphasizing only the rejection of images of self, person, being, and life. Evidence against one’s view becomes an exception; support becomes memorable proof. Scientists, religious people, and professors are not automatically free of confirmation bias.
At a stronger level, bias becomes selective perception. Contrary evidence can sit in front of the eyes and remain unseen. Only events fitting my view are repeatedly noticed, while the rest are ignored. The world then seems to prove my thought continually. Escaping attachment begins by recognizing that humans are this kind of animal.
The Die Does Not Remember the Past
The gambler’s fallacy is another common failure. Suppose a fair six-sided die lands on one three times. What is the probability of one on the fourth throw? Many feel that another number is now more likely because one has appeared repeatedly. Yet the probability of one on this present throw remains one in six.
The die does not remember its past. Earlier results do not alter the chance of each face on the fourth throw. Gamblers easily imagine that a repeated number is now unlikely. People can understand probability logically while momentary intuition gives another answer. Such errors occur throughout perception, cognition, and judgment.
Heuristics Are Survival Wisdom and Hasty Inference
The proverb about being startled by a pot lid after once being frightened by a turtle illustrates heuristics. A heuristic judges quickly from little information. If a large tiger doll is secretly placed beside a cat, the cat turns, spreads its body, and jumps. It does not inspect the doll carefully; it instantly judges a large, threatening shape as a predator.
Without this tendency, animals would struggle to survive. After being bitten by a snake, an animal must flee immediately from something snake-like. Slowly verifying whether it is truly a venomous snake would be too late. The body must react from sparse clues: “It may be a snake.” Quick judgment has enormous survival value.
An experienced art expert who glances at a painting and senses “This may be a forgery” also uses a heuristic. Long training lets subtle inconsistency appear immediately. Yet this is not certainty reached after logically checking every fact; it is a high-probability inference. Expert intuition can be wrong. A heuristic is useful wisdom and also a human limit capable of becoming hasty inference.
Why the Sun Appears to Move
In ordinary experience Earth seems still while the sun crosses from east to west. Told that Earth rotates and orbits the sun, intuition may respond, “Impossible. If Earth moved, I would fall off. I feel no movement.” The fast judgment preceding deep observation and logic fits immediate appearance but can differ from fact.
This is why views require caution. Strong certainty is not proof of sufficient information. Even what feels intuitively obvious can be a conclusion produced by human senses and heuristics.
Artificial Intelligence Also Makes High-Probability Inferences
Because heuristics are so useful, similar judgment is introduced into deep-learning systems. A system learns many cat images and recognizes a new photograph as a cat, infers speech from lip movement, or tells an autonomous car to stop when a camera detects a person. It does not logically know every fact before judging; it learns patterns from many cases and produces a likely answer.
Its judgment therefore cannot be one hundred percent certain. Lip shape cannot perfectly establish speech, and translation software does not always return the correct answer. The probability and quality of approximation improve. A system modeled on heuristic patterns shares both their advantages and their potential for error.
The limits of the senses, confirmation bias, the gambler’s fallacy, and heuristics show that humans do not simply see what is and judge perfectly. Understanding this is the beginning of escaping the idol of the tribe. We must next examine the idol of the cave formed by each person’s experience and environment. Before the certainty “My view is right” comes the understanding “I may not know.”
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.