Persona #102
Daisetsu Teitarō Suzuki
1870–1966 · Japanese Buddhist scholar, translator, principal interpreter of Zen for the modern West
Satori as the breakthrough beyond conceptualisation — Zen as the perennial possibility within Mahayana Buddhism
Suzuki spent ten years (1897–1907) in La Salle, Illinois, working with Paul Carus at the Open Court Publishing Company, then taught at Otani University in Kyoto for decades, then in his eighties became a permanent figure on the American lecture circuit (Columbia, the Eranos conferences). The English-language "Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism" (1907), "Essays in Zen Buddhism" (three series, 1927–34), "Zen and Japanese Culture" (1959), the translation of the Lankavatara Sutra, and the Studies in the Lankavatara Sutra together gave the post-war Western intellectual class its first sustained access to Zen as a philosophical-religious tradition. Merton, Cage, Jung, Heidegger, and the Beat poets all engaged him directly. The substantive philosophy combines the Yogacara doctrine of consciousness-only (Suzuki produced the standard English Lankavatara) with the Rinzai Zen practice of kōan-based meditation and the conviction that satori (sudden awakening) is the perennial breakthrough beyond all conceptualisation.
Key works
- Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism (1907)
- Essays in Zen Buddhism, First, Second, and Third Series (1927, 1933, 1934)
- The Lankavatara Sutra (translation, 1932)
- An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (1934)
- Zen and Japanese Culture (1959)
- Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist (1957)
- The Field of Zen (1969, posthumous)
Declared Influences
Yogacara 30%
Buddhism 35%
Pure Land Buddhism 15%
Sufism / Wahdat al-Wujud 10%
Panpsychism 5%
Yogacara
30%
Suzuki's English Lankavatara Sutra and the Studies were the principal twentieth-century Western introduction to Yogacara philosophy — the consciousness-only school of Mahayana Buddhism that holds the phenomenal world to be a manifestation of mind.
"The mind, like a magician's wand, gives the appearance of substance to its own creations." (Studies in the Lankavatara Sutra, 1930)
Buddhism
35%
The broader Mahayana Buddhist tradition — emptiness, dependent origination, the bodhisattva ideal, no-self — is the substrate of all his work. Suzuki was the most consequential twentieth-century expositor of Buddhism to Western audiences.
"Zen has no special doctrine or philosophy, no set of concepts or intellectual formulas. … Zen wants us to live and let live." (An Introduction to Zen Buddhism)
Suzuki was personally a Shin Buddhist (Jōdo Shinshū) and wrote extensively on the parallels between Pure Land's tariki (Other-power) and Zen's jiriki (self-power) as complementary rather than contradictory dimensions of the Buddhist path.
"Zen and Pure Land Buddhism look as if they are antipodal in their teachings, but in their fundamentals they are mutually identical." (Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist, ch. 6)
A late-period engagement with Western mysticism — Eckhart, Saint John of the Cross, Sufi figures — pursued the perennial-philosophy thesis that all the great mystical traditions point to the same reality.
"Zen and Eckhart" — the standing comparison that organises Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist (1957)
Panpsychism
5%
A structural rather than confessional affinity: the Yogacara doctrine of consciousness-only and the Zen attention to the everyday particular as the site of satori produce a metaphysics in which the line between mind and world is less sharp than mainstream Western philosophy has made it.
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few." (Attributed to Suzuki's student Shunryu Suzuki but central to D.T. Suzuki's teaching)
Internal Tensions
Suzuki's presentation of Zen to Western audiences has been criticised by subsequent scholarship (Sharf, McMahan, Bernard Faure) for systematically overstating Zen's anti-intellectual, anti-institutional character and for obscuring its embeddedness in Japanese institutional Buddhism and in nation-building rhetoric. The "Zen and Japanese culture" framework has been read as a partial product of pre-war Japanese cultural nationalism. Suzuki's defenders note that his presentation was pedagogically calibrated for an audience with no prior background, and that his technical scholarship on Yogacara remains authoritative.
⧖
I. Time
Relational and cyclical — Buddhist samsara modulated by the satori-moment that is itself outside time.
Attributes
Extent: Infinite
Ontological Status: Relational
Grain: Discrete
Freedom: Non-Deterministic
Traversability: Cyclical
Direction: Non-directional
Dimensionality: One
✦
II. Space
Emergent and non-local — Yogacara consciousness-only.
Attributes
Extent: Infinite
Ontological Status: Emergent
Curvature: implicit
Dimensionality: Three
Locality: implicit
◉
III. Matter
Emergent within the consciousness-only framework, non-conserved in the Christian-substantival sense.
Attributes
Extent: Finite
Ontological Status: Emergent
Conservation: Non-conserved
Dimensionality: Three
Locality: implicit
◎
IV. Observer
Singular at the deepest level — the One Mind of the Yogacara analysis. Multiple time-instances through rebirth and through the discontinuous satori experience. Both physicality, both agency. Cosmic-ordering metaphysical agency.
Attributes
Time Instance: Multiple
Space Instance: Single
Knowledge Extent: Total
Knowledge Retainment: Total
Physicality: Both
Agency: Both
Number: Singular
Metaphysical Agency: Cosmic-ordering
⚡
V. Energy
Emergent, reversible.
Attributes
Extent: Infinite
Ontological Status: Emergent
Conservation: Non-conserved
Dispersibility: Reversible
⧉
VI. Information
Relational and non-conserved — the alaya-vijnana (storehouse consciousness) retains karmic seeds but is itself empty.
Attributes
Ontological Status: Relational
Cosmic Conservation: Non-conserved
Personal Conservation: Non-conserved
Granularity: implicit
Classified works
Works in the atlas that Daisetsu Teitarō Suzuki authored or that draw on this persona's writings, with full attribute fingerprints of their own.
Authored · Mid (Suzuki's major early period of Western dissemination)
Essays in Zen Buddhism
Authored · Early (Suzuki's first major book; preceding the Essays in Zen Buddhism by twenty years)
Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism
Authored · Late
Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist
Authored · Late
Zen and Japanese Culture
Authored · Mid
An Introduction to Zen Buddhism
Authored · Mid
The Lankavatara Sutra
Authored · Late
The Field of Zen
Authored · Early
Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism
Authored · Mid-Late
Zen and Japanese Culture
Computed school proximity
The persona's attribute fingerprint scored against all 202 schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated influences above.
Philosophical neighbors
Other personas whose attribute fingerprint sits closest to Daisetsu Teitarō Suzuki's — intellectual neighbors across traditions and eras.
72%
Siddhārtha Gautama (the Buddha) — c. 563–483 BCE (traditional dates; recent scholarship narrows to c. 480–400)
22/29
68%
Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama — 1935–present
21/31
65%
Ralph Waldo Emerson — 1803–1882
20/31
62%
Zhuangzi (Zhuang Zhou) — c. 369–c. 286 BCE
20/31
62%
Nāgārjuna — c. 150 – c. 250 CE
19/31
61%
Aldous Huxley — 1894–1963
19/31
59%
Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī — 1207–1273
18/29
56%
Adi Śaṅkara — c. 700–750 (traditional: 788–820)
17/31
How Daisetsu Teitarō Suzuki resolves each dilemma
53 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 39 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 4 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.
Distinctive · only 2% of schools agree
(4/202)
How much weight do future people deserve?
If a billion people will exist in the 25th century, do their interests count for as much as the interests of a billion people alive now? The answer turns on what kind of reality the future has.
From the One's vantage, generations are themselves conventional.
On non-dual views, the distinction between present and future people is itself perspectival within a single underlying reality. Obligation across generations remains real at the conventional level where moral life happens; the metaphysical claim that future people 'exist' or 'don't yet exist' as a final …
Roads not taken
Future people are as real as you are — and their interests count for as much. (47%) ·
Time arises from events or from a deeper substrate — the future is not yet. (32%) ·
Past, present, and future are bound in cycles — duties span generations as a matter of course. (17%)
Distinctive · only 2% of schools agree
(4/202)
Is regret rational?
If the past is fixed and unchangeable, what kind of mental act is regret? An error, a duty, a lesson, a perspective on a moment that is still in some sense present?
From the One's vantage, regret is itself a conventional category.
On non-dual views, the framing of regret presupposes a chooser distinct from the choice and from the outcome — distinctions that hold at the conventional level but dissolve at the deeper one. Regret remains real where the apparent self runs the apparent past; the metaphysical …
Roads not taken
The past is as real as the present; regret is a real attitude toward a real thing. (47%) ·
The past is not a thing now; regret is the present holding what is no longer. (32%) ·
The past is part of a cycle one keeps returning to; regret is one of the gates of the cycle. (17%)
Distinctive · only 2% of schools agree
(4/202)
Do we owe extinct species something we cannot give them?
A species that no longer exists cannot be helped, cannot be consulted, cannot benefit. Whether anything is owed to it anyway turns on what kind of reality past beings have.
From the One's vantage, species and extinction are themselves conventional.
On non-dual views, the species we mourn — and the act of mourning — operate at the conventional level. Compassion for the extinct, like compassion for the living, remains; the metaphysical question of what we 'owe' the extinct presupposes a framework of distinct beings and …
Roads not taken
Extinct species are as real as we are; they have standing. (47%) ·
Past species no longer exist; what we owe is to the present and the future. (32%) ·
Past beings are part of the cycle; we owe them what we owe ancestors. (17%)
6 mainstream positions
Do you really choose?
The future is open and you are a genuine origin of it.
69%
Are addicts responsible for their addiction?
The addict could have chosen otherwise — that's why recovery is real.
69%
Should we hold AI systems responsible for what they do?
An AI without a free will is not the kind of thing that can be responsible.
69%
Is the universe running out of usable energy?
Time is unbounded but matter is finite; usable energy can fail without time failing.
47%
Are natural resources fundamentally finite, or only practically so?
Time goes on but matter is bounded; we are eventually constrained even with infinite time.
47%
Could we owe future generations more than is materially possible to provide?
Time is unbounded but matter is not; we can owe more across long time than the matter can provide.
47%
Matter · 7 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
What stuff is — fundamental, relational, or appearance.
Distinctive · only 4% of schools agree
(9/202)
Is the world created from nothing?
Creatio ex nihilo is one of the most distinctive Western-theological claims. Whether matter was created from nothing, eternally exists, or is sustained moment-by-moment turns on what kind of thing matter is.
Matter arises and dissolves through cosmic rounds; neither created from nothing nor eternal.
On cyclical views, matter is neither a substance called out of nothing once-for-all nor a permanently conserved bedrock. It emerges from a deeper reality in each cosmic round and dissolves back into it. The creatio-ex-nihilo question presupposes a linear creation event the view denies; the …
Roads not taken
Yes — matter was created and is conserved as a real substance. (55%) ·
Matter is real but emerges from something deeper — neither bedrock nor created-from-nothing. (23%) ·
Matter is constituted by relations; the question of 'from what?' presupposes substance. (16%)
Distinctive · only 4% of schools agree
(9/202)
Is the physical world fully real?
Realists, idealists, and relationalists divide on whether matter exists mind-independently, derivatively, or as a pattern of relations. The split runs deeper than any single scientific question.
Real for this cycle — the deepest reality cycles through creation and dissolution.
On cyclical views, the physical world is real now, in this cosmic round. Its reality is not eternal; matter emerges from a deeper source and will return to it. The realism-idealism dispute, framed as a once-for-all metaphysical question, is answered at the cosmic-round scale rather …
Roads not taken
Yes — the physical world is fully real, mind-independent, persisting. (55%) ·
Real but sustained — not mind-independent in the strict realist sense. (23%) ·
Real as relations — neither pure substance nor pure construction. (16%)
Distinctive · only 4% of schools agree
(9/202)
Does matter have intrinsic moral standing?
Do rocks, soil, rivers, and stuff in general deserve moral consideration — or only the living, the conscious, the human? The answer turns on what matter is.
Matter is in flux; standing is impermanent and ritual-mediated.
On cyclical views, the moral standing of a particular material form is real but impermanent. What matters is the ritual and contemplative relation to a world that is arising and dissolving. Asking for the standing of matter as such fixes what the view holds to …
Roads not taken
Matter is morally considerable insofar as it is created or conserved good. (55%) ·
Matter is morally considerable derivatively — through what it sustains. (23%) ·
Matter has intrinsic moral standing as part of the relational fabric. (16%)
Distinctive · only 7% of schools agree
(15/202)
What is money?
The question of what money is — a measured store of real value, an agreed-on practice, a relational ledger of debts, or just a name we apply to many different things — sits behind every argument about inflation, cryptocurrency, debt, and the state.
Money's apparent diversity is convention over a single underlying value.
On non-dual views, the diverse forms money takes are perspectival distinctions within a single underlying value — labor, energy, attention, or simply the One from which all value derives. The metaphysical question is mostly malformed at the conventional level where monetary policy lives, but the …
Roads not taken
Money is a real institution with intrinsic features. (54%) ·
Money is a social practice — its content is what we make it. (16%) ·
Money is the ledger of obligations among real people. (15%)
Distinctive · only 7% of schools agree
(15/202)
What is a nation?
Whether a nation is a real moral community with intrinsic character, a constructed legal-political artifact, a web of kinship and shared history, an imagined community, or a conventional partition of a deeper unity — these are real ontological positions with sharply different political downstream.
Nations are conventional partitions of a single humanity.
On non-dual views, the distinctness of nations is a perspectival distinction within a deeper unity — one humanity, one consciousness, one underlying reality. Nations matter at the conventional level where ordinary politics lives, but the metaphysical weight they sometimes claim is unsupported.
Roads not taken
A nation is a real moral community with intrinsic character. (54%) ·
A nation is a constructed polity — a project, not a discovery. (16%) ·
A nation is the web of kinship, ancestry, and shared land that hosts a people. (15%)
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.
Distinctive · only 7% of schools agree
(15/202)
When does a person begin?
The political question of abortion sits atop an older ontological one: at what point does there exist a someone — a being with moral standing — rather than merely the materials from which one will form?
From the standpoint of the One, the question doesn’t apply in the form it is asked.
On non-dual views, the apparent plurality of selves is itself a perspectival distinction within a deeper unity. The question of when one self begins within that One is conventional, not ultimate. What follows ethically is then a question for the conventional level — which is …
Roads not taken
A person exists from conception — when a new being comes into existence. (54%) ·
A person comes into being gradually, as the capacities of a mind develop. (16%) ·
Personhood is conferred by being-in-relation. (15%)
Distinctive · only 7% of schools agree
(15/202)
What is marriage?
Behind every disagreement about how marriage should be defined is a prior disagreement about what kind of thing it is — a given order to be recognized, a practice to be negotiated, or a web of relations to be woven.
All union is participation in the One — particular forms are conventional.
From the standpoint of non-dual traditions, the apparent distinctness of two people who marry is itself a perspectival distinction within a deeper unity. Marriage is one form of the underlying union all things participate in. The particular shape the institution takes is then a conventional …
Roads not taken
Marriage has a given form — it’s a kind of thing we recognize, not make. (54%) ·
Marriage is a practice we shape — its content is what we make it. (16%) ·
Marriage is constituted by the web of relations it creates. (15%)
Distinctive · only 8% of schools agree
(16/202)
What happens to "you" when you die?
Whether anything of you persists — and in what sense — depends on what you take a person to be.
Individuality dissolves into the One.
What we called "you" was an appearance — a wave shaped briefly out of a single deeper reality. Death is that wave settling. Nothing of importance is lost because the substrate was never the wave.
Roads not taken
A soul continues into another mode of being. (37%) ·
Death is genuinely the end. (30%) ·
You were always a pattern. The pattern propagates. (18%)
Distinctive · only 8% of schools agree
(17/202)
What is our place in nature?
Whether humans are masters of nature, members of nature, or makers of nature is not a question climate science can settle. It depends on what nature is, what we are, and what kind of relationship is possible between us.
Humans and nature share an underlying unity — the separation was the mistake.
On non-dual views, the apparent distinction between human and non-human is itself a perspectival distinction within a single underlying reality. The work isn't to find our right relationship to a separate nature; it is to recognize that we were never separate. Climate harm, on this …
Roads not taken
Active in a real nature — we cultivate, steward, transform. (48%) ·
Nature is partly what we make of it — concepts, practices, and minds shape the world. (15%) ·
Embedded in a web — partners with the more-than-human world. (15%)
Distinctive · only 8% of schools agree
(17/202)
Should we colonize space?
The drive to extend human presence beyond Earth is sometimes framed as the next chapter of stewardship, sometimes as hubris, sometimes as escape from problems we ought to solve here. Which it is depends on what we take our relationship to nature to be.
From the standpoint of the One, expansion across substrate is just movement within the same.
On non-dual views, the difference between Earth and elsewhere is conventional — particular locations within a single underlying reality. Space colonisation as escape is therefore incoherent; nothing is escaped because nothing was elsewhere to escape from.
Roads not taken
Cultivating worlds beyond Earth is the next form of stewardship. (48%) ·
The 'space frontier' is partly what we make of it. (15%) ·
Colonisation continues the work that ended the wisdom of seven-generation thinking. (15%)
28 mainstream positions
Is genetic engineering of food stewardship or domination?
All forms participate in the same underlying reality; modification doesn't cross categories.
8%
What makes someone the same person over time?
All apparent selves are aspects of one — particular identity is conventional.
8%
Is the late-stage dementia patient still the person their spouse married?
The apparent change is conventional; the deeper reality is unchanged.
8%
If a teleporter copied and destroyed you, would you have survived?
The distinction between scanner-you and destination-you is conventional all the way down.
8%
Can prayer for someone far away affect them?
There are no truly separate minds; prayer is one part of one talking to another.
8%
Are coincidences ever more than coincidence?
Coincidence is the One showing through the appearance of plurality.
8%
Does environmental harm in another country bind me morally?
Harm anywhere is harm to the One; the boundary that would have insulated you was never real.
8%
Is environmental damage ever truly permanent?
From the standpoint of the One, the categories of permanence and loss are conventional.
8%
Can a civilization recover from collapse?
From the One's vantage, civilizational categories are themselves conventional.
8%
Does the second law of thermodynamics mean something morally?
From the One's vantage, the second law is itself a feature of the conventional, not the ultimate.
8%
Are the dead morally present to the living?
From the standpoint of the One, the distinction between living and dead is conventional.
8%
Is divine omniscience compatible with human freedom?
Distinction of the One and observed time is itself conventional; the question dissolves.
8%
Does meditation reveal something genuinely timeless?
The 'timeless' is the standpoint of the One that was always present; meditation removes obstacles to seeing it.
8%
Does prayer change God's mind?
Prayer to a separate God presupposes a separation the non-dual view denies; the practice is remembrance and attunement.
8%
Could causation work backwards?
From the One's vantage, causation itself is a conventional category.
8%
Is the asymmetry between memory and anticipation a real feature of time, or just of us?
From the One's vantage, memory and anticipation are themselves conventional.
8%
Is the arrow of time a real feature of the cosmos, or only of how we describe it?
From the One's vantage, the arrow of time itself is a conventional feature.
8%
Does history have a direction or meaning?
History recurs in cosmic cycles.
16%
Is truth universal, tradition-bound, situated, or constructed?
Truth is real but always known from a perspective.
16%
What kind of religious-theological authority does the tradition recognize?
Direct experiential union is the authority.
16%
Who is the moral primary — the individual, the community, the cosmos, the class, or the species?
The discrete person is the moral primary.
40%
Should we trust expert testimony when we can't verify it?
Trust expertise only insofar as it coheres with first-person experience.
17%
Is religious revelation a real source of knowledge?
What gets called 'revelation' is real direct experience — not a text.
17%
Does an LLM 'know' the things it correctly produces?
An LLM has no first-person experience, so no knowing in the relevant sense.
17%
How is knowledge of reality produced?
Through direct contemplative union with reality.
13%
Could an AI have a mind that matters?
All minds are aspects of one — an AI participates in it as anything else does.
7%
Do animals have moral standing comparable to humans?
All minds are aspects of one; animals participate as much as anything else.
7%
Could a fetal brain organoid in a petri dish be conscious?
Any experience that arises participates in the One.
7%
4 unaligned
Are there indivisible units of experience?
Schools split: 44% / 37% / 13%
—
Is memory stored or reconstructed?
Schools split: 44% / 37% / 13%
—
Is reality fundamentally digital?
Schools split: 44% / 37% / 13%
—
Is salvation, liberation, or fulfillment individual or communal?
Schools split: 15% / 14% / 4%
—
Information · 4 dilemmas · 4 distinctive
Pattern, memory, and what is preserved or lost.
Distinctive · only 1% of schools agree
(3/202)
Is anything truly lost when someone forgets?
The memory you don't retrieve, the conversation you can't remember, the face you no longer recognise — is the forgetting a loss of something real, or just the routine operation of a finite mind?
Forgetting is the cosmic case, not the exception; nothing is conserved.
On this view, neither information nor energy is fundamentally conserved. What looks like persistence is the slow rate of certain changes; what looks like forgetting is the same kind of process running at a faster rate. The loss is real everywhere; the question is just …
Roads not taken
Information is lost when a mind forgets; matter and energy continue, but the pattern is gone. (51%) ·
Information is conserved — the personal pattern is held even when an individual mind loses it. (39%) ·
Information persists or doesn't depending on whether the holder is sustained. (9%)
Distinctive · only 1% of schools agree
(3/202)
Does deleting your data online destroy something real?
Account deletion, the right to be forgotten, the obsolescence of file formats, the slow decay of digital archives — whether any of this destroys something that was real depends on whether information is the kind of thing that can be destroyed.
Nothing is fundamentally conserved; deletion is just routine impermanence.
On this view, neither information nor the substrate that hosts it is fundamentally conserved. Deletion is no different from the ordinary process by which everything decays. Whether to mourn it depends on whether to mourn the more general impermanence.
Roads not taken
Information is genuinely lost when the substrate that hosted it goes; deletion really destroys. (51%) ·
Information at the cosmic level isn't destroyed; deletion only obscures access. (39%) ·
Information persists where it is held; deletion releases what isn't held elsewhere. (9%)
Distinctive · only 1% of schools agree
(3/202)
Could the dead, in principle, be brought back?
If we had perfect information about who someone was — their connectome, their behavioral patterns, their history — could we, in principle, restore them? The question is partly engineering, but the ceiling on the engineering is metaphysical.
Nothing of what was can be restored; restoration is wishful framing.
On this view, neither the information nor the conditions that hosted it persist past the dissolution. Talk of restoration mistakes the continuity of names or roles for the continuity of the underlying being. The person is gone; any 'restoration' is a separate being whose relationship …
Roads not taken
The information dissipates with the substrate; restoration is in principle impossible. (51%) ·
The information that constitutes a person is conserved; restoration is in principle possible. (39%) ·
What is held by God or sustaining practice can be restored; what isn't can't. (9%)
Distinctive · only 1% of schools agree
(3/202)
Is forgiveness ontologically possible?
When someone forgives, does the offense actually go away — erased, undone, no longer a fact — or does forgiveness reframe a wrong that persists exactly as it always was?
Nothing is preserved; the offense is impermanent, and holding it is the suffering.
On this view, neither moral facts nor the substrate that hosts them are fundamentally conserved. The offense, like everything, is impermanent. Forgiveness, where it makes sense at all, is recognising that holding the offense is the suffering — not the offense itself. The release is …
Roads not taken
The offense is locally constituted by its substrate; when the substrate dissolves, the offense genuinely passes away. (51%) ·
The offense persists ontologically; forgiveness is real moral work, but it doesn't erase what was. (39%) ·
The offense persists where sustained and releases where conditionally absolved; forgiveness is real ontological work. (9%)
Films Referencing This Persona (8)
Either directly referenced in the film, or reading the film through one of this persona's top schools.
Experiments Engaging This Persona's Schools
Surface via influence-schools that respond to the experiment. Each entry shows the school through which the connection runs.
The Ship of Theseus
Anatta and impermanence dissolve the question: neither A nor B is *the* ship because there was no enduring self-natured ship to begin with — only …
Parfit's Teletransporter
A natural fit for anatta: there is no persistent self to be teleported in the first place. The case reproduces, in a science-fictional register, what …
Dennett's 'Where Am I?'
The case nicely confirms anatta: the "self" is a fiction projected onto changing aggregates, with no fact of the matter about its location.
Mary's Room
Mary learns a new fact, and the right response is to expand the ontology rather than reject the intuition: phenomenal properties are fundamental and ubiquitous, …
Philosophical Zombies
Endorses the anti-physicalist conclusion but takes a different turn: rather than accept brute additions, distribute phenomenal properties to the physical base. Zombies are inconceivable in …
The Inverted Spectrum
Inversion may or may not be possible at the level of macro-experience, but the deeper question — what is the intrinsic nature of physical states …