How Cessation of life (Nirvāṇa as final “blowing out”), the ultimate goal, happens as category mistake and Siddartha’s fundamental error.

By Bodhangkur

1. Finn’s Premise: Original Goodness and Functional Suffering

For Finn, under Procedure Monism:

1. Every emergent is locally perfect
Not morally perfect, but procedurally perfect:
it is exactly what the Universal Procedure can produce there and then.
(“Every 1 is perfect.”)

2. Life is not a punishment; it is an opportunity
Life = one run of the Procedure as this token.
It is not a jail term to be served and escaped, but
a once-only chance to perform local completion.

3. Suffering is not a metaphysical curse but a feedback signal
Pain = error signal.
It indicates that the token’s current pattern is misaligned or under threat.
It is for adaptation, not proof that being is wrong.

So the baseline is:

Being-on (I AM THIS) is intrinsically good (Original Goodness).
Suffering is a local cost of staying on and staying coherent.

From this, Finn draws a hard line:

· The value lies in being-on-and-operating.

· Feedback (pleasant or painful) serves that value.

· There is no higher good outside procedure, because “Off is Off.”

2. The Buddha’s Stated Goal (Taken at Face Value)

In the classical soteriological reading:

· All conditioned existence is bound up with dukkha (suffering/unsatisfactoriness).

· The highest goal is Nirvāṇa, described as:

o cessation of craving,

o cessation of rebirth,

o cessation of the aggregates,

o cessation of this “whole mass of suffering.”

Taken literally, that amounts to:

The ideal outcome = the end of emergence.
The highest good = not to arise again.

So very bluntly:

· To exist is to suffer.

· The final solution is not to exist.

Finn’s now proposes: assume this is the correct goal and see what follows.

3. First Contradiction: A Process Whose “Best State” Is Non-Process

Consider:

1. A procedure is defined by its operation.
A machine that never runs is not functioning as a machine.

2. If you say: “The best state of this machine is permanently switched off,”
you are effectively saying:

o the best car is the one that never drives,

o the best brain is one with no experience,

o the best life is one in which no living occurs.

3. This is not a refinement; it is a negation of the domain.
You are not saying “a better way of being a machine,”
you are saying: “It is better not to be one at all.”

Finn’s point:

A telos (goal) makes sense only inside a process.
“Off” cannot be a goal for the system, because when “Off” is realised,
there is no system left for whom that goal could be fulfilled.

So the Buddhist project, taken literally, is structurally like:

· a medicine whose “cure” is killing the patient,

· a therapy whose success is total erasure of the client.

From Finn’s perspective:

That is not a solution internal to life;
it is a decision that life, as such, was a mistake.

Once you accept Original Goodness, that verdict is false.

4. Second Contradiction: Erasing the Only Site of Value

Under Original Goodness:

· All value appears in being-on:
joy, insight, love, skill, beauty, problem-solving, art, wisdom.

· “Off” is not a higher value-state.
It is the absence of any state.

If you make the absence of all states the highest good, you have:

· elevated nothing over something,

· treated non-experience as superior to any experience,

· declared that no value at all is the ultimate value.

In Finn’s formulation:

You can’t cash out “Off” as a good.
There is no experiencer, no fulfilment, no awareness that “this is optimal.”
Nothing is there to “have” the good.

Therefore, to call cessation of life the ultimate good is a semantic illusion:

· you are projecting value language onto a state where value cannot logically appear.

From Finn’s standpoint, that is a fundamental error.

5. Third Contradiction: Turning a Functional Signal into a Total Verdict

Buddha: life is pervaded by dukkha.
Finn: yes, but what is dukkha?

Procedurally:

· Dukkha = the felt mismatch between current configuration and required adaptation.

· It is information: “This pattern is not sustainable; adjust.”

If you mistake the signal for a global verdict on existence, you get:

· from: “This hurts — change this pattern.”

· to: “Existence itself is wrong; abolish the process.”

In Finn’s terms, this is like:

· the fire alarm rings → “The house is flawed; never build any house again.”

· the check-engine light comes on → “Cars are inherently bad; abolish engines.”

The Buddha’s move, as Finn sees it:

· correctly identifies the ubiquity of error signals in existence,

· incorrectly upgrades those signals into a condemnation of being-on as such.

Original Goodness reverses that:

The presence of dukkha proves not that being is wrong,
but that being cares about its own structural integrity.

Suffering is the price of caring to remain coherent.

To call that wrong in itself is to misread biology, procedure, and identity.

6. Fourth Contradiction: Motivation Collapse

Thought experiment: Imagine everyone fully internalizes:

· “The only true solution is never to arise again.”

Then:

1. Every project, love, creation, art, science, virtue, becomes:

o at best, a distraction on the way to annihilation,

o at worst, a trap that keeps you spinning in samsāra.

2. All positive goals are downgraded to provisional illusions.
The one non-illusory aim is: get out, forever.

3. From Finn’s standpoint, this is anti-procedural:

o you are still inside the game,

o using the game’s energy to aim at terminating the game.

The result is a deep incoherence:

· Life is used to strive against life.

· Acceptance of being is replaced by a transcendence fantasy.

Original Goodness says:

The only place anything matters is here, in this token’s run.
To use that run trying to abolish the very field of value is self-sabotage.

So Finn diagnoses in the Buddhist telos a motivation collapse disguised as wisdom.

7. Fifth Contradiction: The UP Does Not Share Your Nirvāṇa

Under Procedure Monism:

· The Universal Procedure (UP) keeps iterating random energy into emergents.

· If this token stops, another appears.

· The field does not seek its own cessation.

So if a local doctrine says:

· “The supreme goal is the cessation of all emergence,”

Finn replies:

· That goal is not only unreachable; it is not even well-defined.

· Procedures do not have global stop buttons from inside one token’s interface.

· At most, you engineer local off (this token dies).

Buddhist Nirvāṇa, understood as final global stopping, is therefore:

· ungrounded in any actual procedural structure,

· psychologically intelligible as a wish,

· ontologically empty as an achievable or even coherent state.

From Finn’s view, the UP simply does not care for Nirvāṇic shutdown fantasies.
It keeps iterating.

8. Finn’s Reinterpretation of “Nirvāṇa” Inside Life

Charitable move: what if Nirvāṇa is interpreted not as final cessation (Pari-nirvana = death = off) but as:

· local episodes of minimal friction

· states of low error-signalling,

· functional moments where the system runs with near-zero resistance (‘On stand-by’ or ‘Waiting’).

In those terms, Nirvāṇa becomes:

· akin to deep restorative sleep,

· or the “flow” of optimal performance,

· or the moment of problem-completion (mokṣa as solved constraint).

Then the Buddha’s real genius would be:

· discovering that the mind can be tuned to reduce unnecessary error signals,

· cultivating modes of being-without-clinging that improve the run.

Finn would happily accept that.

But:

· as soon as you metaphysically project those internal functional moments
into a final ontological goal of non-being,

· you step outside procedure and into fantasy.

That is the “fundamental error”:

Reifying a perfectly valid inner experience (local relief)
into a world-negating absolute (final extinction as highest good).

9. Original Goodness as the Corrective Lens

Once Finn’s Original Goodness is in place, several conclusions follow:

1. Life is not a fallen trap; it is the only stage on which anything (of value) can ever appear.

2. Suffering is costly but functional — it drives adaptation and depth.

3. Local “nirvāṇas” (reliefs, releases, ‘on standbys’, ‘sleeps’) are part of good functioning, not proofs that existence is a mistake.

4. “Off is Off”: non-being cannot be an aim for being, because the fulfiller of that aim vanishes with its fulfilment.

Therefore:

· A doctrine that makes unconditional cessation the ultimate good
misidentifies the nature of value and
misreads the role of suffering.

Finn’s verdict:

The Buddha was right about suffering and wrong about life.
He correctly diagnosed error-signals,
but misframed the whole process as something best not run at all.

Under Original Goodness, that is a fundamental error.

10. Finn’s Minim Summary

You could condense the foregoing into a Finn-style minim:

· Life is good; pain is its warning system.
To make non-life the goal is to mistake the alarm for the house.

Or sharper:

· Only “On” can be (have value).
To worship “Off” as highest good is the final confusion.

So why did Siddartha’s err?

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