Anatta is an anti-metaphysical statement. If there is nothing that has the properties of permanence, happiness or selfness, then any self/soul-theories that posit something permanent, happy or selfy, are wrong 
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Excellent observation. The Buddha clearly implied that these two yogis taught him how to attain two different jhana states and that their (this) approach was insufficiently transformative for attaining enlightenment (as if analogous to transient intoxications that leave you as is when they fade). The tradition suggests his addition of sati (smrti) to these forms of samadhi constituted the Buddha’s meditative innovation over that of the yogis, the combination of which seemingly led to his enlightenment. Whereas samadhi slows or stops the mind, sati allows it to move, with attention—a middle way between stopping thought and being lost in it.
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Excellent points. I agree wholeheartedly. I have nothing to add.
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Sure, I think that what you say would hold for a simple denial of self/atta/soul, and Buddhism definitely does have significant anti-metaphysical tendencies.
If one dismantles St. Patrick’s Cathedral brick by brick, then what is left? However, this strikes me as the kind of denial that an atheist might equally as well make if denying a soul or metaphysical self. “What is this nonsense about a soul? When all the atoms of my body have been dismantled, well, where is this supposed soul?”
However, in Buddhism, this denial does come with strings, e.g., presupposes some kind of very persistent multi-life process, kamma etc. So what’s the difference between an atheist’s denial of self/soul, which I will concede is clearly anti-metaphysical, and a Buddhist’s? I think the key difference is dependent origination. Buddhism is both denying self/soul while at the same time still assuming the presence of a certain number of more traditional self/soul-like characteristics. Yes, it is a denial, but one with qualifications. If there is metaphysics, then IMO it comes attached to these qualifications. To go back to the metaphor of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, when this is dismantled, in the context of dependent origination, then that’s not the end of the matter (there is a process that may lead to the arising of another cathedral).
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Could you tell me what this cathedral thing or simile is all about ?
I keep hearing people referring to cathedral but I don’t know what they are talking about
It just makes me more confuse
It was something mentioned in the OP that I took up and ran with a bit. I guess the metaphor represents a certain type of argument or thought experiment where one looks at reducing something to its basic constituent components. One can try to apply it to notions of self and draw a parallel between St. Patrick’s Cathedral (and its bricks and mortar) and the self. Does St. Patrick’s Cathedral have a permanent immortal essence? Where is it when one removes all its bricks? Does the same apply to the self? Or what happens if one gradually replaces all of its bricks and other components over time with similar but different ones? Will it still be the same cathedral?
This is the basically the Ship of Theseus. Though, a more modern and funnier version of this comes to mind. There’s a British sitcom called Only Fools & Horses, which has a character called Trigger. This character had a broom, which he amazingly kept in continuous use for 20 years (of course, the reasons for this are funny and much the same as this Ship of Theseus conundrum ):
Some ideas like this do crop up in the suttas. The following from SN35.246 comes to mind:
"Suppose, bhikkhus, there was a king or a royal minister who had never before heard the sound of a lute. He might hear the sound of a lute and say: ‘Good man, what is making this sound – so tantalizing, so lovely, so intoxicating, so entrancing, so enthralling?’ They would say to him: ‘Sire, it is a lute that is making this sound – so tantalizing, so lovely, so intoxicating, so entrancing, so enthralling.’ He would reply: ‘Go, man, bring me that lute.’
"They would bring him the lute and tell him: ‘Sire, this is that lute, the sound of which was so tantalizing, so lovely, so intoxicating, so entrancing, so enthralling.’ The king would say: ‘I’ve had enough with this lute, man. Bring me just that sound.’ The men would reply: ‘This lute, sire, consists of numerous components, of a great many components, and it gives off a sound when it is played upon with its numerous components; that is, in dependence on the parchment sounding board, the belly, the arm, the head, the strings, the plectrum, and the appropriate effort of the musician. So it is, sire, that this lute consisting of numerous components, of a great many components, gives off a sound when it is played upon with its numerous components.’
"The king would split the lute into ten or a hundred pieces, then he would reduce these to splinters. Having reduced them to splinters, he would burn them in a fire and reduce them to ashes, and he would winnow the ashes in a strong wind or let them be carried away by the swift current of a river. Then he would say: ‘A poor thing, indeed sir, is this so-called lute, as well as anything else called a lute. How the multitude are utterly heedless about it, utterly taken in by it!’
Though, in Buddism, while the atta is being denied, this is being done in a context where, I think, some other things are being positively asserted, i.e., the cathedral/being can be dismantled/dies but, by cause and effect (unless the causes are cut off), that will lead to the later reassembling of a new cathedral, which is somehow linked to the old (that makes a rather awkward metaphor but that’s more or less what’s being implied I think).
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But Cathedrals literally burn down and then they get built up again. Why? Because people want Cathedrals. Like, Cathedrals exist only because of the energy human beings put into keeping them around. If we stopped building Cathedrals eventually they would cease to exist.
Dependent origination is an interventionist causal theory though. IMO, it’s not as traditional as it is science 2500 years before it was re-invented
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This reminds me of Shakespeare’s line:
Is it not strange that sheep’s guts could hail souls out of men’s bodies?
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OK, that certainly makes the whole metaphor work a whole lot better for dependent origination (DO)! I guess the desire of the believers for a place of worship roughly corresponds to the stages of ignorance and sankhara in DO, and the body of people and expertise who can build/maintain cathedrals might equate to birth consciousness. Presumably, the people in the area can only recall that there has been a cathedral there forever as far as anyone knows (whenever a fire or earthquakes topples one down, another has been built in its place).
Well, at least in terms of the outcome, the resulting religious framework is remarkably similar: a type of continuity from life to life, kamma, heavens & hells and a soteriological endpoint/solution are all present in spite of non-self (comparable to other Indian religious systems with an atta of the time, even if perhaps the endpoint was different).
As to whether dependent origination actually approaches the status of science-based causation, well, the later stages do certainly seem to rather accurately model human psychological processes. And it’s certainly possible the earlier steps do correspond to some kind of fundamental infrastructure of reality, like the cathedral-building infrastructure of our metaphor. However, unlike this example, the possible mechanisms of rebirth are not described and, for most anyway, have to be taken as a matter of faith. It doesn’t mean they don’t exist, but IMO that’s the part of dependent origination that seems more like metaphysics to me.
Furthermore, I guess there is always the inherent difficulty of proving the non-existence of something. Like the “Where’s Wally?” or “Where’s Waldo?” books, one may seek Wally here, there and everywhere without success, and eventually just give up and assume that Wally is nowhere to be found, but there’s always at least a small chance that the elusive Wally will reappear when one least expects! I suppose there’s a difference between a shrug of the shoulders, the attitude “why should I believe in this?” and a working assumption that it doesn’t, and an emphatic principle that something definitely does not exist (the later is IMO getting into more metaphysical territory, at least when dealing with fundamental principles of reality and being).
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absence of proof is not the same as proof of absence 
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This is actually quite important for the whole topic and has not been highlighted enough! It seems like the position of @RickRepetti is something like:
But in the suttas it is exceedingly rare that jhanas are mentioned in a context with anatta. Where is this idea coming from, that in jhana one would not experience atta? Is that some teachers’ claim, or of commentarial literature? It certainly is not suttist.
But isn’t also a contemporary cognitivist attitude that whatever we hold as “I” or “self” is an emergent phenomenon (i.e. similar to DO), ultimately based on how the brain and neural networks function? Why aren’t followers of this kind of reasoning Buddhists? I think rebirth comes back here as the essential difference.
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Still, is that his way of explaining, or does he describe it in line with his teaching tradition, or does it come from the suttas? If it’s not from the suttas then it’s open for anyone to make up their mind if they want to see it as an early Buddhist understanding.
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IMO you have to separate between the aesthetics of religion and science. If someone said some parts of the multiverse are less pleasant because of the quantum distribution of the weak electronic force, that has the aesthetics of science but it doesn’t make it science.
Both the rapture and ‘uploading your consciousness into a computer’ are unscientific, but they differ in aesthetics. When it comes to climate change, people tend to be magical thinkers about technology. Some people think they will live forever because science will “solve aging”.
But if we go beyond the superficial, typically you’d want a causal theory with variables you can intervene on, which is what DO is.
It does, and it is a better described theory than most you will find in the psychological literature.
DO is a mechanistic description of rebirth. In causal theories, the mechanism is in how intervening on some variables changes others.
Moreover, the method of verification is described via developing the higher mind, remembering your past births, verifying kamma, etc.
Regular science is taken even more on faith, because you do not directly observe the findings of other scientists. It doesn’t help that there are ongoing replication crises in most of the soft fields, even in medicine.
Plus, in social sciences, psychology, etc. researchers are typically interested in the average treatment effect (the effect of something on many people on average). This effect is not always relevant for individuals.
Edit: Where as DO is about individuals (you, me, everyone else), so it is directly relevant
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First, you hold body as subjectivity, thus ‘I am here.’
Then, you hold body into position of objectivity, thus ‘I am not the body.’
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As long as there is no move away from now, no existence or illusion of such can cause a contraction on consciousness. The subject I am aware of doesn’t exist, and doesn’t move.
Any move away from now, must be a lie or as you put it, a defilement.
And when “I am” or “here” is used, it’s only to point to the threshold, it is not “it”, but it does the trick, because it lands ones mind before any thought kicks in. It’s a mind stopper, like Zen Buddhism uses koans.
I am, is a disease, and I agree with Buddha there, but I doubt Buddha would mind if one gets to know the virus before making the suitable vaccine.
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It was actually just that same point that sparked me to write that post in the first place (though I also went off on some probably meandering tangents when I got going 
). I could see an argument with both sides sharing a seemingly common assumption about jhana and it relationship to anatta and I found myself wondering: “are we really so sure that this assumption is actually implied by the suttas?”
EDIT: And, yes, I agree that rebirth is the tricky part, the essential difference/sticking point with comparison to such emergent theories.
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Thanks! Good post.
Sure, it is a coherent explanation/theory (powerful at least with respect to what we can easily experience in terms of human mental processes, which perhaps suggests it might possibly be applicable to what cannot be so readily or widely experienced).
The details on rebirth are sketchy but, as you say in the following, verification is potentially available (I did say that it’s something to be taken as a matter of faith “for the most part” because I think it’s possible that there are some that don’t need faith anymore). I suppose ultimately it comes down to just that.
Though, that begs the question as to what is the breakthrough insight of the stream enterer. It’s hardly the case that this verifies rebirth (certainly not to the extent of seeing past lives, anyway, which is more the purview of the arahant)? It’s described in many different ways in the SN: insight into the three characteristics in the five aggregates or four elements or sense bases etc. or sometimes as an insight into the 4 noble truths or insight into dependent origination. None of these, per se, necessarily require direct verification/seeing of the truth of rebirth at that point (except perhaps the DO version, which prompts the question as to what exactly is meant by DO in this context). Probably no easy answer to that, anyway (am not likely to get there by logical reasoning ).
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Is it not that in this case the absence of proof is the evidence of its absence? In the sense that they claim an eternal unchanging self or essence but when we base on our observation of impermanence and look we cannot find the thing that has an essence of what we may call a self.
For example a man claims that a small plant lives inside of us and hides in an organ. But when a surgeon dissects a cadaver he cannot find such a plant in any organ .He started with the kidneys then the liver until he has truly chopped up the body but he still cannot find it. Other surgeons have tried to search for the plant too but cannot find it. That doesn’t mean that since there is an absence of evidence against the plant there is no proof of its absence. It is exactly the absence of proof that proves the absence. It is precisely because the surgeons cannot find it anywhere makes the case for its nonexistence.
Of course with such stories there can be disclaimers such as burden of proof are on those who claim .etc I hope it makes sense.