Persona #35
Siddhārtha Gautama (the Buddha)
c. 563–483 BCE (traditional dates; recent scholarship narrows to c. 480–400) · Indian sage, founder of the Buddhist tradition
Four noble truths, eightfold path, dependent origination — suffering analysed and the way out described
The Buddha wrote nothing. The earliest record of his teaching is the Pali Canon (Sutta, Vinaya, and Abhidhamma Pitakas), compiled across the first few centuries after his death from oral transmission. Across the schools that descend from him — Theravada, the Mahayana traditions, the East Asian Chan/Zen and Pure Land lineages, the Tibetan Vajrayana — the historical Buddha is consistently described as having abandoned the household life at twenty-nine, undertaken six years of ascetic practice, attained awakening under the Bodhi tree, and spent the next four decades teaching the Dharma. The substantive doctrines transmitted are the four noble truths (dukkha, samudaya, nirodha, magga), the eightfold path, dependent origination (paticca-samuppada), and non-self (anatta).
Key works
- No surviving writings — preserved through:
- The Pali Canon: Sutta Pitaka (esp. Dhammapada, Majjhima Nikaya, Digha Nikaya, Samyutta Nikaya), Vinaya Pitaka, Abhidhamma Pitaka
- Early Sanskrit Agamas (parallels to the Pali Suttas)
Declared Influences
Buddhism 70%
Jainism / Anekantavada 10%
Samkhya 10%
Pragmatism 10%
Buddhism
70%
The school is his. The four noble truths, dependent origination, non-self, impermanence, and the eightfold path constitute its founding teaching.
"All conditioned things are impermanent — when one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering." (Dhammapada 277)
Buddhism and Jainism arose in the same fifth-century-BCE śramana milieu of wandering renunciants in the Ganges plain, and share the categories of karma, samsara, and liberation — even as they disagree sharply on the nature of the self and the path to release.
"Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world; it is appeased only by non-hatred. This is the eternal law." (Dhammapada 5)
Samkhya
10%
A shared inheritance of the analytic-categorical method — distinguishing the aggregates of experience for the purpose of seeing their conditioned, impermanent character — even as the Buddha rejected the dualistic ontology of purusha and prakriti.
"Just as a great ocean has but one taste, the taste of salt, so has this teaching and discipline but one taste, the taste of liberation." (Cullavagga IX.1.4)
Pragmatism
10%
A working pragmatism most visible in the simile of the raft (Majjhima Nikaya 22) and the parable of the poisoned arrow (Majjhima Nikaya 63): doctrines are tools for the cessation of suffering, not metaphysical claims to be defended beyond their soteriological function.
"Just as the great ocean has but one taste, the taste of salt, so has this teaching but one taste — the taste of liberation." (Cullavagga IX.1.4)
Internal Tensions
The Buddhist tradition itself has spent two and a half millennia working out the tension between anatta (no self) and the empirical fact that rebirth is taught — what is reborn if not a self? The standard answer (a conditioned pattern, not a substance) is doctrinally clean and experientially demanding. The Madhyamaka and Yogacara developments of the early centuries CE are the most sustained attempts to think this through; Tibetan Vajrayana and East Asian Pure Land take the question in other directions.
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I. Time
Relational — time is the pattern of arising and passing of dharmas. Cyclical at the cosmic scale (samsara), discrete in the Abhidhammic analysis (momentary arising and falling). Non-directional in the sense that samsara has no eschatological end and no beginning. "Inconceivable is the beginning of this samsara." (Samyutta Nikaya 15)
Attributes
Extent: Infinite
Ontological Status: Relational
Grain: Discrete
Freedom: Non-Deterministic
Traversability: Cyclical
Direction: Non-directional
Dimensionality: One
✦
II. Space
Relational and non-local. Conditioned arising operates across distances; the cosmologies of the Pali Canon describe innumerable world-systems.
Attributes
Extent: Infinite
Ontological Status: Relational
Curvature: not engaged
Dimensionality: Three
Locality: not engaged
◉
III. Matter
Relational and non-conserved in the Buddhist analytic — what we call matter is the rupa-khandha, one of the five aggregates, conditioned and impermanent.
Attributes
Extent: Finite
Ontological Status: Relational
Conservation: Non-conserved
Dimensionality: Three
Locality: not engaged
◎
IV. Observer
Anatta — non-self. There is no persisting self underlying experience, only the flow of conditioned aggregates. Multiple time-instances through rebirth (the pattern continues even though no substantial self carries through). Metaphysical agency: None — explicitly. The gods of the Vedic cosmology are accepted as inhabitants of samsara, not as ultimate causes of it.
Attributes
Time Instance: Multiple
Space Instance: Single
Knowledge Extent: Total
Knowledge Retainment: Total
Physicality: Both
Agency: Active
Number: Plural
Metaphysical Agency: None
⚡
V. Energy
Emergent, non-conserved in the Christian-substantival sense, irreversible in individual cases though cyclically renewed at the cosmic scale.
Attributes
Extent: Finite
Ontological Status: Emergent
Conservation: Non-conserved
Dispersibility: Irreversible
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VI. Information
Relational and non-conserved. There is no soul-substance that carries personal identity across rebirths; what continues is a karmic pattern, like a flame passed from candle to candle. This is the distinctive Buddhist position against both the Brahmanical atman and the materialist denial of any rebirth.
Attributes
Ontological Status: Relational
Cosmic Conservation: Non-conserved
Personal Conservation: Non-conserved
Granularity: not engaged
Classified works
Works in the atlas that Siddhārtha Gautama (the Buddha) authored or that draw on this persona's writings, with full attribute fingerprints of their own.
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 Siddhārtha Gautama (the Buddha)'s — intellectual neighbors across traditions and eras.
89%
Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama — 1935–present
25/29
81%
Daisetsu Teitarō Suzuki — 1870–1966
23/29
59%
Nāgārjuna — c. 150 – c. 250 CE
17/29
58%
Zhuangzi (Zhuang Zhou) — c. 369–c. 286 BCE
17/29
57%
Wole Soyinka — 1934–present
18/29
52%
Tsongkhapa Losang Drakpa — 1357–1419
16/29
49%
Vine Deloria Jr. — 1933–2005
15/29
49%
Donna Haraway — 1944–
16/29
How Siddhārtha Gautama (the Buddha) resolves each dilemma
49 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 33 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 8 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 17% of schools agree
(35/202)
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.
Past, present, and future are bound in cycles — duties span generations as a matter of course.
On these views, time is not a one-way arrow but a structure of return: cosmic cycles, karmic cycles, the seasons, the succession of generations. To act now is always also to act for the ancestors who shaped your inheritance and for the descendants who will …
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%) ·
The future branches — what we owe depends on which branch we create. (2%)
Distinctive · only 17% of schools agree
(35/202)
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?
The past is part of a cycle one keeps returning to; regret is one of the gates of the cycle.
On cyclical views, the past is not a fixed thing behind you — it is part of the ongoing structure of return: karmic cycles, cosmic cycles, the cycle of seasons and generations. Regret, on these views, is less about an unchangeable past and more about …
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%) ·
Other branches exist; regret tracks roads not taken that are nonetheless real. (2%)
Distinctive · only 17% of schools agree
(35/202)
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.
Past beings are part of the cycle; we owe them what we owe ancestors.
On cyclical views, the relationship to past beings — ancestors, lineages, predecessors — is structurally present, because past and future are part of the same ongoing structure of return. Extinct species are not categorically different from extinct human ancestors or non-yet-born descendants: all are part …
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%) ·
Extinction is path-dependent; the species exists in branches we didn't take. (2%)
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 · 4 distinctive
What stuff is — fundamental, relational, or appearance.
Distinctive · only 15% of schools agree
(30/202)
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 is the ledger of obligations among real people.
On relational views, money is not a substance you have; it is a record of who owes whom what. Debts and credits are real because the relations they track are real — to kin, to community, to ancestors, to land. Money is the form this …
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” names a family of practices — the definition question is nominal. (8%)
Distinctive · only 15% of schools agree
(30/202)
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.
A nation is the web of kinship, ancestry, and shared land that hosts a people.
On relational views, the nation is the relational fabric — extended kinship, ancestral inheritance, shared ecology, communal practice — that hosts a people across generations. Borders matter less than belonging; lineage and land carry the weight that political structures only ratify.
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%) ·
“Nation” names a family of practices imaginatively held together. (8%)
Distinctive · only 15% of schools agree
(30/202)
What makes someone male or female?
Whether sex is a real biological kind, a constructed social category, a relational identity, a label applied to varied phenomena, or a conventional distinction within a deeper unity is the ontological question the contemporary dispute about gender is mostly about.
Sex and gender are constituted by relations of recognition.
On relational views, identity is not a property a person has alone; it is constituted by the web of recognition the person sits in. What makes someone a man or a woman in any thick sense is the relations of kinship, community, ritual, and recognition …
Roads not taken
Sex is a real biological kind with given content. (54%) ·
Gender is constructed; what counts as male or female reflects practice. (16%) ·
“Male” and “female” are family-resemblance terms — no single essence. (8%)
Distinctive · only 15% of schools agree
(30/202)
Should we edit the human germline?
Whether human nature is a given biological kind, a constructed category, a relational achievement, a family-resemblance cluster, or a conventional distinction within deeper unity is the ontological question the policy debate over heritable gene editing is mostly about.
Personhood is constituted by relations of descent and kinship; germline editing reshapes the relational fabric.
On relational views, what makes someone a person is the web of kinship, ancestry, and community they sit in — not a property the body carries alone. Heritable editing intervenes in exactly this fabric: the lineage that ancestors handed on, the descent that descendants will …
Roads not taken
Human nature is a real biological kind given by reproductive biology or by creation; editing the germline transgresses what is given. (54%) ·
The categories we count as 'human' are emergent from practice; germline editing is a practice-revision like any other. (16%) ·
'Human nature' is a cluster term without a single essence; the editing question is empirical, not metaphysical. (8%)
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.
Distinctive · only 13% of schools agree
(26/202)
Are the dead morally present to the living?
Ancestor veneration, intercession with saints, the moral weight of a promise made to someone now gone — these all presuppose that the dead are present in some sense beyond memory. Whether they are turns on whether an observer is the kind of thing that exists in a single moment or across many.
Observers span moments; the dead are present in a real (not merely metaphorical) way.
On this view, an observer is not located at a single moment but extends across moments. The dead, on this signature, are not gone — they are elsewhere on the same trans-temporal structure that you yourself occupy. Ancestor veneration, intercession with saints, the moral weight …
Roads not taken
Observers are bounded by their own moment, and no further agency makes the dead present. (44%) ·
The dead are present through divine memory, communion of saints, or ancestor presence. (35%) ·
From the standpoint of the One, the distinction between living and dead is conventional. (8%)
Distinctive · only 13% of schools agree
(26/202)
Is divine omniscience compatible with human freedom?
If God knows what you will do tomorrow, does your tomorrow-self choose freely? The classical problem of foreknowledge turns on whether the divine vantage stands outside time or inside it.
An observer can occupy multiple times at once; foreknowledge is not foreordering.
On this view, observers can in principle exist in more than one moment simultaneously — and divine omniscience is exactly the case of an observer occupying all moments at once. The future actions God 'foresees' aren't foreseen at all in the temporal sense; God simply …
Roads not taken
The observer is in time; foreknowledge across times raises real freedom problems. (46%) ·
The human observer is in time, but God's vantage is not — and foreknowledge is not foreordering. (33%) ·
Distinction of the One and observed time is itself conventional; the question dissolves. (8%)
Distinctive · only 13% of schools agree
(26/202)
Does meditation reveal something genuinely timeless?
Contemplative traditions across cultures report that sustained attention reveals a level at which time as ordinary experience knows it does not apply. Whether the report is a real glimpse or a real misdescription depends on what observers can in principle be.
Meditation accesses a trans-temporal level the ordinary observer doesn't ordinarily reach.
On this view, observers can in principle exist in more than one moment, and meditation is the practice that opens that capacity. What's reported as 'timeless' is the experience of occupying moments at once — the trans-temporal mode the observer always could have inhabited but …
Roads not taken
Meditators are bounded observers reporting unusual brain states; the 'timeless' is metaphorical. (46%) ·
Meditation participates in a real eternity — divine or cosmic — that the bounded human observer ordinarily cannot reach. (33%) ·
The 'timeless' is the standpoint of the One that was always present; meditation removes obstacles to seeing it. (8%)
Distinctive · only 13% of schools agree
(26/202)
Does prayer change God's mind?
When you petition God for something, are you addressing a personal agent who hears and responds, participating in eternal providence, attuning yourself to what already is, or doing something that doesn't quite map onto petition?
Prayer participates in a trans-temporal liturgy or communion; the question of 'changing the mind' misses the trans-temporal mode.
On this view, the addressee of prayer — and the petitioner participating in prayer — can occupy more than one moment at once. Prayer isn't an instant of message-passing across a temporal gap; it is participation in a trans-temporal mode in which every moment of …
Roads not taken
If there is an addressee at all, it is in time; prayer is communication, and may genuinely change what comes next. (46%) ·
God sees from outside time; prayer doesn't change God's mind, but it is part of how providence is enacted. (33%) ·
Prayer to a separate God presupposes a separation the non-dual view denies; the practice is remembrance and attunement. (8%)
Distinctive · only 14% of schools agree
(29/202)
What makes someone the same person over time?
When dementia hollows out memory, when a coma resolves with no recall, when you imagine being uploaded — the question of whether the surviving person is still you turns on what kind of thing the 'you' was to begin with.
There was never a fixed self to either preserve or lose.
On these views, what we call a self was always a stream of experience, a constructed narrative, a process — never a thing whose continuity could be the question. Dementia, upload, transformation, death are stages in a process, not events that either preserve or destroy …
Roads not taken
You are your body — continuity is bodily continuity. (36%) ·
You are a soul — what persists through change is the non-bodily aspect. (29%) ·
You span moments — identity is a pattern that need not be located at a single now. (9%)
27 mainstream positions
Is the late-stage dementia patient still the person their spouse married?
There was no fixed person to lose; care is owed to whoever is here.
14%
If a teleporter copied and destroyed you, would you have survived?
There was no fixed you to either survive or fail to; the question is malformed.
14%
When does a person begin?
Personhood is conferred by being-in-relation.
15%
What is marriage?
Marriage is constituted by the web of relations it creates.
15%
What is our place in nature?
Embedded in a web — partners with the more-than-human world.
15%
Should we colonize space?
Colonisation continues the work that ended the wisdom of seven-generation thinking.
15%
Is genetic engineering of food stewardship or domination?
Editing the genome cuts into the relational fabric; we should be very slow.
15%
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%
Is environmental damage ever truly permanent?
Loss is part of cycles; what disappears returns in another form.
17%
Can a civilization recover from collapse?
Civilization rises and falls in cycles; recovery is structural to history.
17%
Does the second law of thermodynamics mean something morally?
Local entropy increase is part of a cycle; the moral category is participation in the cycle.
17%
Could causation work backwards?
Time is structured as return; 'forward' and 'backward' are local features of the cycle.
17%
Is the asymmetry between memory and anticipation a real feature of time, or just of us?
Memory and anticipation are phases of a cycle that visits both directions.
17%
Is the arrow of time a real feature of the cosmos, or only of how we describe it?
Within a cycle there is a direction; across the cycle there isn't.
17%
What happens to "you" when you die?
You were always a pattern. The pattern propagates.
18%
Can prayer for someone far away affect them?
Prayer changes the pray-er, not the prayed-for.
49%
Are coincidences ever more than coincidence?
Coincidence is exactly what the math says it is. The pattern is in the noticer.
49%
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%
Could an AI have a mind that matters?
An AI’s standing is constituted by the relations it enters.
15%
How is knowledge of reality produced?
Through historical-critical engagement and the working-out of contradictions.
13%
Do animals have moral standing comparable to humans?
Talk of 'standing' presupposes fixed selves that animals (and we) don't have.
10%
Could a fetal brain organoid in a petri dish be conscious?
Asking whether the organoid is 'really' conscious presupposes a category we don't have.
10%
5 unaligned
Are there indivisible units of experience?
Schools split: 44% / 37% / 13%
—
Does environmental harm in another country bind me morally?
Schools split: 50% / 29% / 12%
—
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.
The Liar Paradox
Jain seven-valued logic (syādvāda) anticipates paraconsistent treatments: a proposition may be true, false, both, or indeterminate in different respects.
The Surprise Examination Paradox
The teacher's statement is true *and* false in different respects: true as an announcement, paradoxical as a deductively analysable proposition. Anekantavada's pluralism is congenial.
Curry's Paradox
Jain logic's seven-valued treatment of contradiction is congenial to substructural responses; Curry is a Western rediscovery that absolute truth-talk must be qualified.
The Chinese Room
Both the systems reply and Searle ask the wrong question. "Understanding" is a practical capacity — embedded in a life, a community, and consequences. The …
Newcomb's Problem
The right policy is the one that, if generally adopted, yields the best outcomes — and one-boxers reliably leave with the million. Functional decision theory …
Twin Earth
Meaning is use, situated in practice. Earth and Twin Earth practices are distinct because they hook onto different substances; the disagreement with internalism is real …