Things that don’t have categories are merged into similar things or stop existing within our awareness entirely.
This is also where you jump into talking about insight meditation. It seems a good place to point people to the idea that Buddhist insight meditation is much more mundane than it first appears. The extra craziness is generated by snarls when attempting to describe something that cuts across abstraction levels (also how lots of famous philosophy thought experiments work). The simple thing is that your attention is a sieve. Look at a pile of lego and consider the chain of instruction:
you’re looking for a yellow piece
you’re looking for a blue piece
you’re looking for a piece shaped like this
you’re looking for a piece that includes this shape but is nonspecific otherwise
you’re looking for a piece that might look like a good ‘engine’ or engine component
etc.
At each step you are tuning the holes in the sieve. You create holes, you search for something that would fill that hole. This occurs in high dimensional space. Simple enough.
A core claim of Buddhism is that you learned some specific sieve shapes quite young, built a bunch of stuff on top of them, and then never stopped filtering that way. This is fine, and necessary for interacting with others who also have the same built up abstraction stack, but is also causing some unpleasant side effects that you can undo with practice. Specifically, your attentional schema is tuned to make salient the stable aspects of things, the potentially satisfactory to your goals aspects of things, and the understandable/controllable/ownable/essentializable aspects of things. This sounds like multiple things but turns out to bea single shape. This isn’t conceptual, this is happening in moment to moment attention the same way that you ‘focus’ your eyes to highlight the yellow pieces of lego. This results in weird gerrymandered symbolic objects that, when assembled into bigger abstraction stacks are basically spaghetti towers. Insight meditation is quality time spent refactoring this.
This is also where you jump into talking about insight meditation. It seems a good place to point people to the idea that Buddhist insight meditation is much more mundane than it first appears. The extra craziness is generated by snarls when attempting to describe something that cuts across abstraction levels (also how lots of famous philosophy thought experiments work). The simple thing is that your attention is a sieve. Look at a pile of lego and consider the chain of instruction:
you’re looking for a yellow piece
you’re looking for a blue piece
you’re looking for a piece shaped like this
you’re looking for a piece that includes this shape but is nonspecific otherwise
you’re looking for a piece that might look like a good ‘engine’ or engine component
etc.
At each step you are tuning the holes in the sieve. You create holes, you search for something that would fill that hole. This occurs in high dimensional space. Simple enough.
A core claim of Buddhism is that you learned some specific sieve shapes quite young, built a bunch of stuff on top of them, and then never stopped filtering that way. This is fine, and necessary for interacting with others who also have the same built up abstraction stack, but is also causing some unpleasant side effects that you can undo with practice. Specifically, your attentional schema is tuned to make salient the stable aspects of things, the potentially satisfactory to your goals aspects of things, and the understandable/controllable/ownable/essentializable aspects of things. This sounds like multiple things but turns out to bea single shape. This isn’t conceptual, this is happening in moment to moment attention the same way that you ‘focus’ your eyes to highlight the yellow pieces of lego. This results in weird gerrymandered symbolic objects that, when assembled into bigger abstraction stacks are basically spaghetti towers. Insight meditation is quality time spent refactoring this.