Philosophy Spotlight: Maluhia, Bristlecone Pine
“Reality is filtered through our eyes. Space and time, color and shape, beauty and meaning - we see only what our minds can construct. What could lie beyond the reach of our minds? Some confuse what they see with what is, others deceive themselves because they do not trust their own sight. The truth is not so simple. Observer and object are like two sides of a coin - neither can be represented without depending on the other.”
Inspiration: Nagarjuna’s Buddhism
Maluhia’s philosophy is an interpretation of sunyata, the Buddhist concept of emptiness and the origin of our game’s name. An object is empty if it has no traits without depending on external conditions such as an interaction with another object or a reaction from our senses. Nagarjuna argues that all things are empty, and the key to learning Buddhism is to understand what sunyata means for different schools of thought.
Colors are the easiest category to understand emptiness. The colors we see are not traits of the objects themselves. They are representations our minds use when reacting to the limited range of wavelengths we can see. If we imagine what each color would look like independently of our perception of them, we are left with an empty, indescribable concept.
Shapes are a more difficult category. The shape of objects we see matches what we feel with our hands, so shape does not initially seem to depend on the interpretation of either sense. However, consider the role our size plays in our perception - we can only see objects that are relatively large enough to be relevant to us, and we feel objects as solid when the gaps in them are not wide enough for us to pass through. But at an atomic level, neither shape is retained. The object’s surface is not the smooth layer it looks to be, and the gaps of empty space in each atom make up the majority of the object. The solid surface we can touch is a representation our senses use that matches our inability to pick through the tiny pockets of empty space.
Emptiness applies to ethics and personal values as well. Values are empty because there is no objective fact independent of us about what should matter. This view is a type of moral anti-realism, and as a result it can be confused with the nihilistic view that nothing matters. However, this reduction to nihilism would be a failure in applying sunyata to anti-realism. There is no objective truth that nothing matters, as the nihilistic claim is itself empty, and so nihilism is at most a personal view like any other moral framework.
From Nagarjuna’s view, moral questions become incredibly difficult to answer. How do we determine what we should do if there are no objective moral truths we can appeal to? Some philosophers, such as Plato and Derek Parfit, think this approach inevitably fails and devolves into tyranny or apathy. Nietzsche, one of the few philosophers to attempt an answer, likens it to a child-like state of free play that can enjoy and value anything the world has to offer. Buddha himself did not worry about this problem and instead gave practical advice to help people find peace and meaning through simple tasks such as spending more time outside or eating a moderate diet.
These arguments are just a sampling of how the philosophy of sunyata approaches different fields. Emptiness applies equally to thoughts about aesthetics, causation, personal identity, and Buddhism itself. In both ethics and metaphysics, emptiness is an alternative to realist and nihilist philosophies. Contrary to traditional realism, we cannot know or conceive of anything about the world that does not depend on our limited representations of it. But this does not imply the nihilistic conclusion that the world we interact with exists only in our minds. Instead, the world, as we perceive it, is the result of a mutually dependent reaction of our senses to our surroundings.