There is no "I" in "You"

[Gemini]

The eastern tradition is larger than your preferred subset, containing a great number of more and less skeptical bits than your favorite portion of your favorite portion.  The same is true of the western tradition.  

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Your formulation of anatta was -absolutely- scrubbed.  No ghosts, therefore no self.  

What about this--if the question is whether eastern philosophical traditions are more rational than western traditions, I agree with you. They are not. My contention is that they are more skeptical. In the sense of not having much confidence in metaphysics.

Let's contrast this kind of skepticism with two philosophers that had no problems at all making claims about all sorts of metaphysics: Plato and Aristotle. 

If you didn't know, these aren't just a couple of random dudes out of the panoply of western philosophers. We're talking about the guy who for two thousand years was The Philosopher. And his teacher. If you know anything about western philosophy, you know what a huge impact Aristotle had on it.

Now let's take Nagarjuna. Ask him about whether we can know stuff about metaphysics, and he's all, "No...just, no."

And like Aristotle, he's not just some random dude out of the panoply of eastern philosophers. He's fucking Nagarjuna. In the same way that, when you're reading western philosophy, you know everyone is familiar with Aristotle, when you're reading eastern philosophy, you know everyone is familiar with Nagarjuna. 

And they don't want to sound like the kind of "fools and reificationists" he humiliated in the Mulamadhyamaka-karika. So you tend to get a little more skeptical action going on.

But anyway. To give you an example of how anatta relates to physics, a while ago I was watching a conversation between Robert Wright and Lawrence Kraus, about the Higgs boson. And how it explains why electrons have mass. Wright stated that it wouldn't have occurred to him to think that there ought to be an explanation for something like that--he would have just accepted mass as a brute fact about electrons. A property they have which has no explanation.

What he was presupposing is metaphysics. That electrons have "own-nature," or svabhava, as the ancient Indians called it. Read some Nagarjuna and you'll see him critiquing this concept within an unexceptionally non-ghosty intellectual framework.