Reincarnation
Spent yesterday arvo at a Seminar.
Chalmers did his spiel, but there was too much agreement for my taste. He started a bit of critique of Wallace, but did not pursue it. I suspect he was being kind to his hosts. Or perhaps he was unfamiliar with Wallace's take on Buddhism.
I have long rejected reincarnation on the grounds that it uses a confused notion of the self. It is unclear how Banno could be the very same person who was previously Napoleon...
But is there a way around such objections?
Chalmers did his spiel, but there was too much agreement for my taste. He started a bit of critique of Wallace, but did not pursue it. I suspect he was being kind to his hosts. Or perhaps he was unfamiliar with Wallace's take on Buddhism.
I have long rejected reincarnation on the grounds that it uses a confused notion of the self. It is unclear how Banno could be the very same person who was previously Napoleon...
But is there a way around such objections?
Comments (819)
What makes it the same person?
If memories, then not.
Even given that our brain structure (memories?) is encoded in a 2 dimensional membrane at the edge of the universe, how would that mean that I am a reincarnation of Napoleon? In what way is it Napoleon that is reincarnated in Banno?
The memories we carry essentially define who we are. The actions we take based upon these memories device how we explore, create, learn and evolve. So we are fundamentally evolving memory.
You asked how it could be, so I suggested a model. I didn't expect that you would like it, but as long as you were inquiring ....
The material that makes you up changes over time, until none of what was there a decade ago remains. Memory is an autobiographical narrative, we remember a story. There are only so many forms the story can take, and only so many kinds of stories that we tell. We learn the forms until we just begin to identify everything that that comes, as the same as what came before. Nothing new under the sun. What makes you what you are is the kinds of relationships you have, the co-dependence of identity, and your form and function. Any completely unrepilcatable experiences wouldn't be representable, even to yourself. Language, and concepts require repeatability.
The irony always strikes me... which of us is the one that believes in special unchanging immutable souls? The one that says they're repeatable, or the one that hold stead fast to their special uniqueness?
So... if we can't make sense of self, then we have no hope to make sense of reincarnation?
Everything is special and unique though, it's just maya, samsara that is repeatable. The world truly is both just, and good under it all.
We can't make sense of either, no. We can think it, and do it though. Watch out for that.
Like clockwork.
Why "reincarnation", not "incarnation"?
A question not just for Mongrel.
If you ask Buddhists about this question, the general answer will be: 'are you the same person now as you were when you were seven?' (The question supposes you answer 'no'.) 'Then are you a different person' (Likewise.)
So - neither the same nor different. This undercuts the usual notion of identity, because identity supposes that 'the same person' has continuity from one life to the next. But a fundamental dogma of Buddhism (yes, Buddhism has dogmas) is that there is nothing that doesn't change; everything compounded (roughly equivalent to 'created beings' in Western theology) has three characteristics, namely, it is anicca, anatta, dukkha - impermanent, not self, and unsatisfactory (although these Buddhist terms are hard to translate directly).
So there is emphatically not 'a self' that 'migrates' from one life to the next. One of the canonical statements on same is the anecdote of 'S?ti, the Fisherman's Son' who believes the Buddha teaches there is a self that migrates from life to life:
When later quizzed by the Buddha himself as to who 'this self' is, S?ti answers:
He is thereupon rebuked by the Buddha as 'this worthless man' who will 'create long-term harm and suffering' for himself on account of his 'pernicious view' - which is taken to be similar or the same as the orthodox Brahminical account of there being 'a self that transmigrates from life to life'.
But, that said, re-birth is still said to occur by Buddhists - so how does that work? The Buddhist answer is hard to summarize, but the gist is that a person (like everything) arises on account of causes and conditions. So 'craving and attachment' gives rise to future lives; until one is free of craving and attachment, those causes will continue to propogate, giving rise to future lives.
Of course, that leaves a great many questions unanswered, and these themes were elaborated over the subsequent centuries - but that is the gist of it.
SO my take-away is roughly that if re-incarnation is taken as the self entering into a new life, then Buddhism does not hold to reincarnation.
Cheers.
That won't win over many converts....:)
Want to be further confused, eh? The Buddha once gave a "flower sermon", in which he held up a flower and said nothing. A lot more clear than anything I could say.
That is true, and technically Buddhism doesn't teach reincarnation - but that should be interpreted carefully.
Quoting Wosret
The earliest known version of the tale appeared in 1036, in China.
I used a couple Indian terms, and now just referenced something the Buddha said, but not as an authority, but just an example. I'm no scholar, I'm not that interested in perfectly repeating anyone. Just using the tools at my disposal in order to fail to communicate, lol.
No sweat Woz. I mainly agree with the gist of what you say, I'm just trying to relate it back to the fine print.
I liked that thing that you quoted about behaving as if everyone else are the enlightened ones, and we're the only ones that aren't. Jung said that people nowadays can't find God because people can no longer bow low enough.
I would be careful with this takeaway. There are as many interpretations of reincarnation as there are Buddhist teachers. This is not the Catholic Church with a hierarchy. I tried to warn you.
I'm interested in if reincarnation is a coherent notion.
"SO my take-away is roughly that if re-incarnation is taken as the self entering into a new life, then Buddhism does not hold to reincarnation."
There are many, many variations on this theme under the umbrella of Buddhism.
His work was met with the predictable opprobrium and most sceptics have convinced themselves that his research was irrevocably flawed by sloppy methodology and confirmation bias. Myself, I am not entirely convinced by his research, but I also don't believe it can be dismissed so easily, as he documented many thousands of cases. But one of the interesting features is that amongst children who said they recalled their previous lives, those lives were invariably mundane - mechanics, clerks, farmers, and so on. It's a far cry from the mythologised 'I lived before as Julius Caesar' trope (or tripe) which is associated with 'belief in reincarnation' in popular culture.
A typical case:
Source
There are quite a few such cases, and overall they're rather difficult to dismiss, although that doesn't stop the critics from doing just that.
The difficulty is, that the subject is a cultural taboo in the West. Belief in reincarnation was ubiquitous in ancient cultures - there's pretty good reason to believe that Plato accepted it - but was anathematised by the Church in the 4th century AD. It is also anathema to scientific materialism, as it proposes some unknown medium by which memories (at the least) appear to be transmitted. Ergo, a touchy subject.
Nevertheless, I remain unconvinced.
I imagine it's pretty ordinary in a community of Hindus. You still haven't shown that it's incoherent. I think you just don't like the notion.
Good for you.
Stevenson'd toddler is a good case to take. In what sense is the toddler also the drowned girl?
Is there a contradiction in transmigration of the soul?
I'm a surprising fellow.
It's a good thing to challenge one's prejudices, no?
Any set of assumptions I put forward would be uninformed.
So I am looking for someone to put forward an account that is coherent.
Care to help?
As the principle of actuality of a living body, the soul is necessarily prior to the actual living body.
The problem with reincarnation, as it is commonly apprehended, is that we think of the soul as a property of the body, rather than the proper conception which is the inverse of this, the body is the property of the soul. So you ask questions like how is it possible that myself was formerly someone else's self. This just displays that misconception of assuming the soul as a property of the body.
Only in the sense that she appeared to remember the previous life. (Stevenson himself, as noted, documented many such cases, but never claim that they 'proved reincarnation' - only that they are suggestive of it.)
Not that it keeps me awake at night... but i have not resolved the reincarnation/heaven (or Buddha realms) question. This is probably Catholic upbringing about heaven being the final destination is lodged in my brain. Maybe it is a vacation before returning? Why would anyone want to come back? Is perfection boring? To learn more or help others possibly. Couldn't one simply watch a tutorial in heaven if they wanted to learn? They must have the technology. It's heaven! O:)
No transmigration?
They tend to be benevolent and happy when it suits them; but on other occasions they can be quite nasty.
Maybe that is because they are remembering a very painful experience they once had... 300 years ago.
However recall that in Buddhist philosophy, beings comprise a succession of moments of experience, called (confusingly) 'dharmas' (they're 'moments of experience' as distinct from an unchanging essence, self or soul.) So dharmas are held to arise and cease in quick succession, giving the illusion of continuity in a manner similar to the frames of a moving picture (i.e. like a movie, but with real blood.)
However, the difficulty posed by the question of how such 'mind-streams' can manifest across time, inspired the introduction of a (contested) concept called the ?laya-vijñ?na. Actually the first term is the same as in 'Himalaya' - it means 'abode'. Vijñ?na is commonly translated as 'mind', so the ?laya-vijñ?na is 'abode of mind' - something like Jung's 'collective unconscious'. There's a scholar called William Waldron whose books on the topic are considered definitive, e.g. his The Buddhist Unconscious: The Alaya-vijñana in the context of Indian Buddhist Thought.
There is an elaborate theory built around this idea by the Yogacara school of Buddhism, which is influential to this day in Tibetan and East Asian Buddhism.
That's simply because you refuse to try (denial). You should try though, if you are truly interested in issues like this, because it is very important ontologically, to distinguish between the thing being referred to, and the properties which that thing is said to have.
If you mix these two up, as you've demonstrated with your misunderstanding of reincarnation, and refer to the property as if it were the thing, then you and the reincarnationist are referring to different things. There will be no understanding until you first recognize the thing being referred to.
Ok, here is my idea of a soul that I got from new agey books. A soul is a special kind of conscious body that exists and evolves in spacetime, and in its life, movement, actions and perceptions it uses various outfits, devices and vehicles, as we would use clothes (for protection, special function or for fun), sensory aids (to enable or enhance our perception in special kinds of environment), tools, or means of transport such as cars, ships or submarines. The physical body with its sensory and nervous system is one of such outfits, devices or vehicles, that is suitable for the soul's life in a physical environment. When the physical body stops functioning, the soul returns to the world it came from and may return to the physical world in a new physical body (reincarnation). In the physical body the soul typically forgets about its existence prior to its physical birth but its memories may be renewed after it exits the physical body, during hypnosis or during a spiritual "awakening". The reasons for the amnesia in the physical body are not clear to me, but the physical body obviously has a significant impact on the soul's function. Some authors claim that the amnesia is the result of a spiritual weakness, flaw or "fall", a disability that prevents the soul from retaining conscious connection with the world it came from.
Do you think reincarnation and eternal re-occurrence are different? Perhaps reincarnation suggests a history and eternal re-occurrence does not.
Also more mundanely :
wikipedia
The soul is explicitly "not a body", therefore it cannot be a "special kind" of body. Since it is not a body, it is highly unlikely that it exists in space-time, because space-time is a concept which was developed to account for the motion of bodies.
I can go with the rejection of an unchanging essence you describe in talking about Dharma. SO the question for reincarnation remains. What is it that is common to two people, such that one can be said to be the reincarnation of the other?
I think you have shown that this is not an issue for Buddhism. Thanks.
If you disagree with the word "body" then just use the word "object" or "thing".
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In new agey conceptions the soul acts, moves and evolves, so it exists in spacetime.
I've gone to pains to show you how the notion of properties is fraught; perhaps it is you who lacks effort.
So... there would be no thing as ghosts and apparitions? (Not that there is any incontrovertible evidence for them. If they exist, they are slippery little buggers... by nature I guess.)
Sure, but do you distinguish between material things like bodies, and immaterial things like souls?
Quoting litewave
Action is not confined to "in spacetime". That's why the concept of "a field" will not tell the physicist where a particle is.
Right, your "pains" amounts "ahhh, I can't relate to this!": followed by the refusal for further engagement.
Did I say that?
Sure, I distinguished between the soul and the physical (=material) body.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The notion of action presupposes time, and also some kind of space in which the action or change is defined. I don't understand how your sentence about field and particle is related to this.
No, of course not! That's why I offered the question. You have the right to remain ghostly silent! X-)
Here's an example of why it is important, in this type of discussion, to distinguish between the thing referred to, and the attributes, or properties which the thing is said to have.
Suppose I say "let's talk about the blue sky". You say "yes, I see the blue". I say, "no, I'm talking about the sky, not the blue, look at the sky". Unless you get to the point of accepting that there is something there, being referred to as "the sky", which is blue, you will never proceed toward an understanding of why the blue appears there.
The concept of soul had existed for time immemorial so it it's not a new age concept per se.
However, my interpretation in light of more modern concepts, would be to just consider a soul as memory with a life force evolving as time (not through space/time). Memory is preserved as the fabric of the universe which would be the quantum potential. Evidence for this preservation would be the evolving characteristics of different species that we refer to as inherited characteristics or innate talents (genes are simply a partial physical manifestation).
Given my model of memory bring imprinted holographically into the fabric of the quantum potential, it may be possible under certain circumstances for some people to view them in forms other than physical body forms. I believe that if such persistent memories do exist, the brain for the most part filters them out with appropriate reconstructive waves. But this is just an idea that I thought of in response to your question.
I might go along with this. But before you were talking about one thing, "spacetime", and now you are talking about two distinct things, time and space, so you have changed the subject, divided it into two distinct subjects.
Quoting litewave
A field is a concept based in spacetime. The fact that the position of the particle cannot be determined through the use of the field indicates that there is activity outside of the field (not covered by the field), and quite likely outside of spacetime.
The problem with definitions like this, is it tries to include both the natural and supernatural while compromising both. The universe's fabric is not "memory" and no applied or theoretical physics shows it to be. And evolving characteristics of different species, which Punctuated Equilibrium shows to not be primarily progressive, are not indicative of a cosmic "memory" making up the fabric of the universe.
The notion of a soul transcending and defying the physical rules of the universe inevitably depends on either a supernatural explanation or a natural explanation correcting current ones. Nobody has provided the latter yet.
Thanks for the reply. Interesting thought. I hadn't considered ghosts as a type of hologram, if that is what you meant. That would seem within the realm of researchable possibility, not that I understand quantum matter and such. (Y)
There is nothing as far as I can tell that is supernatural about memory, life, or quantum fields. I am using them as fundamental constructs. [
quote="Thanatos Sand;87291"]The universe's fabric is not "memory" and no applied or theoretical physics shows it to be.[/quote]
All that physics tells us is that we are composed of quanta. My interpretation of quanta is that it is evolving memory/intelligence (and habits) as a process. It is not a novel idea but it does place mind at the fundamental substrate.
Quoting Thanatos Sand
There is nothing here that transcends any observations that are made. It is merely a model for explanatory purposes. Nothing new or supernatural is claimed. Everything is as is.
No, but you're making them supernatural by giving them "physical" attributes that do not exist in the physical universe and making them physical in a way that they are not.
No, physics tells us much more than that; that's why there are many physical rules of the universe and the undergraduate and physics textbooks are pretty big. And your idea of quanta is not backed by those physical rules and realities. It's a nice Sci-Fi concept, but It is not backed by physical reality.
Actually, all of your theories here transcends physical observations since none of them are prove by or even supported by the rules of physics and accurate observations made by physics. Your "memory as fabric of the universe" theory a perfect example. So, since your theories transcend and are not supported by the natural laws of physics, they are supernatural.
They are no more and no less physical than they already are. I am only referring to memory and quantum fields as being real. How you wish to characterize them is up to you. I view reality as a continuum of the insubstantial to the substantial.
Quoting Thanatos Sand
There are no rules. There are concepts an descriptions of these concepts that are constantly evolving in small and large ways.
Quoting Thanatos Sand
No more and no less sci-fi than any interpretation of Relativity or Quantum. I am referring to real phenomenon (memory, life, intelligence, evolution) but giving it a different substrate than what one is user to. For example, the brain doesn't house memory, the brain reveals memory just as a TV doesn't house TV programs it only reveals them. My paradigm is actually very straightforward and realistic.
Quoting Thanatos Sand
Not at all. It simply makes memory persistent and we have plenty of evidence of this in innate and inherited traits as well as habitual movements.
There is nothing new here. It is an explanatory model that can create new opportunities for research and conceptual development. As I showed in another thread, there is already scientific evidence for a holographic universe.
Spacetime is a thing made up of space and time. The action happens in both space and time, so it happens in spacetime.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The field interacts with a measuring apparatus and that's how the position of the particle is determined. Activity outside of spacetime doesn't make sense to me.
No, you literally said "memory is preserved as the fabric of the universe." So, you did far more than referring to memory and quantum fields as "being real." And so the one already characterizing them was you, yourself:
Of course there are rules, the principle of thermodynamics and rules of Gravity among them. It's why our planes can fly and our cars can drive. I'm not being snarky here, but I suggest you check out a book of basic Physics.
Yes, way more since it isn't backed by Physics at all. The fact memory exists doesn't mean it is the fabric of the universe and it is not. Feel free to back up your claim with physics at any time. We both know you can't.
If you haven't observed that science is constantly changing (yes, even gravity) than there is nothing more to say. We have two different life experiences.
Yes at all since you haven't and can't show memory is the fabric of the universe. You can't even show what memory is physically made up of at all. And an explanatory model is not physical proof by the rules of physics. And whether or not you have shown there is scientific evidence for a holographic universe, you certainly haven't show that memory is the fabric of the universe or even part of it. Until you do, your theory remains supernatural.
If you haven't observed that the rules of the universe-like the ones I mentioned-don't change, then there is clearly nothing more to say. You don't understand physics. Science may change in correcting it's errors; the rules of the universe don't. We clearly have two different education experiences as well.
It's like if a person describes the precise way a victim were killed and locates the body without having apparent access to that information, I'd not call that person a psychic, but instead a suspect.
I guess this is one way to frame it.
In any case, there is nothing much more to discuss. Different life forces at play.
No, it is the correct way to frame it. And you said "nothing more to discuss" two tweets ago.
The way I would frame it, is not that the child is aware, but rather that the memory persists. The child's "self" it's this memory. And, yes, all learning is accomplished in the normal manner of creative exploration evolving into new memory.
I think he believes in underlying ambiguity. Language use paints a picture. For all practical purposes the elements of that painting are real.
Sense if self is a kind of stress response that is directly related to language use and castration.
When you reject reincarnation, you're saying it doesn't fit in the picture your people are painting.
Or maybe not. I'm still trying to understand.
OK, I agree, spacetime is something "made up".
Quoting litewave
Why not, we're talking about real activity aren't we? And spacetime is made up. Made up, and real are mutually exclusive. N'est-ce pas? If so, then all real activity is outside of spacetime.
Buzzkill!
I'd also point out that you are on to something in your evaluation of reincarnation. If it is the case that reincarnation does not exist (as I contend it does not ), then any religion that justifies poor treatment of certain peoples (as the Hindu do in their caste system) on the basis that those peoples are being punished for the sins of past lives, then that religion is horribly unjust and oppressive. It seems such a religion is being used for controlling the masses and protecting the ruling class (which I contend it is).
Except we know they don't. Many horrid people who do terrible things die happy with everything they want, while many excellent people endure great suffering they did not deserve. Also, mass deaths counter the notion of Karma in life, as not only does not everyone in a plane crash or those being gassed in the Holocaust not deserve what they got, they can't possibly deserve the exact same thing. No two people do the exact same things in life.
Samsara and Karma are coherent because
1. It explains away the problem of evil which plagues Abrahamic religions
2. It fits well with the general notion of causation
However, one key element for Samsara/Karma to be meaningful is the continuation of the soul. Otherwise 1 and 2 would be undefined. Buddhism is just a long-winded version of the maxim ''you reap what you sow''.
Quoting Hanover
Yes, but there are many cases where instant Karma is absent. Unsolved crimes are aplenty.
To cover these cases Buddhism needs souls to reincarnate.
You're predicating conjecture on conjecture. Samsara and Karma do not explain away the problem of evil and you haven't shown they have. I would sincerely like to see you do so. And it does not fit well within the general notion of causation, since there is no proof tying together the effects of events to a mystical moral judgment of causes. I am more than willing to see you show that proof as well.
And I showed the problem with that thinking in this post:
The world is just, dispute appearances.
This is how new branches of Buddhism are developed. Because Buddhism is decentralized, it it's relatively easy to start creating one that conforms to one's own belief system. Next thing you know, somebody will be claiming it is true, and it will be for that person. There is no central authority to contradict. This is one of the attractions of Buddhism. Of course, it can also leave to some bad blood between competing Buddhist branches.
https://www.dalailama.com/the-dalai-lama/biography-and-daily-life/reincarnation
How can anyone love you if they don't know you because you've hidden from them? How can you love yourself if you've hidden from yourself, because you live in denial? Do you think that comfort and fortune beings happiness, rather than boredom and restlessness? Do you think that a calm and uneventful death brings one more joy than a violent one?
Yes, I meant me as well. I'm constantly wrong about what will bring me happiness, what will satisfy me, and bring me health. I need to be silent and subtle to discover that in every moment.
Wisdom is about living a good life, a healthy life. Whether man made or not, it doesn't render it ineffective.
Stop strawmanning me. I never said anything about anyone hiding from anyone. Some of the people in the world most honest with themselves are terrible people who know they're terrible. And there are people out there who actually love them, no matter how much that bothers you. There are also people who love people who are hiding from them, as well. And how can you love yourself when you're in denial about knowing what makes everyone happy? Using your logic, you must not.
Again you strawman me; you need to read better if we are to actually discuss. I talked about bad people dying loved and surrounded by their loved ones. And if you think comfort and fortune inherently brings boredom and restlessness, you must have never really enjoyed real comfort and fortune. And if you don't think a comfortable uneventful death free from watching loved ones die horribly is better than a violent one watching loved ones die, you have strange notions of happy and unhappy deaths.
Wisdom is knowing you don't know what makes a good and healthy life for everyone else. You can still acquire that. And concepts being man-made show they're not necessarily weighted in reality, and you haven't shown your concepts are effective at all.
You replied to me, and my conditions were lying cheaters.
No I didn't. Go look.
That was the only post to which I responded of yours. I hadn't even read that other one, let alone replied to it.
when you wrote this:
Lol, believe what you want man... best just ignore me I think.
Ciao.
An activity outside of spacetime? Activities take time.
Not exactly parsimonious to come up with a parallel universe of sorts. :)
Souls by their nature would act outside of space/time since the rules of space/time clearly don't apply to them. They neither move through time, nor exist in space, like the rest of matter. So, either a parallel universe with different rules or a supernatural dimension would be needed. Parsimony would demand the rejection of the theory of souls since neither scientific observation nor the rules of the universe bear them out; they are hardly the simplest explanation of things.
In the absence of an omnibenevolent god, the problem of evil is moot. The evil in the world, suffering in other words, is just your past bad deeds catching up.
Quoting Thanatos Sand
There's no proof of course. But it's not that much of a stretch to extend causation that is apparent in the physical world to the realm of morality. May be it is but the point is Karma sticks to the accepted truth of causality. Even Abrahamic religions are ''true'' in this regard that moral actions have consequences.
I believe these two central precepts (Karma and Samsara) don't make sense without the existence of an indestructible soul.
Souls are then defined as parts of us living in parallel universes?
But why, what's all this stuff for, what's it supposed to account for...?
And how would we differentiate it all from fiction?
I don't believe anyone involved with Buddhism ever speaks of parallel universes. The concept of infinite upon infinite number of parallel universes and all of their inhabitants (including an infinite number of parallel souls of our own) it's strictly a fabrication of the tens of thousands of scientists who believe in this interpretation of quantum physics, because they rather it her believe in an infinite number of universes than have non-locality. Scientists are a funny bunch when it comes to science.
In any case, parallel universes is a strict concoction of modern science, and yes there are tons of parallel souls living there free of our actions.
There are two main problems with this. One, you don't know there is no omnibenevolent God. Secondly, evil is not just bad deeds catching up with someone, they are also the bad deeds affecting other people.
Many Nazis died happily in Argentina with new families; their actions actually "caught up with" the Jews they helped slaughter. That was evil.
I never said souls are parts of us living in parallel universes. That's a strawman counterproductive to any discourse on the matter.
And what this "stuff" should account for and how we should differentiate if from fiction is your problem, not mine. I never said souls exist.
Just "other realities" that are temporal, as per the previous posts.
[sub]Principle of charity (Wikipedia article)[/sub]
The Inferno wasn't written by Virgil, btw.
Peace out.
Quoting Thanatos Sand
I was only comparing religions on the scales of coherence. In this case, Buddhism to Abrahamic religions. I don't know if God exists but Buddhism is a more coherent theory than, say, Christianity, so far as solving the problem of evil is the issue.
Quoting Thanatos Sand
Yes, but everyone is getting their Karmic reward/punishment. Every person in your life, even the tiny speck of dust that enters your eye, is a Karmic messenger, there to give you happiness or pain based on your past deeds.
Karma is a justice system where everyone is both the criminal and the judge, reward/punishment being handed out in complex BUT perfect ways.
You did say there's no omnibenevolent God, and you don't know that. And Buddhism isn't a more coherent theory than Christianity as far as solving the problem of evil; you just say it is. Christianity, particularly the Medieval theologians, has delved deeply into addressing the problem. A religion thinking it can solve the problem is just hubris.
Wrong. Firstly, you have no proof of this. Secondly, if bad people are getting good fortune and good people are getting bad fortune, than your justice system isn't a justice system at all. The Holocaust and Nazis getting away with it shows that. So do plane crashes where everybody who deserve different Karmic results are getting the exact same one.
Yes and what's there solution?
Original sin? Hereditary sin doesn't make sense.
Free will? What of the evil of natural disasters?
Buddhist Karma quite easily explains evil as retribution for past bad deeds.
Quoting Thanatos Sand
But...there's a next life where good is rewarded and evil punished. Karma doesn't necessarily mean we have to reap our rewards or suffer punishment in this life.
Of course the determination of whether you believe that there is or might be reincarnation is a matter of asking yourself this: What is the origin, cause, or reason for your current life? Will that origin, cause or reason continue to obtain afterwards?
Michael Ossipoff
The traditions that posit reincarnation seem to be saying "What you are is what you get."
Michael Ossipoff
I'm sure you're aware you need to specify which Christians and/or which Medieval theologians.
Actually, the model of original sin and even predestination makes sense when you consider some of us are born with a greater genetic disposition for anger or Depression or addiction and some of us are given a genetic disposition for well-adjustedness and congeniality, and we haven't even mentioned cultural coding.
No, it offers that as an answer. It doesnt' substantially support that, or support it at all, with real-world evidence to bear that out.
You say that's the case, but you have no proof of it. And if people have no memory of what they did in the past, then their suffering is pointless as far as learning. And there's something disgusting about suggesting Holocaust victims deserve what they got because its "Karma" for past misdeeds and the Nazis good fortune is Karma for past good ones.
Its also a matter of asking yourself is the origin, cause, or reason for your current life something spiritual, or is it just the result of many physical & psychological phenomena that have occurred along the way.
No. I was referring to origin, cause or reason for the fact of your life itself, not about events and causes during your life which have influenced its eventual outcome. Those don't bear on the topic's question.
Michael Ossipoff
No, as you can see, you said "What is the origin, cause, or reason for your current life?" and I addressed that with a statement that bears on the topics questions.:
Quoting Thanatos Sand
Yes, you addressed something different from what I clearly stated that I was referring to. Before your most recent reply, I had already clarified that what I was referring to was not what you were replying about.
You're talking about "many physical & psychological phenomena that have occurred along the way" (during your current life), which have caused your current life to turn out as it has.
After your first reply about that, I clarified that I was referring to origin, cause or reason for "the fact of your life itself" (in other words, the fact that your life occurred at all).
Different topic.
Michael Ossipoff
My topic was the origin, cause or reason for the fact that your life occurred at all.
Your topic was developmental influences during your current life.
The influences to which you refer occurred after the beginning of your current life, and aren't relevant to the origin, cause or reason for that life's initial occurrence.
...or to my post, or to this topic.
But thank you, Thanatos, for providing us with such a classic textbook example of a troll.
Michael Ossipoff
Of course they are since they are a possible alternative to how one got to their current life. And you did talk about one's current life
So, the only one who has provided us with a classic textbook example of a troll is you. So, I ask that you stop trolling me. I will not read or respond to any more of your posts on this thread.
Promise?
Than thank you for that too.
My previous replies are sufficient, and there's no need or reason for me to continue answering the same repeated confusion.
Michael Ossipoff
I think it depends on what, if any, continuity, one wishes to attach to one's idea of reincarnation. If there is no practical continuity attached, in the form of memories or tangible characteristics, I think one can only make sense of the idea if one believes in Aristotelian essences. Then one can say that one's essence is the same as that of Napoleon, even though there is nothing else of note that is shared. This hypothesis is, of course, unfalsifiable.
If one wants to attach things like recovered memories (I remember the cannons at Austerlitz, the embrace of Josephine) then one might not have to be an Essentialist. But recovered-memory ideas of reincarnation do seem pretty kooky to most of us.
If we discard the notion of the self, like Nagarjuna or Hume, then we can get an idea of reincarnation along the lines that it is simply life or consciousness - the totality of all alive or conscious beings - that goes on. A bit Circle-Of-Life ish, perhaps a bit hippy, but not nearly as woo as 'Reincarnation' usually seems.
Discarding essences, the self can be thought of as like a rope in which no strand runs the full length, and yet the rope is treated as a whole.
But even then, what exactly are the strands that go from one life to another?
This is the point I tried to clarify with Banno. You cannot think of the soul as a part of yourself. Souls have bodies, and bodies have parts. So the soul cannot be a part of yourself. Until you understand the need to assume a soul which to attribute the living body to, as the property of that soul, any talk about the relationship between the soul and the body will appear as fiction to you.
As per my example, you can look above your head, and say "I see blue", and to the person who wants to talk about the sky, you can insist "What sky? All I see is blue, there is no sky to be talked about, only blue". Until you see the need to assume the sky, which is blue, any attempt to discuss the finer points nature of the sky is pointless. Likewise, until you see the need to assume a soul, which has as its property, the living body, any attempt to discuss the nature of the soul is rather pointless.
If souls have bodies and their bodies have parts and cannot be a part of ourselves, what are they, how and why do they exist, and what are their connections to us? Using your definition, they sound like Angels or aliens.
What are we talking about? If it's 'something' that is indestructible, unchangeable, immortal, beyond time and space, then how do we demonstrate the existence of such a reality?
Having said that, I don't buy into the idea that you 'have' or 'don't have' a soul. What I think 'soul' means, is really something like 'the totality of the being'. And the totality includes, for instance, proclivities, likings, tendencies, attributes, the past and the future. But it is not an objectively real entity or object of perception.
That said, I think at the root of many spiritual traditiions, is the idea that 'the soul' transcends the physical. That doesn't mean it's a 'substance' in the sense we nowadays understand the word. But in dualist philosophies, the soul is something that is real on a plane other than the physical; it intersects with the physical, but it is not physical, and the reason for the soul's bondage is because it has become attached to or trapped in the physical, by identifying with it.
Ok, but do you think reincarnation is true? Does reincarnation require an indestructible soul?
I'm not saying Karma and rebirth are true. As a hypothesis Buddhism is better than Abrahamic religions.
Religion is inherently about morality. Any moral system is heavily dependent on responsibility, culpability, fairness, justice, reward and punishment. All of these become meaningless in the absence of a person (soul?) that is responsible for an action and that bears the repercussions of the action. Punishing/rewarding Tom for Dick's actions is simply incomprehensible.
Also, the doctrine of Original Sin seems to make sense on this view.
Their genes live in you. Their "identities," which are made up of far more than genetic material, do not.
Also, this is a topic where knowledge is scarce. So, I think it's open to speculation.
It's not open to fantastical or erroneous speculation. It is a fact that our identities are made up of more than just our genes; our life experience and socio-cultural surroundings have a huge influence and part. And there is nothing in Genetics pointing to identities being passed down genetically; so to think otherwise is anti-scientific.
You have too much faith in science.
No, I have completely appropriate and rational belief in science. You have too much unfounded faith in the fantastical world you see beyond it.
And Genetics, by the way, is science, so you're relying on science as well, just not as well as you should.
You could be right. I don't know. I've been having strange experiences last few years. Anyway...be rational but leave some room for spirituality. Not an advice, just a suggestion.:)
The way I see it is that the necessity to assume the existence of a soul is understood by logic. All these different things which are said about the soul, that it is immutable, immortal, etc., are not necessarily true, because no one really knows the exact nature of the soul. And perhaps we cannot know it. This is similar to God. The need to assume God can be demonstrated, but when we start saying things about God, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, etc., it is quite likely that untruths are said because we don't really know the exact nature of God.
Quoting Wayfarer
The idea that a person "has a soul", is what I argued against, as a misrepresentation, which leads to confusion and the claim that the concept of the soul is nonsense. I think that to properly understand the soul, one must understand that the living body is a property of the soul and not vise versa.
Quoting Wayfarer
The idea that the soul transcends physical existence is produced by the logical demonstration. To state it very simply, it is evident that the form which the living body will have, precedes the actual existence of the living body. This can be readily observed in the free will act, which is a manifestation of the existence of the soul. The form which the act will take precedes the existence of the physical act.
Quoting Thanatos Sand
Do you understand the notion of looking at things, and trying to figure out why a certain type of thing behaves the way it does, and coming to the conclusion that there is something underlying that thing which is not immediately evident to your senses, but must be there in order to account for how that thing behaves? We can give that underlying thing a name, an identity, while knowing very little about it, just that it must be there in order to account for the way that the things are behaving. Take gravity for example.
Do you understand there is no substantial evidence a soul exists, so you have to establish or at least substantially establish that it does before accounting for how it behaves? Do you understand trying to ascertain how it must behave before doing so is particularly illogical? Do you also understand Gravity is something that can be shown to exist in the natural world while souls are not? Do you realize you never actually addressed my statement above, but just responded with a question?
What are the strands that go from one hour to another? Memories?
.... light the corners of my mind
Misty water-colored memories...
of the way
we were...
-Wittgenstein
Is there something to memories other than language use? The dreaded continental Wittgenstein: language is mechanistic, thoroughly conventional, and it speaks us.. not the other way around.
Actually, i was joking... it is not a quote from Witt. Humming the words might reveal the author.
Unless you were joking back, and got me! :D
Memory is there essence of who we are as we persist through duration. One only has to discard the notion that somehow memory is locked in the brain (we know of body memory) and one can begin to understand how it may persist beyond the physical body.
The nature of memory is the basis of Bergson's writings. He was well educated in many fields including mathematics, biology, childhood education, and of course philosophy.
I think it already exists beyond the physical body. Part of my memory is in my cell phone.
(Y) yep, Barbara will do that to ya! X-)
What I am suggesting is that the basic essence of being human is dispersed beyond the brain. Most artists and sports figures recognize this as it is the basis of learning their activities. We recognize it by virtue of what we call natural instincts and innate talents and traits. More recently, scientist have begun to discover it in experiments. Bergson wrote about it in his early 20th writings which were a harbinger for quantum theory and holographic science. He did it via observation and intuition which should be the basis of philosophy.
Yep. Chalmers had an angle on that as well.. extended mind..
Quoting TheMadFool
Reincarnation needn't require an indestructible soul, or a parallel universe of souls.
Though reincarnation isn't part of, or necessary to,. Skepticism: Reincarnation is consistent with Skepticism, or so it seems to me.
Is reincarnation true? I admit that none of us can give personal testimonial to it, but because Skepticism is similar enough to Vedanta to be called a version of Vedanta, that gives me some confidence that the ancient Vedanta writers might very well have been right about other things, like reincarnation. They had some consensus that reincarnation happens as an appearance. They often spoke of life as an appearance.
As as been mentioned here by others, Buddhists have a similar consensus about an appearance of reincarnation.
For the above reasons, I'd say that reincarnation is probably true.
People taking the opposite position tend to sound very sure, but maybe they're overconfident about what can be known for sure.
Michael Ossipoff
My most recent post here was very brief, because that was all there was time for, right then.
.
Of course some things that I said in it call for a bit of explanation or some justification.
.
A website by a modern Buddhist or a Vedantist outlined his beliefs, including a statement that there’s no metaphysical mechanism for reincarnation. Sure, certainly not in Physicalism.
.
I’ve said that you’re the body, and nothing more. So it sounds as I contradicted myself, when I said that it seems to me that reincarnation is consistent with Skepticism.
.
In my first post to this topic, I said that it’s a matter of asking oneself, “What is the origin, cause or reason for this life? Does that origin, cause or reason obtain afterwards?”
.
In the framework of Skepticism, as I proposed it, that question seems to have an affirmative answer.
.
It’s well to remember that, in this topic, we’re really talking about terra incognita.
.
Michael Ossipoff
To me it seems more sensible to think of the soul as 'having a body'; the soul is not "had", rather it is the having, so to speak.
What would 'evidence' consist of? As mentioned previously, there is a large amount of documentation comprising interviews with children who claim to remember previous lives. Why would that not constitute evidence, at least of continuity between one life and another? And another field is NDE research which likewise has a considerable body of documentation.
But I think it's also important to understand that such questions, insofar as they're concerned with metaphysical problems, are out of scope for the natural sciences as currently conceived, so it's problematical trying to hold statements to them to the standards of natural science.
Quoting Mongrel
One general answer might be derived from theories of morphic resonance, which states that 'nature has memories', If memories can be stored and transmitted by means other than being encoded in brains, then it would explain a lot of things.
If you have to ask what "evidence" consists of, you need to go back and look up the word. And if you think people saying they have had past lives is evidence they have, you really need to do so. Some people say they've talked to God or Satan; some say they are God; you must believe them as well.
No, it's not problematic to hold metaphysical statements of fact to standards of natural science if they are claiming to be as true as truth statements within natural science. In that case, it's imperative we hold those claims to such standards.
Have you read anything about this research? Of are you saying that, purely because you know it's impossible that such research could reveal anything, because you class it with 'talking to God and Satan'. In other words, are you expressing an informed opinion, or simple prejudice?
I class it with "talking to God and talking to Satan" because it is like talking to God or Satan. It is something no physical evidence bears out and the realities of the world show to be extremely likely as untrue. One no more has to read the "research" on claims of past lives as one has to read the research on people claiming to talk to God or claiming to be God to know any of those claims are extremely unlikely to be true.
And using your faulty logic, your not believing people talk to God, talk to Satan, or are God are Satan is "prejudice." That's cute
Right, so you don't know anything about it. So long as that's clear.
You don't know anything about the research on people claiming to be God or Satan. So, using your flawed logic, you must believe those people's claims are true. Cute.
Research on 'children who claim to remember a previous life', is a different topic to 'people who claim to talk to God or Satan'. This is because such claims can be cross-checked against other sources, so as to ascertain whether there was a such a person, who lived and died in the circumstances the child alleges. As mentioned earlier in this thread, there is considerable documentation of such cases; anyone may dispute it, but dismissing it out of hand is something else.
They may be different topics but they are equally ridiculous, unprovable claims. And different claims of talking to God or Satan can be unscientifically "cross-checked" just like claims of past lives. In each cases all you have are: insupportable claims.
And there has been "considerable documentation" of claims of talking to God or Satan just as there have been claims of past lives. Never have those past lives been proven. So it is as supportable and logical to dismiss claims of past lives out of hand as it is to dismiss claims of talking to God or Satan out of hand...as you do, quite hypocritically.
By the way, there is "considerable documentation" of chupacabras and aliens impregnating women, too. You must believe in those as well.
Got any references?
And thanks for showing you couldn't address what I wrote here:
The article I referred to earlier was a blog post in Scientific American.
There are quite a few books by Stevenson on Amazon - but no need to bother reading them, you already know what's in them, right?
In any case, for the interested reader, the point about these particular cases, is that there is 'empirical evidence', namely, children who tell these stories. This is not possible in cases of other after-life experience, except for Near Death experience studies.
I'm sorry, a "blog post" in Scientific American isnt' scientific documentation of anything. Try again.
Again, a few books by a guy named Stevenson isn't scientific documentation of anything. There are books on the Chupacabra, bigfoot, and alien abductions. But no need reading them, you already know what's in them, right?...:)
There are people who tell stories about talking to God and being abducted by aliens, too. Those don't constitute scientific or sufficient evidence either. If you think they do, you're in trouble.
If anyone thinks that reincarnation requires souls, then I'll remind you that millennia of Buddhists didn't and don't think so.
As I've said in a previous post here, I suggest that reincarnation doesn't require anything inconsistent with Skepticism, which doesn't assume anything.
Michael Ossipoff
If reincarnation doesn't require souls, the person arguing for its existence needs to assert what it does require. And reincarnation is very inconsistent with skepticism, which may not assume anything but doesn't accept unsupported claims. And claims of reincarnation are all unsupported.
He did follow all the standard scientific protocols in his work, but, as is well known, prejudice will trump science any day of the week.
Right, he followed all the "scientific protocols" to prove past lives. There are no scientific protocols for proving past lives because there is no science for it. As is well, known, gullible foolishness will try to trump science any day of the week.
P.s. Feel free to print any examples of him following any of those "scientific protocols." I do love comedy.
No need, I think you're point has been made abundantly obvious.
I started with a question as a preamble, then proceeded with a reply to your question. We can validly assume the existence of something without being capable of answering the questions concerning that thing, which you ask. And I provided an example, gravity. Your questions are irrelevant to the point I was making.
Quoting John
Right, I agree, that was the point I was trying to make.
Actually, you didn't reply to my question, and your statement there and here are both irrelevant to my statement I made.
And my questions were very relevant to the incorrect, erroneous point you were making. in fact, they showed your point you were making was wrong. Here they are again:
No need to answer them. As I pointed out, they're rhetorical questions showing how wrong you've been.
I’d said:
.
.
Thanatos says:
.
.
…unless it doesn’t require anything.
.
.
Thanatos needs to not reply to posts, discussions or topics that he hasn’t read.
.
The metaphysics that I call “Skepticism” doesn’t assume reincarnation.
.
In fact, it doesn’t need or use any assumptions, or posit any brute fact. That’s why I call it “Skepticism”.
.
In particular, I made a point of saying, in an earlier post to this topic, that reincarnation isn’t a part of, or necessary to, Skepticism.
.
*******************************************
Administrators:
.
Consistent, habitual, misquoting, and replying to things that weren’t said are standard behaviors of the typical troll. What is this forum’s policy regarding trolls?
*******************************************
.
.
What unsupported claims does Thanatos think Skepticism accepts? :)
.
.
Well, reincarnation is supported by being consistent with a completely parsimonious metaphysics.
.
As for “assumptions”, maybe it’s necessary to remind Thanatos that I said:
.
“It’s well to remember that, in this topic, we’re talking about terra incognita.”
.
Hello? That means that we don’t know.
.
My claim for Skepticism (the metaphysics that I propose), is is a strong one, because I claim that the Principle of Parsimony pretty much settles the matter of which of two metaphysicses is better qualified as valid. My statements about reincarnation are more modest and cautious.
.
Michael Ossipoff
Much as I don't like Sand's posturing, I think there is a logical gap here. A child has memories of being a mechanic; therefore the child has the same soul as the mechanic.
But memories are not soul.
But what 'the soul' actually means, is still an open question. As you say above, the standard reading of Buddhism is that 'Buddhism rejects the idea of there being a soul' (or 'substance' in the old-fashioned sense). There's a whole chapter on that in one of the most popular introductory text books on Buddhism. But it makes me uncomfortable, because the folks who insist on there not being a soul, in the West, are behaviourists and materialists of various stripes ('you got no soul, man'). The implication is, humans are 'just' machines, or 'just' organisms, or 'just' automatons. And I'm sure the Buddha doesn't mean that.
What Buddhism actually rejects is hard to understand, because the culture in which the teaching was developed is very different to our own. Furthermore the ideas in the Upanisads about the nature of the 'self' (atman) are divergent and often contradictory - the self as an 'inner knower' which is separate from everything physical (this is an early form of dualism, rather like the Cartesian model, called Samkhya.) Alternately, the self is like a 'minute flame' situated 'in the heart'. The upshot of all these ideas is the idea that there is a soul that is'solitary, like a post set firm or a mountain peak', and that if one gains identity with this self, then one will live eternally i.e. literally be reborn either on earth or in a 'heaven realm' forever. That is why this view is called 'eternalism', which is one of the 'extremes'. (I think the possible modern equivalent is the belief that one will go to heaven and find your possessions, pets and relatives there.)
The other 'extreme view' is nihilism - which is pretty close to what everyone believes nowadays, that death and the break up of the body is the end of that being, there is nothing further.
So the'middle path' rejects both 'eternalism' and 'nihilism'. That is the basis of Madhyamika philosophy. It is quite hard to grasp.
BUT, whether this means there is a 'soul' or not, is still an open question in my view. Most scholars say the Greek word 'soul' is not what the Buddha had in mind when he rejected the Hindu 'atman'. But it is fair to say that the term is not part of the Buddhist lexicon, as neither is the idea of a Creator God.
As I mentioned before, what eventually developed in Buddhism was the idea of the 'citta-santana', or 'mind-stream'. Granted, that is not so much an entity as a process - but still quite an effective stand in for 'soul', I would have thought.
I did no posturing, only cogent argument with the occasional appropriate repartee.
That's one answer to the OP I can understand.
The Diamond Sutra, Chapter 3.
(Mind you, having been aware of this sutra for 30 years, I still find it very hard to fathom.)
Better to remain silent. :-#
One can then ask, what is the difference between your consciousness and mine or a mouse's? And the answer would always be in the contents, not the container. In which case, one could presume that consciousness itself is, like water, everywhere the same, perhaps more or less here or there, but always self-identical, apart from its contents - what it is conscious of.
In which case every incarnation is a reincarnation of consciousness, with or without memory or awareness of this fact. And it is literally true that 'in as much as ye do it unto the least of these my brethren, ye do it unto me.' Karma rules because when one is kind or unkind to another, that other is oneself.
It becomes obvious that consciousness inherits the consequences of its own behaviour through time; if it promotes violence, it will suffer violence, and so on, unto the seventh generation.
As to whether there is any substantial evidence for consciousness, or whether it is a substance at all, I leave to the rest of me to work out between yourselves.
so, we're the most conscious, because we're the most miserable. Yay us.
What is this consciousness made of? And how can it be just contents when it is connected to, affected by, and affecting the human body and mind?
Consciousness would be quanta. One and the same. And it is spreading spreading into duration as memory waves.
The problem is everything could be quanta, and quanta doesn't inherently become memory waves. One would have to show how they do.
Sure but you were attributing to it a metaphysical quality it doesn't inherently or conspicuously have, and our conscious cannot physically be separated from our body/brain.
Consciousness does lurk in quantum theory interpretation. I am being more explicit, but this type of thinking it's precisely where philosophers should be. Creativity based upon observations is where philosophy should be and exploring.
Consciousness, in this framework, would be one and the same as the physical body as is quanta. It extends though outside of the brain. Athletes and artists refer to this as body or muscle memory. Science is beginning to explore this idea:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/01/070123143605.htm
No, it doesn't, not in by serious physicists.
No, it wouldn't, since the physical body is comprised of mass and energy, consciousness is a concept like the soul. And body memory is a medically recognized physical dynamic; consciousness isn't. And "science" is beginning to explore the existence of alien abductions; it doesn't make it valid.
If you want to disagree, don't talk about "our conscious". I'm not attributing any quality whatsoever to it beyond that it has contents which are generally called 'experience'.
What I am doing is turning the question around, and asking what makes someone think that they are not already incarnated in every living being, and suggesting that it is merely the limitation of the senses. Because I don't feel your joy and pain, I tend to think we are separate. It seems a short-sighted notion.
Your characterization of who and what isn't a serious physicist is parenthetical to the discussion.
Quoting Thanatos Sand
The to are one and the same, and there is evidence that thinking goes on outside the brain.
I talked about "our conscious" because you said "our conscious."
Fine, you can do that as much as you like, just like people can ask what makes someone think God isn't in all of us. But those are both metaphysical notions with no foundation in the physical world. Thinking they do is a short-sighted notion.
Since you brought up quantum theory, my correct characterization of what is a serous physicist is completely germane to the discussion.
The two are certainly not one and the same and you haven't shown they are in any way. And there is no evidence 'thinking" as we know it goes outside the brain, but feel free to share it if you believe you have some.
That you feel that you are in a such a position to make such characterizations speaks for itself.
No, that you feel I, or any other educated person, isn't in a position to say physicists seriously studying metaphysics aren't serious physicists speaks for itself...and it doesn't speak well for you.
I use the term 'our conscious' because my thesis is that conscious is unitary and shared. You claim to disagree, and therefore you should talk about your conscious or my conscious and not a shared conscious.
Quoting Thanatos Sand
Conscious is a metaphysical notion? That's just silly.
Wrong. I was addressing your concept, so I correctly used your term when addressing it.
No, thinking it isn't a metaphysical notion is just silly.
I see now you are just trolling, Rich, so I won't read or respond to any more of your posts on this thread.
No problem, though I did find your autobiographical description of yourself quite interesting.
We are of one mind. ;)
Is every living body conscious of itself?
It feels sensible to think contents would always be different from being to being (varying memories and experiences). In step with your analogy, I don't see how we can possibly conclude that containers are all the same. If all living beings had the same container how could there be varying levels of consciousness?
And emptiness is everywhere the same, and so the same emptiness is incarnated in every conscious being.
You're positing some metaphysical substance called "Consciousness", which is some kind of a container, which contains experience.
Do you see the roundabout artificiality of that?
Animals respond to their surroundings.
What we call "experience" is the perceptions of that animal (including ourselves). "Experience" and "perceptions" are a way of referring to the point-of-view of the animal when it responds to its surroundings.
From the external, objective point of view, there's just that animal, a device that responds to its surroundings, in a manner resulting from natural selection.
Typical Eliminative Physicalists say that's all there is. They speak of "experience" as being fictitious notion. ...as they are, from the objective, external point-of-view.
They're right, as far as they go. From an objective, external point of view...from the point of view of a white-smocked lab-person watching a rat and taking notes.
Yes, from his/her point of view, there is no rat's point of view. Of course.
But the objective, external point of view isn't the only one that can be spoken of. In fact, no one particular point of view can claim to be the only valid one.
It's possible to speak of the animal's point of view. Since you're an animal, that point of view is the one that's most obvious and relevant to you. And--Dare I say it?--your own point of view is every bit as valid as that of an Eliminative Physicalist who is observing you and taking notes.
And that experience that is your point of view is your life-experience possibilily-story. I call it a possibility-story, because (as I've explained at length) there's no reason to believe that your life-experience story is other than a hypothetical system of inter-referring hypotheticals, as I've described and justified in more detail elsewhere.
I've told why that hypothetical system of inter-referrng hypotheticals couldn't have not been (as a system of inter-referring hypotheticals).
To save space, I won't go into all the details here. I've recently posted them elsewhere at these forums, and will paste them to this topic if requested.
Why is there your life?
Among the infinity of hypothetical life-experience possibility-stories, your life-experience story is one of those.
There are infinitely-many, and they're all "there". They include yours. Tautology? Sure. Then maybe just say that there's your life possibility-story because your life story is self-consistent and therefore possible.
Now, is that system of hypotheticals somehow not going to be there just because your body eventually shuts down?
Yes, at the end of your life, you aren't exactly the same person you were earlier in your life. Certainly not the same person that you were at the beginning of this life. But, if you're still someone about whom there could be a life-experience possibility-story, then there still is a life-experience possibility-story about you.
1) So, as your body shuts down, there's what remains of you. There's of course a time during that shutdown when you don't remember any details of your life. But there could be deeper, less detailed, impressions, feelings, attitudes general inclinations. Vedanta calls them your "Vasanas". They're what remains of you at a fairly deep stage of body shutdown.
2) I've spoken of a farther-advanced stage of shutdown, in which there's no identity, and you don't know that there ever were identity, time, events, problems, concerns, incompleteness, etc.
The body will eventually shut down, of course, but, in stage2), that, by the time the body shuts down, you don't know that there ever was such a thing as a body, a life, time, events, cares, incompleteness, etc. All you know is Timeless absence of identity, events, cares and incompleteness.
But the stage that I referred to in the paragraph before last, and labeled with the number 1) is before the stage in the next paragraph, labeled with 2). In stage 2) there are no Vasanas..
Well, in stage1), the Vasanas are all that remains, and there's a hypothetical life-experience possibility-story about someone with those impressions, feelings, attitudes, and general inclinations.
That's you.
Your life impressions, feelings, attitudes, and general inclinations don't suit you for stage 2). Due to Vasanas, you aren't stage 2) material.
Sure, the body will eventually shut down. But, among the infinity of life-experience possibility-stories, there's one about the person described by your Vasanas. That's uncontroversial.
What more argument is needed?
Are there really people without Vasanas? H have no way of knowing that. My only information about that is 2nd-hand. It's said that eventually a person reaches such a character. But, if so, there wouldn't be many people around you who are like that. We have it from the teachers of a millennia-long tradition in India that there are a few such people, and that every one of us will get there after sufficiently-many lives.
Someone could argue the opposite, and claim that everyone goes to stage 2) not having died and remembered it, I don't claim to be in a position to say. But, above, I said, "What more argument is needed?"
Is the person in that other possibility-story different from you? Well, it's a story about you, as you are at that time. What do you expect to experience at that time? At that stage, you don't remember life-particulars, such as the detail that you're dying.
In dreams, you don't remember particulars about your life.
As someone earlier quoted Shakespeare's Hamlet, in these forums:
"To sleep, perchance to dream."
Michael Ossipoff
There's no evidence for that. By every indication, you're a particular person. Period.
Michael Ossipoff
But yes, admittedly you and all the other life-forms have much in common, and, of course, are identical at core, ...are all brothers, to say the least.
I just feel that Advaita makes an extra unsupported assumption, when it denies the obvious fact that you're a particular person.
I'm a Vedantist, but not an Advaitist.
I claim that Skepticism qualifies as a version of Vedanta, because it shared with Vedanta, the general aspects, conclusions, and consequences.
Michael Ossipoff
There cannot possibly be a point of view from which there is no point of view. Not even solipsists are that radical. And while views differ, points are all the same.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff No evidence for what? There is evidence that I don't feel your pain, and that my senses are limited.What there is no evidence of is that there is some other separation.
That's very cool. Thinking.
Have you been reading Hegel?
I come to this thread a little late. I have not read all of it so there is some danger that I might repeat what others have already said.
First get clear about what it is that makes you a person at all. 'Incarnation' means something like 'into the flesh'; the implication is that 'something non-fleshly' is moving into the flesh. Does personhood consist in fleshhood? Or is it that which moves?
One contemporary analogy would be that persons instantiate information. So 'the flesh' is roughly equivalent to the silicon, metal, etc, and the mind roughly equivalent to the software.
Actually if you're familiar with the basics of networking, there is a model called the Protocol Stack which governs how information is translated across networks:
The 'physical layer' corresponds with everything up to and including genetic information, but there's also a 'data layer' which (somehow) corresponds to mind.
That also ties in with biosemiotics etc.
Wouldn't take it literally but it is, as I say, a possible analogy.
Thanks, interesting, but I can't make much sense of the OSI Model, though.
Can information be quantized? My tendency is to think that what makes a person cannot be quantized. I can also see how the information analogy kind of works, though.
How do you think computers work?
But as you well know, I am not a materialist, and I don't think the human mind is a kind of computer. Where the analogy is suggestive is the distinction between the 'physical layers' (cables, processors, and the like) and the 'application layer'. So in this analogy, mind, ideas, mental attributes, and personality types correspond to the application and presentation layers above. The 'transport layer' might be culture, language, the 'physical' layer would be exactly that - bodies and genes. But genes (for instance) don't work until they're switched on by environmental cues etc.
Sorry, I didn't make it clear enough that it was a rhetorical question.
I think the point for me about the limitations of an analogy like this is that all the layers are quantizable; whereas with persons there is much that is not.
To the the extent that everything is in quantum system state, then yes, everything is quantized. If memory is self, then yes self/memory can be preserved.
What leads you to say that? You asked how you could be the same person as Napoleon. So why would thinking about what it means to be a person in the first place not be on-topic?
But why should we think that self is memory, rather than being that which remembers?
What makes you believe that the perceiver, as opposed to merely its faculties, can be perceived?
It seems to me that defining the self as memory amounts to a very impoverished conception. Memory is a function, so such a definition would seem to be a functionalist, or at best a quasi-functionalist. idea
Of course memory is flawed; that's why people misremember things as much, if not more, as they accurately remember them. That is flawed. And no, it is not where each of us is; its' where the person where the memory is. And the fact things evolve doesnt' take away from their being flawed; in fact, being flawed is usually a main reason for that evolution.
Sorry, none of this changes the fact that memory is flawed as I showed above.
People can both read books and experience life. I'm sorry you never realized that. And your argument that artists and musicians express philosophy with greater depth is both unfounded and is itself philosophy. Ironic.
And its still flawed because it misrepresents both internal and external experiences. And it is not representative of a persons experiences since a person forgets more than they remember. You really need to go look up the word "flawed." You don't really understand it.
No, flawed is the correct use of the definition of the word and the correct description of human memory. Just ask someone who was convicted by flawed testimony based on flawed memory. Again, you need to look up that word.
Uh....huh. And many, if not most, things--including memory--are still flawed. But I forget you don't understand the word.
"flawed
[flôd]
ADJECTIVE
blemished, damaged, or imperfect in some way"
And now that you are actually claiming you are perfect, the sign of a disturbed person, I am truly out of here. Ciao.
Assuming for the sake of charitability that this is an accurate account, all it could be taken to truthfully recount is that 'when you closely observe yourself, all there will (seem) to be is memory'. Why do you assume that it is the same for others?
I don't see how we can separate consciousness from the physical.
OK, well I meditated for many years and practiced Tai Chi for many years also, and have tried to "know myself" through general self-awareness in all my activities and particularly in creative activities such as writing, painting and playing music for more than forty years, and I have not found what you claim to have found about the self at all.
If "symbolic expressions" are "inadequate and possibly misleading" then why not just accept that the self is an unfathomable mystery? I think that would be a fair acknowledgement of the limitations of discursive rationality,
Why should we restrict something as all-encompassing as the self to some determinate model or other; whether the model is "holographic", based on memory, or whatever?
I don't see how we can coherently conjoin them.
You yourself, is a perfect example of how it's done.
Ok. What did you discover about yourself in any it all of the activities? My b discoveries are very clear, unified, and indivisible among all of my activities which included Tai Chi, various sports, piano, drawing and painting, dancing and writing. All share exactly the same fundamental experience.
That begs the question.
I discovered that the self is ineffable, cannot be captured in any model and is best discovered and expressed through evocation in poetry. music, painting, other arts and disciplines, love, faith and indeed in everyday life.
Claudio Arrau discovered precisely the same feeling that I did about the nature and expression of the soul.
https://youtu.be/xMG247zUzB0
It could be question begging within a specific and in my opinion, incorrect framework. It's more an example of ostensively defining it. When has there ever been a real example of consciousness that wasnt dependent upon a physical process to manifest? And, when has there ever been an instance of 'self' without consciousness?
The traditional method is to upload your consciousness to a computer. But I wouldn't recommend it personally. I don't see how we can separate you from me.
If you look, I have said nothing about the physical or its separation from consciousness; I have been considering identity. But for the ardent physicalist, let's say that software is substrate independent; there is always a medium, of polarisations on magnetic tape, or laser burns in a plastic disc, or residual charges on a silicon chip, or patterns of neural connectedness. But the patterned structure and internal relations and transformations are something different from a few pounds of grey meat. To put is crudely one can separate consciousness from the physical with one well placed bullet. Disrupt the structure, and the person becomes a corpse. Therefore the person is not the body, but the structure and process.
Perhaps these differ not in being different digestions, but only in what is being digested.
There is only one digestion, manifest in different stomachs.
I just meant that the points of view are mutually exclusive.
From what I remember of what Eliminative Physicalists say, it's canonical that the valid point of view is the objective, 3rd-person point of view, and animals' experience is fictitious "folk-psychology".
And I was just saying that that view isn't justified, making canonical a point of view that isn't anyone's point of view.
I'd also said:
You replied:
But the fact that you don't perceive from my point of view, or that of anyone or anything else, is, itself, evidence that you're one individual, one person, one body.
First of all, forgive my manner of expression. I'd just been previously replying to Thanatos :)
Every indication from your experience is that you're the person, the body, and nothing more.
One person, one body.
I don't harm any living-thing, if I can help it, because I recognnize all living things as being like eachother. ...and, as I said, identical at core. But the fact remains that we're each one individual body, and there's no evidence or indication otherwise.
I take it that you're an Advaitist. I have two arguments for Skepticism, vs Advaita:
1. As I emphasized above, there's no indication or evidence that you're more than one body.
2. Why is there the one consciousness that Advaita posits?
Michael Ossipoff
Then it's rubbish. We know there are animals, and there is plenty of evidence that they have a point of view - their eyes for example, but there is no evidence that there is a third person view, and there cannot ever be evidence even in principle. That is the fiction.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
It is very common to think so, but I question it. There is no end of stuff I don't perceive about my own body, how it heals a cut for instance, or my own fingerprints and DNA. Is this evidence that it is not my body after all? I think it is incontrovertible that there is much more to a person than they can perceive or know, and therefore lack of perception is not evidence of non-identity.
I'd like to further clarify my suggestion about how reincarnation is consistent with Skepticism.
At the stage of body-shutdown that I called "stage 1)", the person doesn't remember hir most recent life, or remember that s/he is dying, but s/he still feels identity, and possesses the Vasanas that I referred to.
I spoke of Vasanas, which include feelings, impressions, inclinations, subconscious attributes, etc.
One of those feelings or inclinations is our natural orientation towards the future, something that we anticipate, or intend to do.
Therefore, because the person doesn't know that s/he's dying, and because of our natural orientation towards the future, with feelings such as anticipation and intention, ...
...and because there is a life-experience story that starts out exactly where you are at that point, then isn't it plausible to suggest that, at that point, given your future-orientation, you're at the beginning of a life?
If someone objects, "Isn't that a bit of a reach?", I'd answer, "Why are you in your life in the first place?"
That's simply because there is a life-experience possibility-story that has you as Protagonist.
So the origin of, and reason for this life is something as aethereal and nonphysical as the fact that there's that hypothetical life-experience possibility-story.
That remains so in the above-described situation too.
The reason why you're in this life now will still be a reason later too.
Yes, if Physicalism is true, there's no reincarnation. But I the Principle of Parsimony suggests that Pysicalism isn't true.
Michael Ossipoff
Of course.
Quite so.
I'd said:
But, until the cut heals, it hurts if you disturb it. And, if the cut gets infected, due to neglect, then you might get sick. Those are things that you directly perceive, and even have a survival stake in.
No, you don't perceive all the details of the body, but it's still what you are.
That finger-cut is in your tissue. That's part of you.
That's qualitatively very different from matters involving other bodies.
I want to not harm an insect, not because it's me, but because living beings are so similar, nearly alike in important ways, arguably identical at core. It isn''t me, but it's my brother or sister.
Advaita's assumption that there's only one consciousness, instead of separate individuals, is just that--an unsupported assumption.
But I emphasize that, as I've said, Skepticism shares the same general aspects, conclusions and consequences as those of Advaita, and other Vedanta versions. ...qualifying it as a Vedanta version.
But it could also be said with respect to the conclusions and consequences of Buddhist metaphysics.
...except that I can't make heads nor tails about what Buddhist metaphysics is saying. But maybe that doesn't matter, if the overall conclusions and consequences are the same.
So maybe it would be better to more broadly say that Skepticism is a member of the broader category that includes the various Vedanta versions and Buddhist metaphysics (though I don't know what Buddhist metaphysics is saying).
Michael Ossipoff
Michael Ossipoff
"I don't see how we can separate you from me." I wouldn't mind hearing you give some thoughts on this if you'd like.
"That patterned structure and internal relations and transformations", are dependent on and what a few pounds of grey meat can do.
The bullet example clearly shows consciousness no longer exists in any sort of way we recognize it once you disrupt the precise make up of the physical substance. Granted humans don't "recognize" everything in this world but we have nothing but religion and unfounded meta-physical theories when it comes to a concept of consciousness standing alone with no substrate.
The person is necessarily both the body and the structure and process.
I agree: well not 'necessarily', but as far as we know.
Are you saying you feel differently about your cut finger? Probably not. It can happen that one cuts a finger and yet doesn't feel it, at least not immediately. Do you want to say it is qualitatively different, and in some way the same as if it was an other body?
This is what we do; we identify ourselves with the limits of our sensations. Whatever I can feel the hurt of or the pleasure of is me, and if there are hurts and pleasures that I don't feel, that is another. It's strongly intuitive, and it's the way we go on. So I'm not surprised that there is resistance to my questioning this intuition. But I am trying to show, with a closer look, that it is a bit arbitrary.
Different from if it's someone else's finger? Sure. And that doesn't conflict with my disagreement with harming anyone.
Sure, but it's still a cause of immediate personal concern, and will hurt later if it gets infected. ...and could result in dangerous illness. ...things that will involve direct perception by the person whose finger it is.
I'd say that it's qualitatively different, but similar, and still important. Injury to anyone should be undesirable to everyone.
Literally identifying ourselves with other bodies--saying that they're literally "Me", would be a tremendous leap-of-faith, unsupported by any indications from our experience.
Yes, sometimes I don't feel a cut till later, but I never directly sensorally feel a cut on someone on the other side of the world (though I don't want them to be harmed).
...and strongly obvious. It's intuitive because it agrees with our actual experience.
What you're proposing is a theory.
Yes, Advaita says it. I don't mean any criticism of Advaita. As I said, Skepticism agrees with Advaita in general aspects, conclusions and consequences.
But it's reasonable to compare theories according to how well they accord with experience.
Michael Ossipoff
Basically, you're re-defining the word "Me".
Michael Ossipoff
You didn't say whose explanation of what you're referring to. Why not at least "mention" whom you're replying to, by clicking "reply" at the bottom of the post to which you're replying.
But, in case you were speaking to me, I'd answer, "Would you rather that I give you the explanation that I consider the worst one"" :)
Michael Ossipoff
Well I hope I am doing something more than just playing with words. Suppose, imagine, that I have convinced you, that quite literally, another's pain is your pain even though you don't feel it; that another's harm is your harm. Do you not think it would change your prioities, change your life, if your identity was actually 'everyman'?
Quoting Rich
What difference exactly are you trying to indicate? What part of the statement I made are you disagreeing with?
Of course I would agree there are patterns that 'run deep'; symmetries, broken symmetries and asymmetries everywhere. Do you believe, though, that any model really does justice to reality in a unique way that all the others do not, or is it not rather than each model (if it is a 'true' model) captures reality from a particular 'angle'?
When has there ever been a real example of a physical process that wasn't dependent upon consciousness to manifest?
As I see it physical processes and consciousness arise co-dependently. If there were physical processes prior to the arising of consciousness (which we might surmise) I would say they were unmanifest.
OK fairy nuff.
But such an assertion is made because of the presuppositions that the writer brings to the question. In other words, he depicts the issue in such a way that it would indeed be ridiculous to believe it. But this is because of a deep misunderstanding about the very nature of the idea.
Carroll says:
I can think of a straightforward answer to this question, which is that the soul is not 'made of particles'. In fact the idea that the soul is 'made of particles' is not at all characteristic of what is meant by the term 'soul'. (I also think the claim that 'the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood' is ridiculously hubristic, but I'll leave that aside.)
But I think the soul could more easily be conceived in terms of a field that acts as an organising principle - analogous to the physical and magnetic fields that were discovered during the 19th century, that were found to be fundamental to the behaviour of particles. This is not to say that the soul is a field, but that it might be much more conceivable in terms of fields than of particles.
Morphic Fields
Just as magnetic fields organise iron filings into predictable shapes, so too might a biological field effect be responsible for the general form and the persistence of particular attributes of an organism. The question is, is there any evidence of such fields?
Well, the existence of 'moprhic fields' is the brainchild of Rupert Sheldrake, the 'scientific heretic' who claims in a Scientific American interview that:
As the morphic field is capable of storing and transmitting remembered information, then 'the soul' could be conceived in such terms. The morphic field does, at the very least, provide an explanatory metaphor for such persistence. (And notice the reference to 'collective memory' which is similar in concept to the previously-mentioned 'alaya-vijnana' of Mah?y?na Buddhists.)
Children with Past-Life Memories
But what, then, is the evidence for such effects in respect to 'life after death'? As mentioned previously in this thread, a researcher by the name of Ian Stevenson assembled a considerable body of data on children with recall of previous lives. Stevenson's data collection comprised the methodical documentation of a child’s purported recollections of a previous life. Then he identified from journals, birth-and-death records, and witnesses the deceased person the child supposedly remembered, and attempted to validate the facts that matched the child’s memory. Yet another Scientific American opinion piece notes that Stevenson even matched birthmarks and birth defects on his child subjects with wounds on the remembered deceased that could be verified by medical records.
Carroll, again
Carroll goes on in his piece to say that 'Everything we know about quantum field theory (QFT) says that there aren’t any sensible answers to these questions (about the persistence of consciousness)'. However, that springs from his starting assumption that 'the soul' must be something physical, which, again, arises from the presumption that everything is physical, or reducible to physics. In other words, it is directly entailed by his belief in the exhaustiveness of physics with respect to the description of what is real.
He then says 'Believing in life after death, to put it mildly, requires physics beyond the Standard Model. Most importantly, we need some way for that "new physics" to interact with the atoms that we do have.'
However, even in ordinary accounts of 'mind-body' medicine, it is clear that mind can have physical consequences and effects on the body. This is the case with, for example, psychosomatic medicine and the placebo effect, but there are many other examples.
He finishes by observing:
But that is not what 'most people have in mind'. That is what physicalists have in mind - because that is how physicalists think. If you start from the understanding that 'everything is physical', then this will indeed dictate the way you think about such questions. And it is indeed the case that there is no such 'blob' as Carroll imagines. But that is not what 'soul' is; but what it is, is something that can't be understood, given the presuppositions you're starting from.
Regarding my explanation of reincarnation, in terms of it being consistent with Skepticism, someone could object,
"I don't know--that transition from one life to another just sounds a bit magical."
Sure, if you believe in Physicalism.
But sure, maybe it still sounds magical, and counter to the kinds of things that we expect to observe.
But we didn't observe it.
You didn't notice it happening, because it happened when you were too far-gone to know that you'd just left a life.
And, then, in the new life, who can say about that?
When that happens, it will be unobserved and will later remain inaccessible, behind the same veil that masks the beginning of this life.
Whatever your beliefs, this life began when you didn't know it. ...didn't know what was happening. That origin and beginning were unobserved.
Ask yourself: wasn't the origin and beginning of this life unobserved, and isn't it inaccessible?
Fantastic? What do you think this life is?
Michael Ossipoff
So, skepticism, which demands verification and/or demonstration would not accept reincarnation.
But maybe some disagreements aren't really substantive, but are really only differences in wording.
That can eliminate some philosophical disagreements.
I've felt that really Skepticism and Advaita differ only in wording. Their conclusions and consequences are the same. So, they're just different descriptions leading to the same conclusions.
Advaita was first written about millennia ago, when maybe people said things differently, in different terms, in terms of different premises and traditions.
...maybe in terms of an earlier tradition.
So I don't feel that there's a substantive disagreement between Skepticism and Advaita.
Sure. Though I already want to not harm other living things, it's conceivable that if I knew what you're saying, for a fact, I'd be in a better position to convert my household to complete vegetarianism.
But, though I don't believe that we're all the same "I", I still don't want to harm other living things, and so the only change, if I were convinced of what you're saying would be that I'd have a stronger argument for vegetarianism...an argument easier to justify to everyone.
...assuming that I could convince others to it as well. It wouldn't help if I couldn't.
And of course that would apply to human-affairs too, all the depredations that are in the news.
But, in those human-affairs matters, and in every matter other than our household's lack of all-the-time vegetarianism, it wouldn't change me one bit, because I already don' t want anyone or anything harmed.
Michael Ossipoff
I often felt so, but it's a bit of a pat explanation. But young Joey Alexander, an Indonesian child, burst onto the world jazz scene back in 2015.
When asked, he said God gave him this gift. But it's really like he came into the world with a lot of practice behind him.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Similarities between Pyrrho and Buddhism have been noted by scholars, but I'm not aware of such a comparison being made in respect of Advaita.
My martial arts teacher, to was quite a materialist, once mumbled to me that his skills are from past lives. I was really shocked at the time.
The evidence is staring at us right in our faces. We have memory in one physical life and it appears to persist as a field.
But there is no having without the had. They create one another.
Physics doesn't have bearing on metaphysics
...unless it does in some special case, as described by that author on quantum-mechanics, who said that quantum-mechanics lays to rest the notion of an independently existing objective physical world. But I don't believe that Physicalism needs that to lay it to rest. It's already laid to rest by its own unparsimony.
If you want to say that you have an instance of physics having authority in metaphysics, then give a convincing justification.
And haven't you lately been the great science-hater? But i guess a troll can be whatever he wants, and say and believe contrary things in different conversations, because it's just a devil's-advocate game.
So now you've changed from a science-hater to a science-worshipper :D
...and of course a Physicalist.
In terms of your Physicalism, you couldn't accept anything that I'm saying. You've heard what I've said about Physicalism. If you're still a Physicalist and a Science-Worshipper, then we have nothing to talk about.
...because our conversation was about the validity of Physicalism. If we don't agree on that, then we can hardly discuss tthe conclusions and consequences of a different metaphysics.
So that's your pronouncement
Well, then that settles the matter, doesn't it. :D
Nonsense. We aren't (or shouldn't) be only expressing beliefs at these forums. But of course I can't speak for you. :)
A different topic.
So you're an evolution-denying, science-hating, science-worshipping Atheist. :D
Neither I nor you know what God it is that you disbelieve-in...something that, I admit, is entirely your business.
This is typical of Thanatos' "arguments". He's prolific with his expressions of strong opinion, which he never justifies. "That's just blather (or gibberish, or as in-valid as belief in the Easter-Bunny...etc, etc.)".
Repeated pseudo-angry characterizations of what he (says that he) disagrees with, with never a justification. ,,,often or usually accompanied by a claim that none is needed.
Or sometimes replying to things that weren't said.
I said "pseudo-angry", because of course a troll isn't really angry when he goes on the attack. It's just part of his fulfillment of a psychological need that he has.
Call it "angry-noises", with the understanding that "angry" means "pseudo-angry".
These are some of the typical standard habits of the typical troll..
I inititally said that I wasn't going to answer this particular one. But then I felt that every argument, objection or question deserves an answer on its own merits, no matter who it's from.
But that policy doesn't really work well, because it encourages the troll to post replies to me, if I've been answering them, and then take the trouble to judge just when he's crossed the troll-line.
I don't want to encourage him in that way, and I don't want to take the trouble to read and evaluate each of his posts. To bother with that would give him respect that he isn't entitled to.
So I'm going to go back to my policy of not replying to anyone who has demonstrated himself to be a troll.
If a confirmed troll were to say something qualifying for an answer (an unlikely occurrence), that would just be too bad. He had his chance. If it's a valid criticism, objection, comment or question, then someone else can post it themself.
So, I'm going to, again, post this troll-non-reply statement (it will be standard in these instances):
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I won't be replying to "Thanatos Sand" again. My not replying to him doesn't mean that he's said something irrefutable. It's only because he's demonstrated that he doesn't deserve a reply.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Ossipoff
It is the most original piece of thinking I've seen here so far, although there has been some fine exegesis on Indian Philosophy.
You're right. That's why you're absolutely wrong when you say the realities of our physical world supports the existence of reincarnation. They don't.
And then you start with the (erroneous) name-calling while failing to address my argument in any way. Considering you can't counter it in any way, that's not surprising.
So, the only one who has demonstrated himself to be a typical troll is you. So, I won't read or respond to any more of your trolling on this thread.
+1
I've been pretty much ignoring him. He doesn't add to the quality of the discussion.
So they don't have different languages and customs? :)
In any case, you didn't say why or how that would be relevant, even if true. ...because, of course, it isn't.
I've answered more posts from Rich than any notion of politeness or fairness could obligate me to answer.
All of his comments that I've answered have been things so silly that they don't need, deserve or call for a reply.
So, in keeping with the policy that I stated, a few messages ago:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I won't reply to Rich again, because he's demonstrated that he doesn't deserve a reply.
When I don't reply to Rich, that doesn't mean that he's said something irrefutable. ...only that his posts don't deserve a reply, and i don't have time to waste in that manner.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Ossipoff
A wave function collapses, not when it is observed, so much as when it makes a difference.
It makes a difference when it is observed, so the reason for the confusion is clear.
But consciousness is not what collapses wave functions.
You will notice I actually removed the sarcastic remark I made, and replaced it with another. But the point of the remark was that you're glossing over a lot of very significant differences. Also that I have yet to see any indication that you really understand or argue from the perspective of scepticism.
Collapsing wave functions are an artifact of the original Schrodinger equations. It survived for a couple of days decades (desire De Broglie's real model) because Van Neumann, the god of mathematics, proclaimed that a real model of the equations could not be derived. Enter Bohm who derived a real model version and collapse is now banished and Bohm gets a Nobel prize for doing the impossible. Well, not quite. Scientists insist on the old equation because they are easier to use and Bohm is more or less forgotten.
Physics is written in the third person, not the first person.
I beg to offer a counterexample:
I believe this is written in the third person. Am I wrong?
I defined Skepticism as the name of the metaphysics that I propose, and I explicitly clarified that it isn't the Greek philosophy called Skepticism. No similarity, derivastion, or other relation is claimed, between my Skepticism and Greek Skepticism.
Michael Ossipoff
What Banno said.
Forgive for believing that rejection and avoidance of assumptions and brute-facts is skeptical :D
That's why I named my metaphysical proposal "Skepticism".
As I've already said several times, by naming my metaphysical proposal Skepticism, I make no claim for any similarity, derivation, or other relation between it and Greek Skepticism.
Michael Ossipoff
John grew up in Canada, but moved to England. The atoms of his body that he started with were replaced by English atoms.
But he was still the same person.
John might have been elected Prime Minister. He might have won the lottery. But he didn't.
It was the same person who might have done these things.
John was in an accident, and lost his memory.
It was John who lost his memory. He was the same person.
John changed his name to Fred.
He was the same person.
Nothing about John remained the same for the duration of his life.
Funny thing is, for all that he was the same person.
When I coin a usage or a term, or anyone coins a usage or a term,, it means, in the coiner's usage, what the word's coiner chooses it to mean--neither more nor less.
Coining a usage or term starts with stating the definition with which you will be using it--As I did, when I named my metaphysical proposal "Skepticism".
It's hardly unusual, improper or inappropriate to give a name to a proposal. ...by which to refer to it.
I'll repeat what I said to Wayfarer:
Forgive me for believing that the rejection and avoidance of assumptions and brute-facts is skeptical.
That skepticism is what distinguishes the metaphysics I call "Skepticism" from most other metaphysicses. Hence its name.
Michael Ossipoff.
I'll just add that posting "arguments" (either very sloppy, or insincere) like the ones that I've just replied to wastes your time and mine (if I reply).
As I've said elsewhere, i naively expect people to mean what they say, and say only what they can defend.
It really only makes sense to reply to people who post seriously-intendeed valid objections, arguments or questions,.
Sorry, I don't have time to reply to more postings from someone who habitually hasn't met those requirements.
Bye.
(It's just that today I noticed that I was wasting a tremendous amount of time replying to such things.)
Michael Ossipoff
That was rather the point of my mentioning Humpty.
I've just gone back over your last half-dozen posts on this thread without being able to understand what you were getting at. Were you defending reincarnation? How did that fit with scepticism?
Now I guess I will never know.
Except when you take some recognizable terminology and use it in an entirely idiosyncratic way, which makes you a self-appointed expert in a school which has a single member.
Then I'll refer you to my reply to Banno.
Maybe you qualify for the benefit of the doubt--in case you really thought that I was referring to Greek Skepticism (though I'd already clarified otherwise). But now you're also trying to imply that it was somehow wrong, inappropriaate, or something, to use "Skepticism" as the name for a metaphysics that uses no assumptions or brute-facts..
I welcome and reply to posters who post seriously-intended criticisms of, objections to, or questions about Skepticism.
.
Michael Ossipoff
We know from Kripke and friends that essences are logical rubbish.
So it is reasonable to reject the idea that it is an essence or soul that is reincarnated. Hence one can reject
shows a way of doing reincarnation without essences, but at the cost of not reincarnating the self. That should work.
I don't see reason to pay attention to mumbled quantum mechanics. Without the mathematics, it becomes very dubious.
is at least working with the notion of identity, but in a way that is different and a bit odd.
Philosophy is about putting together clues imagining patterns in differences and patterns. There are lots of patterns that can be discerned from Bohm's quantum potential.
Dean, to the physics department. "Why do I always have to give you guys so much money, for laboratories and expensive equipment and stuff. Why couldn't you be like the math department - all they need is money for pencils, paper and waste-paper baskets. Or even better, like the philosophy department. All they need are pencils and paper."
This video got 2 million views, which I find rather bewildering.
Memory has very specific locations where it exists primarily as energy: "Short term memory is found in the frontal lobes and the parietal lobes of the brain. The hippocampus is necessary in forming long term memory but not in the storage of it."
Speaking of the quantum potential:
" ... it was later elaborated upon by Bohm and Basil Hiley in its interpretation as an information potential which acts on a quantum particle."
What real field? I'm sorry, but Daoists dont' take precedence over neurologists in matters of memory.. And there are things in the brain, like the frontal lobes, parietal lobes and the hippocampus. And that's where the neurologists say memory lies. You are, of course, free to go against science and say they're wrong.
Yeah, I bet you do.
It sure is written in the third person, but I suspect it is Einstein's view. Scientists have this really silly habit of talking in a third person voice. "The test tube was dropped on the floor" rather than "I dropped the test tube." It don't fool me. Not like you to take a grammatical construction for reality. There is a third person voice, but there is no third person. Self, other, invisible friend?
I think you are underestimating the effect of identification. According to 'common sense' notions of identity, I take precautions and plan for a future self, that is necessarily absent from experience. I buy food for the imagined unenlightened's breakfast tomorrow, because I identify with him - 'I will be him'. I don't take the same precautions for the homeless guy on the street, because I will not be him.
Or, if I 'know' that I am eating my own corpse, there is no need for any argument about vegetarianism.
Social morality dissolves into common prudence, one doesn't want to shoot oneself, let oneself starve, belittle oneself on philosophy forums and so on. If one come across oneself in the sad condition of not knowing that I am the other, which is the case almost everywhere at the moment, then one will see how I am hurting myself in that condition and try to help myself see more clearly. What appears to the one in that condition of limited identity as great kindness and nobility, is actually common prudence to the other, who loves his neighbour as himself.
I've read your posts through this thread, and while I find your position interesting, I think it's suffering of at least one deficiency that I myself perceive. You create a division between "the fact of consciousness" and the "contents of consciousness", but I think no such distinction can be drawn in the first place. How can consciousness be conceived to exist without the attendant intentionality - or better said directionality - towards particular contents? If so, then it would seem that consciousness cannot be conceived without reference to the constituents of consciousness. One is always conscious of something, one cannot simply be conscious. It seems to me that quite the contrary, consciousness is individual, and not collective and shared. Consciousness is also impermanent. It disappears while you sleep for example.
Quoting unenlightened
What if the contents and the container are one consciousness together?
There's a sense in which they are the same, and a sense in which they are not. It is a question of identification. So I read your post, and I am conscious of your post, but I am not your post. One could say that my consciousness is 'of your post', but that 'of' is doing more work than it can really cope with.
My consciousness is filled with any number of fleeting things from moment to moment, but I do not think of myself, or behave as if, I am a fleeting thing. Rather, I identify as some sort of thread (to use another image from container for a moment), on which these fleeting impressions and pearls of speculative wisdom are strung. And, as I mentioned, I see this thread projecting into the future, and make an identification with tomorrow's unenlightened wanting his breakfast that is strong enough to propel me to the shop for eggs and coffee. Somehow, that seems entirely natural, but the identification with another's morning hunger is not. Yet they are equally inaccessible to me in fact, though not in
imagination.
So to answer your question directly, if the contents and the container are one consciousness, then I am not the same person who started writing this reply, and the person who reads it will not be the Agustino of yore. And that is just as unbelievable as that we are one.
But what if we are not our consciousness to begin with? That is really my entire point, that consciousness too is impermanent, and thus, as Buddhists would say, anicca - impermanent, and anatta - empty of self. That's why in Buddhism consciousness is taken to be one of the Five Skandhas - which cease to exist in Nirvana.
So yes, effectively my consciousness of today, is not my consciousness of yesterday. So consciousness is not "me". Rather consciousness is something that I have - or I don't have (when I sleep for example). That's why your consciousness reincarnates in other people, but your real self doesn't. (Buddhists would say the Five Skandhas reincarnate).
Quoting unenlightened
But would you not say that your consciousness is as fleeting as those things with which it is filled?
Quoting unenlightened
I can agree with this. To me it seems that you are that which is conscious of X or Y (or perhaps better said, that which HAS consciousness of X). But consciousness isn't the self.
There is however a rebirth of the "self" people typically mis-associate with (thoughts, desires, tendencies, consciousness etc.). But these things are actually anatta - empty of self.
Quoting Agustino
I'm not sure what you are pointing to here. Not body, not consciousness, not memory, but...?
Well if you could point to it, it would no longer be the self, but rather an object or property in the world, wouldn't you think so? In Kantian terms, the self would be a condition for the very possibility of the world. One reason why it leads into antinomy - the self can never be captured, for who would be there to capture the self? Whatsoever you can "see" cannot be the self, for then who is the one seeing it?
Take consciousness. If consciousness is the self, then who is the one who is conscious?
I said the self cannot be reborn, because the self is never born, for whatsoever is born must die. And we've already established that when we're looking for the self, we're looking for something permanent. That is why Buddha stopped at anatta - no-self. The meaning, in my eyes, is that this world, with everything in it, is impermanent, and hence cannot be self.
In Christian terms, the self is the soul, which is God's breath. Genesis 2:7 :
So that's as far as Buddhism goes. This real self, which is light compared to the world, but darkness compared to God - for it is solely an image of God, His Breath - but not the essence of God.
Or you can have a look at this book.
I think it gets confusing when consciousness is thought of as some object that can be made mobile.
Consciousness is better thought of as ongoing, never-ending, continuous processes existing in duration. There are hierarchies of consciousness (which Sheldrake calls morphic resonance fields) that define who we are moving from the individual (a field of memory) through family, race, species, life fields etc., all of which are in a continuous process of learning and changing that flow into each other.
These intelligent processes just continue through duration. There appears to be a wave-like, cyclical nature moving of processes that move from rest-from-learning-and-creating (sleep/death) and creating/learning (awake/alive) of this process.
Have we? I don't remember establishing that. If reincarnation, then something survives death. But you don't mean that, because:
Quoting Agustino
Then It seems to have no connection to me, because I was born, Mummy told me.
To be honest, talk of the LORD God seems out of place here. It's philosophy, not revealed religion. It's a question of identity, a matter of examining one's life, and the answers from books are just theories about someone else's notion of their identity.
Quoting Rich
I agree. Let's not do it, then. Though I consciously went to Manchester the other day, on the train.
Quoting Rich
That's fine; if that's who you imagine yourself to be, I won't argue. How does this identity manifest itself in your life?
I would say it manifests as a continuous sense of creative exploration and experimentation that is always learning and evolving in an unpredictable manner. At times it rests (sleep without dreams) and at times it is active making choices of direction of exploration. There seems to be a continuum without boundaries between the observer/memories and that which is exploring and being observed. It is all happening in duration.
Yes, your atoms, thoughts, desires, etc. re-incarnate - they "survive" your death. But not you (you are beyond the need to "survive").
Quoting unenlightened
Yes, in a common sense of speaking, since that's what people mis-identify the self to be.
Quoting unenlightened
So philosophy cannot involve revealed religion? What if philosophy itself points towards, or rather necessitates, revelation? Plato certainly thought so for society cannot be governed without the philosopher king, nor can there be a philosopher king who did not have the mystical vision of Agathon - to whom Agathon hasn't revealed itself.
So absolutely, by all means by looking at my life, I can see that I am not my consciousness, not my body, not my mind, not my thoughts, not my desires. I am not my consciousness because my consciousness can be taken away from me, and yet, I would not cease to be who I am. I am still myself while I'm asleep for example.
I'll stop here, as I have no idea what you are on about, but it is nothing to do with what I have been saying, and nothing that I can see to do with the topic of reincarnation.
Alright,it's true that the consequences of people believing that everyone is the same "Me" would be a tremendously better societal world. ...quite unrecognizably better.
But, as a practical matter, people have a better chance of behaving well because they start having a standard for their conduct..
Of course it will never happen.
And yes, if it were obvious to everyone that non-vegetarianism were self-cannibalism, instead of just cannibalism, there wouldn't be any need to argue for vegetarianism.
.
But, for me, the similarity and close relatedness is enough to make me not want to harm. .
Anyway, even if it were true, the people who behave the worst would be the least likely people to believe it
But, no matter how much better unitary-ness, and its recognition, could make the societal world, I just don't feel that our experiences give indication of it. Everything in our experience in a life can readily be fully explained as the experiences and perceptions of one body.
But as I said (setting off a big collective hissy-fit from some posters) I it seems to me that, in its conclusions and consequences, Skepticism doesn't differ from Advaita.
And I emphasize that I try to not avoidably harm other living-things.
(...though I admit that my household would probably be fully vegetarian if we were unitary and knew it.)
Michael Ossipoff
The skandhas don't reincarnate, as their nature is temporary.
It's worth recalling the original statement as to what constitutes escape from the 'wheel of life and death'. As this was presented in the EBT's, beings were doomed to continuously suffer and die until such time as they escaped from the wheel of suffering, which was an exceedingly difficult thing to do, and the chances for which exceedingly rare.
Here is a canonical statement of the 'end of suffering' in the EBT's.
— Ud 8.3
Religious studies scholars will note that the idea of 'the uncreated' or 'unborn' is also found in Patristic theology, whereby in the final stages of theosis, the disciple is said to reach union with 'the uncreated light of God'.
Interestingly, later Buddhist texts introduced the idea of the 'buddha-nature', the Tath?gatagarbha, which represents the potential or capacity for attaining Nirv??a. Though Buddhists will usually deny it, it is a very similar concept to the 'soul'.
Quoting Agustino
You will find similar polemics in diverse religions, denouncing 'new age' religions and promising to represent the 'original and pure faith', straying from which will inevitably result in hell. Doubtlessly a Buddhist equivalent could also be cited.
Yes, exactly!
I don't think it is arbitrary; it is the basis of being able to talk about "you" and 'me" in the first place.
Quoting unenlightened
I think this cannot be anything beyond "playing with words". Advaita plays with words in order to point to what lies beyond playing with words. So, according to advaita another's pain would both be your pain, and not be your pain, and would neither be your pain, nor not be your pain.
Non-dualism indicates that there is no difference in differance; not two, but not one, either. This relates to the context of thinking about reincarnation, where the reincarnated entity is both you and not you, and neither you nor not you. The same can be said about your self in the past or the future of this very life.
That's why I suggested to Banno earlier about the need to address the issue of what it means to be Banno before trying to address what it could mean for Banno to have been Napoleon.
OK, so being a bit more obvious: there is a difference between "I see the cup on the table" and "The cup is on the table".
How do you characterise that difference?
So, why not you and Napoleon, then?
Did you notice my post about John?
Isn't identity something we inflict, rather than something we discover?
I never said, or implied that a soul is an essence. I don't know where you got that idea, or even what you mean by "essence" in this context. Those are not my words at all.
What I said is that we can infer from logical demonstrations, that when there is a living body, there must be something which has that body, and this is what we call the soul. The soul has a body in the same sense that a subject has the property attributed in predication. So, where there exists a property, there must be something which has that property. And since the living body is a property, there must be something (a soul) which has that property.
I’d said:
.
.
Wayfarer says:
.
.
Forgive me the idiosyncrasy of suggesting that the rejection and avoidance of assumptions and brute-facts is skeptical :)
.
“Skepticism” is an English common-noun. We don’t have to stop using it because the Ancient Greek philosophers used it as a name.
.
I gave that name to the metaphysics that I propose, because is eminently, undeniably, completely, maybe uniquely, skeptical.
.
That name is an accurate description, and therefore an appropriately-chosen name.
.
“Skepticism” is skepticism, by that common-noun’s standard meaning.
.
…hence its name.
.
There were already more than one philosophical position using that name. I defined another. English (probably like other languages too) has many words that are used in many ways. “If you don’t like that too, that’s too bad.”
.
I’d misleading, at best, to say that I idiosyncratically used a recognized terminology. Skepticism, as I mentioned above, is a common-noun, and I used it with that common noun’s meaning.
.
The other “Skepticism” s, at least the ones that I read about, aren’t metaphysicses. My “Skepticism” is a metaphysics. I use the word “Skepticism” when discussing metaphysics. Therefore there’s no reason for Wayfarer to be confused about what I meant.
.
It has been pointed out here that “Physicalism” is used with at least 2 different meanings: Metaphysical Physicalism, and Science-of-Mind Physicalism.
.
“Hey, you can’t name your son ‘George’! There’s already someone named ‘George’. “
.
Any dictionary contains many, many words with more than one meaning. Usually a word’s listing in a dictionary will have a whole list of meanings, enumerated with numbers and letters.
.
How about this hypothetical one:
.
Skepticism:
.
1. An attitude of doubt or a disposition to incredulity, either in general, or toward a particular object.
.
2. By extension, a certain particular metaphysics that embodies skepticism as defined above.
.
[end of definition]
.
No, as a metaphysics, Skepticism isn’t in the dictionary. No newly-coined name could be. But its derivation is in keeping with standard practice.
.
Requoting:
.
.
Regarding the “expert” part:
.
Hyperbole, a common troll tactic. Did I claim expertise regarding the dictionary definition of skepticism?
.
I invite Wayfarer to look it up.
.
.
More hyperbole. At no time did I say that Skepticism is or has a “school”. It’s a metaphysics.
.
In the usage that Wayfarer referred to, “school” means:
.
A group of persons who hold a common doctrine, or follow the same teacher (as in philosophy, theology, or medicine).
.
…also, the doctrine or practice of such a group.
.
[end of definition]
.
At no time did I claim that Skepticism is or has a school.
.
Flamewarrior-hyperbole reveals something about its perpetrator’s intent, and that intent isn’t serious discussion.
.
It’s, rather, whatever flamewarriors have as their intent.
.
(but they’d know their intent better than I would).
------------------------------------------------------------
Something has recently upset Wayfarer.
.
Want to tell us about it, Wayfarer?
------------------------------------------------------------
.
First, I’ll briefly add to a previous reply:
.
Wayfarer said that he’d twice posted sarcasm about me. Duly apologetic, I admitted that I hadn’t noticed it, because sarcasm isn’t something that I look for or expect at a philosophy forum.
.
But I can give another excuse:
.
A lot of posts are about someone referred to as “He”. I have no idea who “He” is, and so I routinely ignore such posts. Again, sorry.
.
Now, let me just outline some recent events here:
.
I hadn’t intended to post about reincarnation, because, though reincarnation is consistent with Skepticism, it isn’t part of the Skepticism proposal.
.
But someone started a topic about reincarnation, asking some questions about it.
.
Others began posting about whether and how reincarnation could be true.
.
Eventually, I decided to comment on those questions.
.
So I posted a description of how reincarnation could be consistent with Skepticism.
.
My suggested reincarnation mode was the one that didn’t posit indestructible souls, morphic fields, morphic resonance, or a distributed extra-corporal (extra-spatial?) holographic memory-repository, or any such assumption or brute-fact.
.
That’s right about the time when Wayfarer began having his hissy-fit.
.
Honest, I didn’t mean to upset him.
.
I’m not responsible when someone gets upset, unless they’re upset for some specified justifiable reason having to do with something that I’ve said.
.
In keeping with this forum’s guidelines, I welcome anyone to comment on, criticize, find fault with, argue-with, question, of inquire about Skepticism, or my reincarnation mode suggestion.
.
However I do require the following:
.
1.
.
You must be specific with us about what statement, passage, or conclusion, in what I wrote, you disagree with. In other words, if you say (in one wording or another) that what I wrote contains an error, a mis-statement, or an unjustified conclusion, then you must specify it.
.
If you want to say that its meaning isn’t clear, then quote a passage to which that claim applies, and, if possible, make some effort to say why you didn’t understand it. Characterizations of “blather” or “gibberish” don’t qualilfy.
.
If you don’t want to do that, that’s ok. Then don’t comment, and, thereby, don’t waste your time and mine.
.
2.
.
You must make at least some effort to not say things that you won’t be able to justify. Of course it’s easy to speak without sufficiently well checking what you’ve said. But I don’t want your post to be so sloppy and careless that you obviously haven’t made any effort to check what you’re saying for justifiability. …so sloppy that you’re obviously just spewing-forth.
.
Otherwise you’re just being a slob, and you don’t deserve the time that it would take to reply to you.
.
(This post takes time to write? Yes, but I wanted to clarify this matter, once and for all—and I do mean once.)
.
I’m sorry, Wayfarer, but you’ve demonstrated an inability to meet the above qualifications, and I henceforth won’t have time to reply to you.
.
Apologies.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I emphasize that when I don’t reply to something posted by Wayfarer, it isn’t that he’s said something irrefutable. It’s just that he doesn’t meet the above-specified requirements
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
.
Michael Ossipoff
Waves do not have the ocean and the ocean does not have the waves. They are one and the same. It all depends upon on how one views it. There is an ocean. There are the waves. There is the ocean. It is a continuous, inseparable whole. I do not observe any gaps anywhere.
No apologies required.
I had understood that this demonstration was much the same as that used to show that individuation requires substance.
I apologise for mischaracterising you. Please, show me the logical demonstration you mention.
Why do you say that?
[quote=Soames 2003]Rigid Designation and Essentialism
Throughout Kripke's discussion of names in lecture 1 of Naming and Necessity he takes it for granted that the distinction between essential properties of an object and its contingent properties is a legitimate one. [/quote]
I think it's an important part of his observations in Naming and Necessity.
I've just been reading some contemporary Western theology, and I noticed a very similar point.
Tyson, Paul. De-Fragmenting Modernity: Reintegrating Knowledge with Wisdom, Belief with Truth, and Reality with Being (Kindle Locations 418-421). Cascade Books, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.
So, from a Platonist perspective, what is real is the idea (eidos) of the being, which is a facsimile of the pure form that 'dwells' in a purely intelligible reality.
Now the reason this will always remain completely incomprehensible to moderns, is because there is no longer any conception of the transcendent which was found in traditional theology. And this is why most moderns will declare 'essences' to be 'logical rubbish'. After all, 'essence' is 'what a thing truly is'. But in Platonic theology, what a thing truly is, is different from the (mere) worldly being, who is only a facsimile of the 'real' being.
By way of contrast, Buddhists say that you can't find an essence in anything which has a determinate identity; that is the meaning of 'emptiness'. Of course, Buddhism and Platonism differ on this point, but they are disagreeing about something which 'modern philosophy' doesn't understand at all.
Lurking? I thought it the point of the OP... X-)
What am I missing?
Kripke shows that any properties, including those that are called essential, can be removed from an individual, and yet that individual remains. T
Individuation is not a function of the individuals properties.
So, if you prefer, "We know from Kripke and friends that using essences to individuate is are logical rubbish"
That kind of goes against the whole concept of "essence" and "essential," and definitely against Aquinas' view of the matter. How does he explain that can happen with those properties still being essential?
To you, I may be Rich who doesn't remember. To myself, I am someone else. An example:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/transient-global-amnesia-what-total-memory-loss-is-like
Identity always relies on memory.
This is an article about Boatwright. When he thinks he is not Boatwwright, he is wrong.
What?
I don't think so. Rigid designators and essential properties are connected ideas. Anyway, he was talking about stipulated possible worlds. We have a priori knowledge of objects in those worlds (per Kripke).
It's interesting to compare the view you're expressing with Hume's bundle theory.
Two was of viewing individuation.
In the Bundle theory, what makes an individual is the bundle of properties that make it up. Change the properties and the identity changes.
In the Essences theory, the properties are like pins stuck in a blob of essence. Change the properties and the individual remains the same, because of its essence.
Kripke transcendes these views by showing that individuation is about names - rigid designators.
HE proposes a causal theory for names, and hence for individuation.
My view is slightly different, in that I view naming as something we do; we use names to pick out individuals.
Because that seems to me to be an error.
His son remembers him as his father. That is his memory. He remembers himself as someone different. It's a good example of what happens when memories are in conflict with each other. There is no right or wrong, just differences in what is remembered. What is going on here is fascinating, especially if someone, as myself, is studying memory as holographic and the brain as the reconstructive mechanism. Notice, he is speaking Swedish. Absolutely fascinating. I'll have to see if I can parse this out from a holographic viewpoint.
I don't agree. When he thinks he is Johan Ek he is wrong.
That is to say, it is Michael Thomas Boatwright who thinks he is Johan Ek. It is not John Ek that others think is Michael Thomas Boatwright.
He is wrong.
Nixon comes already individuated at the beginning of the story. The causal chain might account for the use of a certain name, but for how parents distinguish their baby from a lamp?
[quote=Banno]My view is slightly different, in that I view naming as something we do; we use names to pick out individuals.[/quote]
I guess you missed my post about how langauge paints a certain picture and for all practical purposes the objects in that picture are real. Lacan says language plays a role in individuation.
He got that right. As I suggested to Un, being an individual is something we inflict... using language.
And Banno reveals he's been a Post-structuralist all along.
Because doctors love to fool around and experiment with humans as if people are their little playthings. This is the roots of materialism and the dehumanization of humans making them into buggie machines that need to be constantly fixed. It's a great marketing angle.
I don't know if he wants to be left alone, but if he does, just leave him alone. Things may revert or they may not.
X-)
But he should see a doctor - he's not himself.
Which puts me in mind of Hofstadter's I am a Strange Loop.
Chaos theory was once fashionable; and I am rather fond of the idea of a strange loop explaining the self as a self-referentail system.
It strikes me as much clearer than quantum.
Is it a rabbit or a duck?
An individual is not identified by a substance or a bundle of properties, but in most cases by our treating the individual in a certain way.
If you like, an individual is an individual only because we place it in that role in our language games.
"We" is used here, not "I", so as to show that this does not take place in a private language.
What's the corollary with regard to reincarnation?
In our language games and in our language. And as Lacan points out, the value of our words within our language vary, so our varied placements and movements within language also affect our value within our cultures/societies and our accesses to power.
Direct response to your post.
What point are you making?
You wrote the bloody thing.
Banno
"An individual is not identified by a substance or a bundle of properties, but in most cases by our treating the individual in a certain way.
If you like, an individual is an individual only because we place it in that role in our language games"
In our language games and in our language. And as Lacan points out, the value of our words within our language vary, so our varied placements and movements within language also affect our value within our cultures/societies and our accesses to power.
If there are memories to link one self to anther, then that's fine. But if there are no memories, then can i be the reincarnation of whomever I choose?
Anamnesis.
If there are memories, as in the cases described above, then the reincarnation can be discovered; evidence collated, explanations assessed and conclusions reached.
If not, then reincarnation can be prescribed; "this child is the reincarnation of the Thirteenth Lama".
The roll it plays in our language games would be quite different.
Are you sure? To my knowledge the skandhas are supposed to account for a person's material and mental existence. For example "rupa" which is the body's matter clearly does reincarnate, because when you die, your atoms go and become part of other bodies. Is this not "reincarnation"?
It seems you also suggest that if something's nature is temporary, then it does not reincarnate, but how do we arrive at this link? Why do only permanent things reincarnate? Because to me, it seems that quite the contrary, permanent things do not reincarnate, for reincarnation implies birth, and as you yourself cited, unborn things don't get born.
Quoting Wayfarer
It may be exceedingly rare, but it seems to me that to "escape" from the cycle of birth & death is to escape from reincarnation.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well we don't need the idea of the Taboric Light to have something "unborn" and "uncreated" for God is in any kind of Christian theology unborn and uncreated.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well I think such denunciations are good, because the religions do, in the end analysis, make exclusivist claims to the truth. This doesn't mean they don't each contain some truth, but it does mean that only one has access to the fullness of Truth.
I think New Age is a very unfortunate phenomenon. Spirituality was never meant to be an "individualistic" affair.
They're 'anatta' which means 'not self'.
Buddhism doesn't accept reincarnation, strictly speaking, in the sense of there being a person or soul which transmigrates. Quite why is a deep question. But your characterization is basically correct, otherwise.
Quoting Agustino
Well, there's your authoritarian tendency again. Besides, history is replete with examples of unholy slaughters over just what Christ stands for. Look at the wars of religion. You would think if the revealed truth of Christ was obvious, how could that have happened?
Quoting Agustino
How could it be otherwise in a pluralistic world? Of course there is new age rubbish, but it's also a fact that human culture and consciousness really has crossed a threshold into a completely new kind of culture - a new age, in fact.
So you don't need innate knowledge to solve meno's paradox.
Quoting Banno
The cup, presumably is largely unaffected, so the more limited second statement is implied by the first, which provides the source. As distinct from "The bible declares that the LORD God created the table, and placed a cup thereon." But in each case, there will be a speaker and a source, whether they are mentioned or not.
Quoting John
I wonder how the discussion would go if posts were numbered, but not named. One might find a sequence of consistent posts that express and amplify a POV, but one would have play the ball and not the man. It would be an interesting experiment. No contributors, only contributions...
Quoting Banno
I don't find it hard to agree with both sides of this. From the outside, one is dealing with the continuity of the body, which is born and continues 'the same body' until it dies. And that can be true, at the same time as, from the inside, he is not the man he was. There is a tradition - is it Native American? - of changing one's name after a life-changing experience (like marriage, for instance?).
Quoting Banno
So as we treat you as Banno, you are not Bob, even if you think you are. I think there is a problem here with this 'we'. Because if you think you are Bob, you are not part of the 'we' that treats you as Banno, and so it is not 'we', but 'they'. I treat myself as John Ek, but they treat me as Boatwright.
If the Nazis decide to identify you as a Jew, it doesn't matter what you think you are, as long as the Nazis are in control. But when the Nazis have been defeated, it no longer matters what they think.
But either way, I think identity is a matter of thought and custom, and anyone who has a relative with dementia can understand that this person is the same and not the same person that they loved - and again the 'we' that they used to be part of, has slipped away from them along with the 'I' that is their 'personal' identity.
Indeed, and they are also anicca - impermanent.
Quoting Wayfarer
I haven't even mentioned this, I was talking about your assertion that the Five Skandhas don't reincarnate. If the Five Skandhas don't reincarnate, and reincarnation does not happen on a soul (read permanent essence), then on what does it occur?
Clearly the answer is that the real self, which Buddha doesn't talk positively about, the same way he doesn't talk positively about Nirvana for example, isn't one of the Five Skandhas, and therefore does not reincarnate, nor is it impermanent.
What does reincarnate are the things which are anatta - matter, desires, etc.
Now, Dharma, Buddha, and Nirvana are not anicca and anatta - they are permanent. That's why morality is not ever changing in Buddhism but rather permanent, like the Law of the Old Testament. In fact, I take the Asian religions to be contemporary revelations along with Judaism, all which are completed by the Fullness of Christ.
Quoting Wayfarer
That might be my authoritarian tendency, but the fact that it is "authoritarian" doesn't mean it is wrong. It is a fact that the religions make exclusive claims. It is also a fact that God would revealed himself across the whole planet, not only in one place. But these revelations are partial.
Quoting Wayfarer
Who said that the revealed truth is obvious? On the contrary, it is not obvious, and this is an argument for Christianity not against Christianity. Is it not Christianity which tells us that God is a "hidden God" a God who hides Himself?
Quoting Wayfarer
A "pluralistic" world is just the effect of pride and selfishness, of man who thinks he can, alone, by his own efforts, reach up to God. A man who wants a God who is in His own image, rather than the other way around. That is much of what you yourself are doing. But on the contrary, Christ says the He is the Way - and none will come to the Father but through Him.
Our consciousness did not cross into a new kind of culture at all - largely what you're witnessing is the effect of capitalism praying on man's selfishness and encouraging diversity in order to open up new markets, create new desires, and therefore create new streams of income. Our moral consciousness has not evolved at all - we're more brutal, selfish and individualistic than ever, so I'd say quite the contrary, our moral consciousness has darkened if anything. Remember that there is always enough light for those who want to believe, and enough darkness for those who don't want to believe.
What we have here is evidence for holographic model of memory. The brain has somehow changed in such a way that is now reconstructing a different memory pattern, just as a tuner of a radio station might.
So n instead of v recognize it recognizing this situation as evidence that memory is not stored in the brain, but rather holographically, neurologists quickly come to the universally accepted opinion that something is "wrong". Hopeless.
The identity of being 'man born of woman' is presumed, not remembered, and that is a process of the internalising of social circumstances. Thus one has the circumstance sometimes of discovering that who one thought was one's sister is one's biological mother, and who one thought was one's mother is one's grandmother. There are facts about oneself, about which one can be deceived, and then undeceived. Where in the holo-sphere the real and false ideas are stored is another matter.
What interests me is the process of construction of personal identity. That certainly does involve memory, and also imagination, and also social relations. To say that one cannot be deceived about one's personal identity seems both true in one sense, that I am whoever I think I am, and false in another, that I can think I am the queen of England when I am not. I am nevertheless, the man who thinks he is the queen of England.
It's some consensus can be created in terms of lines of inquiry online subgroups can be formed to investigate new paradigms, e.g. the nature of memory. Stephen Robbins and Rupert Sheldrake are trying to form such groups that in turn can create entirely new possibilities in the realm of philosophy.
Yes, I think we are largely in agreement, about a lot of things. For myself, though I would say that it is a mistake to try and create a new science of the person, because it will inevitably end up as depersonalising as the old science. Let's just drop it entirely and talk and listen to each other and to ourselves. "So, unenlightened, what's it like being the queen of England? It must be annoying that nobody bows."
I deny that our real self is born, not that what we most commonly attribute in common language as the self was born. That self was indeed born.
I have been waiting to read this for years. It has felt like only the Owl in the tree and me understood the necessity of truly embracing the absurd.
You are just confusing me now. You were talking about essences, now individuation and substance. My point has to do with substance, that's for sure, but not necessarily individuation. The point was to recognize the need to assume substance in order to understand the reality of existence. So for example when you look up and see blue, you recognize the need to assume "the sky" which is blue, in order to understand that particualr occurrence of blue. Likewise, when we see a living body, we need to assume "the soul" in order to understand that occurrence of a living body.
Quoting Banno
I accept the apology, and will demonstrate the logic. The actual physical evidence which is needed to justify the first premise, you will have to perform yourself, because it is within you. It is well suited to meditation, so position yourself such that you are seated and unmoving. Take notice of the passing of time, perhaps by listening to something, or recognizing your own breathing. After a while you will produce the desire to move some part of your body, perhaps due to some discomfort, or in this case, just to get on with the physical part of the demonstration. So let's say that you make up your mind to move your hand. You are not moving your hand just yet though, you simply recognize that it's something which needs to be done. You wait, and wait some more, recognizing that as you wait, time is passing. Now you move your hand. The cause of you moving your hand is not something external to you, nor is the moving of your hand a random act so it is clearly caused.
So this is the first premise. There is cause of movement of parts of your body which is not something external to your body, but it is properly a "cause" in the sense that the movement is not random. The second premise is that any living body is describable as parts which are moving in this way, described by the first premise. The conclusion is that this cause of movement is the cause of the living body.
So we can say that there is a cause of existence of the living body which is not external to the living body, but nevertheless precedes the existence of the body, as its cause. This is what is called 'the soul", and as the cause of existence of the living body it is what substantiates the existence of the living body as an entity, a unified thing. As the cause of it, it necessarily exists prior in time to the living body. The puzzle is, how is it possible that the soul is independent from the body in the temporal sense, (as prior to it), but not independent from the body in the spatial sense (as a cause internal to the body). But the soul is not necessarily internal to a body, this is just how it appears to us, as an internal cause. Once we apprehend that this is merely how the soul appears to us, as an internal cause (internal being the soul's spatial manifestation), and not necessarily the full extend of being that the soul has, accepting the reality of non-spatial being as the completion or perfection of the soul, then we are free to speculate about things like reincarnation.
Good call on that book reference.
It's profoundly obvious, that the ocean does have waves, and not vise versa. The ocean is a body of water, and that water may or may not be waving, so waving is a property of that water. Water is the substance wave is the property.
Quoting Rich
It is a simple issue to solve. Simply ask yourself, can you imagine a body of water without waves, and the answer is yes. Then, can you imagine a wave without an underlying substance which is waving, and the answer is no. Some may insist that light is a wave without a substance which is waving, but this only results in confusion. Either we release the notion that light is waves, and recognize light as particles, or we determine the medium in which the waves exist. But to say that light is waves without substance is nonsense.
The ocean is the ocean. It is continuous. We make the distinctions, when viewing the ocean from a given perspective. One can turn it upside down and say all the waves contain the ocean. There are and there isn't one or the other or both.
In the same instant, we are individuals (as the waves) but also the universe (the ocean). I've does not contain the other, but it is possible to shift perspectives to create a different.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
An ocean without waves is extremely easy to imagine as is the opposite (one big wave). One only need to exercise creative imagination.
BTW, the moment someone used the word obvious, there is a problem.
If one can't make distinctions between the ocean and the waves within it, there's no reason to make a distinction between the Earth and the oceans and lands within it, or the universe and the objects within it.
There are practical reasons too make distinctions and there are practical reasons not to. One should not confuse practicality with what may be transpiring. Symbolics are practical but have nothing to do with what it's happening.
Even if it was just a matter of practicality, and it isn't, you haven't shown why the separations I mentioned are any more practical to make than separating the Ocean and its waves. Feel free to do so at any time.
If that's true, then you were wrong when you said we shouldn't make distinctions between the oceans and their waves. Good to know.
Thanks for the lesson...:)
You clearly can't defend your erroneous point, so I'll let you enjoy your meltdown in peace. Ciao.
The self, which is the same as consciousness. Consiousness is conscious of itself.
So when you sleep your self disappears? :s
Hadn't thought of that before, a very good point. But yes, unless one is dreaming.
Got a citation?
Quoting Agustino
Right. So everyone should believe the same, think the same, in accordance with revealed truth, which is the same for everyone, and those who don't should be outcaste?
Quoting Agustino
A Philosophy Forum is not the place for proselytizing.
So then how does the same self return when you awaken, and where does it go while you're asleep?
It's in there, please read it more carefully. It's in Pascal's quote, a citation from Isaiah :)
Quoting Wayfarer
You're mixing up a whole different set of issues here. On the one hand there is the Truth, and what or Who that Truth is. On the other hand is how people relate to that Truth (which is individual). And finally there is the question of how society should be organised (whether those who reject the Truth should be outcasts). These questions have little to do with each other. So which one do you want to address?
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, that's why I said it's a fact that God WOULD reveal Himself (if He exists) across the whole planet.
The other question you have to consider is, that if this is so, and the self disappears in dreamless sleep, then it would follow that one commits no wrong if they were to kill you while you were in dreamless sleep, for there would be no "you" to be harmed in that case. And I think we can both conclude that this is wrong, and thus identifying consciousness with the self must be rejected.
I think human mind exists outside human body as a "physical" object (not physical as in being matter). There exists some other substance that our minds consist of, and the reactions in our brains are some kind of "projections" of that mind/self. While asleep, that self does not disappear, it just hibernates. The consciousness is there, just not conscious of anything. Besides, while asleep, people are to some extent aware of the physical reality.
Would this substance be physical or? And how are the reactions of our brain correlated with that mind/self? In other words, how is that mind/self attached to our brain, and only our brain?
Quoting BlueBanana
I agree with this.
Quoting BlueBanana
But how can consciousness exist without an object towards which it is directed? This goes to the point I was discussing with unenlightened before:
Quoting Agustino
Most of this I have no idea of. I guess some structures of matter are capable of interfering with that substance, and brains are some of those structures. A bit similarly to how eg. matter can be turned into energy and vice versa, but we don't really see that in our everyday lives but instead need to build hugely complex nuclear reactors for that to happen, that substance can in some way interact with the substances we are more familiar with such as matter and energy but that just doesn't happen "naturally" (seemingly unnecessary quotations because it's arguable whether high tier technology is natural). Human brain certainly is complex enough of a structure to justify the thought.
Quoting Agustino
I'll go to sleep while pondering this very disturbing thought, and answer tomorrow.
I don't see how you can say this, because when the ocean is calm there is still an ocean but no waves. So it is impossible that the waves contain the ocean.
Quoting Rich
A wave is a particular form. It is impossible to imagine a calm ocean as one big wave, because it does not have the appropriate form to be called a wave.
The ocean becomes over wave but doing absolutely nothing. This would be comparable to death or to b the sleep state without dreaming.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It's a wave without amplitude. It's dead in the water. Flatlined.
Take a jump rope, add energy, and you have waves. It's the energy that creates. In Daoism it is the Three (energy) combined with the Two (polarity) that creates the Multitude (everything).
Why can't consciousness simply be aware of itself? Is it necessary that consciousness is aware of objects prior to being aware of itself? Itself would not be an object.
Doesn't sound like a wave to me.
The model is very straightforward. All it needs is mind (the flatline), polarity (amplitude) and energy (will) to get things going. This is the Daoist Genesis story.
Humans are waves in the ocean (of a particular sort of course).
Interesting. Can you set out for me the structure of this argument? I don't see a negation, so is it modus ponens? Or is it a hypothetical? Or is it a transcendental deduction? Or some other?
Well, perhaps. But there is something you have not mentioned, that for my money is quite central.
"I see the cup on the table" is true just in the case that I see the cup on the table. It will be true even if the cup is not on the table, and I am deluded.
But "The cup is on the table" is true just in the case that the cup is indeed on the table.
That is a significant difference. "I see the cup on the table" does not imply that "The cup is on the table". Nor is "I see the cup on the table" implied by "The cup is on the table".
I read your post. Did you post though?
If you put logic before the world, then you are in trouble. Amend your logic to follow the world. Perhaps someone has hacked your account, that would explain it, or perhaps I had too much wine last night. No, I read your post, and I am quite certain you posted. What is central is that I see the cup is empty, and I'm taking it to the kitchen for a refill.
But can you see something that isn't there? If someone were to tell me that they saw me in London yesterday then I would be quite right in saying that they didn't see me (and couldn't have seen me) in London yesterday because I wasn't there.
Do people see ghosts? Or do they see natural things that they simply mistake for ghosts?
If I was that someone, I'd believe you, because my facial recognition is not great, but if it was a policeman investigating you as a suspect, they might not. But could you be mistaken about where you were yesterday? It's conceivable. But like me, you don't bother to conceive it unless there is good reason to; like me you are generally certain that you were where you think you were, and that what you see is what is there. Because to be limited by logical implication is to be unable to function at all.
You probably know me well enough to know that formal logic is not my thing. The argument is most likely modus ponens but the important aspect, what actually makes the argument, is the defining of the terms, and definitions are validated by induction. So once the definitions are accepted (the inductive aspect), the argument follows by modus ponens. Let me start with the definitions.
First we have to accept the existence of "objects", or in this case "bodies", the two are one and the same. An object or body is a collection of parts forming a unity which is distinguishable from its surroundings. Call this the foundation of individuation if you like, but without this definition, "a unity which is distinguishable from its surroundings", or some similar definition, we have no basis for claiming the existence of any objects. And without "collection of parts" we have no basis for the claim that an object can be divided.
The second definition is the "living" object, or "living" body, which signifies a distinct type of object. What distinguishes it from an inanimate object is the special way that its parts move. As per the physical demonstration which you must perform yourself, the movements of the parts cannot be said to be caused by a force originating from outside the body, nor are the movements random. The cause of the movements of its parts is within the body. This is a special type of movement which defines living, the cause of the movement of the body's parts is within the body itself. That is the most difficult definition to justify because one must demonstrate it to oneself, and even then there may be doubt that all the parts of a living body move in this way. What is necessary is to assume that all living bodies have some parts which move this way.
Accepting the definitions, we can proceed to say that the living body is a collection of parts forming a unity, which is distinguishable from its surroundings. Its parts have a special type of movement, in which the cause of movement of its parts is within the body itself.
Third definition is of "cause" or source of motion, and this means what is responsible for, or what initiates a movement, and is necessarily prior in time to the movement itself.
According to the second definition, if there is not the special type of movement of parts required for a living body, then there is not a living body. According to the third definition, the cause of the special type of movement is prior in time to that special type of movement.
All living bodies must have the special type of movement. The cause of the special movement is prior in time to the special movement. Therefore the cause of the special movement is prior in time to the existence of the living body.
The "cause of the special type of movement", which is required for a body to be living, is what we call "the soul". So the soul exists prior in time to the living body. What type of existence does the soul have, prior to its activities within the living body? And, if the soul exists prior to the living body, could it not continue to exist after the living body? The living body is dependent on the existence of the soul, not vise versa.
Third person: The cup is on the table.
First person:
I see that the cup is on the table
I believe that the cup is on the table
I know that the cup is on the table.
I think there are only two points of view, the first person subjective and the second person inter-subjective. If truth lies somewhere, my money is on the second person inter-subjective point of view. What we agreed on. 'The cup is on the table' is true if the consensus is that it is on the table.
The third person point of view is the view from nowhere, a merely formal point of view.
A few more comments, to answer possible arguments about my suggested reincarnation-mode:
.
There might be some reluctance to accept that, in a stage of death, a mere hypothetical story could be a subsequent life.
.
But I’ve been saying that the previous life was nothing other than a hypothetical story too.
.
When you’re so shut-down that you don’t even remember that you're ending had a life, then being at the beginning of a life is no more implausible than being at the end of a life. More plausible, really, given your inclinations and future-orientateion..
.
Due to your Vasanas, your subconscious tendencies, inclinations, feelings, and—in particular—your natural deeply-built-in future-oriention, a story in which you’re beginning a life is what would feel plausible to your feelings. That’s the story that is about the you that has the subconscious feelings, tendencies, inclinations and future-orientation that you have. …the Vasanas that are all that remain of you.
.
In the Dali Lama’s wording, that propels you into a next life.
In my wording, being at the beginning of a life is what’s plausible to your feelings. And a life that's beginning is the story that’s about the you who has the Vasanas that i named above.
.
In that life, as hypothetical as your previous one, there’s no memory or indication that there was ever a different life. Who’s to say that this isn’t your life?
.
Not only is reincarnation consistent with Skepticism—It’s evidently implied by Skepticism.
.
If the reason for this life-experience story (even if in modified form) remains at the end of this life (and it usually does), then there is a life-experience story about you then, just as there is now.
.
Michael Ossipoff
There is memory. It is called inherited, innate, instinctual traits or unaccountable skills (idiot savants, prodigies, etc.).
Only true in formal sense. There is no truth outside of our own determination and our agreement. The statement might be true formally but this may have no correspondence to reality, which is solely apparent. I don't believe it can be shown otherwise.
As in, only true in the sense of being true.
It has been called the view from nowhere. "Right there" is an appeal to me to see something, but I don't see it, and if I did see it it would be a first person view. It's not right there; it's not anywhere. The cup is in the cupboard and not on view.
It would remain true even if god did not see it.
Perspective is removed in the third person account.
So it ain't a point of view, but an abstraction. I'm not arguing for idealism here, merely against the reification of grammar, I agree shit can be true if nobody sees it, but if nobody sees shit there is no point of view. It's an account sans point of view; there is no third person in the cupboard.
This might be true, but then it's also true that "Donald Trump is the President" does not logically imply "Donald Trump won the most electoral college votes" and that "Donald Trump won the most electoral college votes" does not logically imply "Donald Trump is the President".
The fact of the matter cannot be solved simply by pushing semantics (as I've said before, and as I recall you've agreed with before). There are other facts that must be considered, and so too with the issue of seeing a cup and there being a cup.
And "Donald Trump is the President" will only be true if Donald Trump is indeed the President. But it's also the case that "Donald Trump is the President" will only be true if Donald Trump won the most electoral college votes.
So leaving aside simple semantics, it may be a (meta-)physical fact that the cup is on the table only if one sees that the cup is on the table. That the one does not logically imply the other isn't sufficient to rule this out.
Suppose that an object that is not being observed by a mind is simply in a quantum state and looks like this. Is it still a teacup? With quantum physics there is no removing the observer. There is no way to talk about anything without an observer.
Is it reasonable to suppose that something not being looked at looks like something?
We have no idea what something might be without being observed. This is a holographic plate of apple. It needs a reconstructive wave to create the image.
Except it does, since this was an electoral college election.
That fact is incidental to the meaning of the sentence "Donald Trump is the President". The argument "Donald Trump is the President, and so therefore he won the most electoral college votes" is invalid. It needs the additional premise "only the person with the most electoral college votes wins the Presidency".
No, it's not since he could only be president if he won the most electoral votes. So, the statement is valid.
That's an additional premise, as I've said. Without that premise the conclusion doesn't follow.
No it isn't. Nothing in being the President logically entails that one won the most electoral college votes. Having won the most electoral college votes isn't part of the meaning of being the President.
This is false. See the United States presidential line of succession.
It has everything to do with being the President. If Trump and Pence become incapacitated then Paul Ryan will become the President, despite not having won the most electoral college votes.
Therefore your claim that "you can't be president without having won the most electoral votes" is false.
But again, even it it's true it wouldn't matter. Being the president doesn't logically entail having won the most electoral college votes, just as being a man doesn't logically entail that one is mortal. You need the additional premises "you can't be president without having won the most electoral votes" and "all men are mortal" to have valid arguments.
It has nothing to do with logic or necessarily facts.
The State election boards declared certain results (which can and has been disputed) which entailed Trump being declared and recognized as President which was then accepted (reluctantly in many cases) by citizens and the legislative and judicial branches of government. It was a formed consensus which is all entangled with lots of other events.
I wish logic would just go away. It has nothing to do with life as we experience it.
The issue is knowledge. A proposition may be true, but if it was asserted, then someone is claiming to know it. Knowledge internalism says that the knower must have access to some justification. Knowledge externalism rejects the need for justification. Take your pick.
You can free yourself of the POV shenanigans by saying that you aren't talking about assertions. But then the question becomes... what are you talking about?
The inner voice inside of me is usually in first person.
However occasionally I have that Good Angel on one shoulder, debating the Devil on the other shoulder and THAT makes me wonder in what person, that additional voice is offering the counterbalance.
Geez, I hope that made sense.
Even those people don't remember a previous life.
Possibly their remarkably early abilities are consistent wlth attitudes, general approaches to life, general inclinations, that remained present among their Vasanas.
Michael Ossipoff
Memory in the form of instincts, inherited traits and abilities is remembering. What you are saying that it's that people don't seem to remember past physical lives, but apparently some claim that they do. We x even can't remember in most cases even what happens in one physical life.
SO "the kettle is boiling" is an abstraction from "I see the kettle boiling"! This is a new misuse of "abstraction"!
But it says nothing about "the kettle is boiling" being true under quite different circumstances to "I see the kettle boiling".
There is reification here, to be sure. What is being reified are cups, tables, and kettles. The stuff that our language talks about.
If you could find that objectionable... well, it takes all sorts.
Ok, fair enough. I was just referring to the kind of remembering by which someone could actually say that they've previously lived.
Haven't some of them been debunked?
There are various explanations for reported past lives:
1. The person genuinely remembers a past life.
2. Intentional hoax, fraud by the individual in question or hir (his/her) parents.
3. More or less subconscious coaxing by parents
4. The child has heard conversations about historical times and historical people (including people who weren't famous)
5. The author of the book that describes the "seemingly true" cases is a liar or hoaxer.
Don't underestimate #5.
A person can quote something from a book, and say, "Aright, how do you explain that?!!"
The author made it up.
And yes, that's been well documented in numerous occasions, from UFO's to all sorts of other kinds of things.
With so many prosaic explanations for someone telling details of a past life, there's no need to assume the explanation (genuinely true reports) that, itself, doesn't have any known explanation.
Skepticism implies reincarnation, but not reporting of details of a past life.
Quite so.
Michael Ossipoff
I think that it would be difficult to debunk but it would also be difficult to verify. I think it is more likely that children will remember because adult social patterns tend to force a denial of any such memory sense.
What an suggesting is that it is a area worth investigating. So much can be explained with such a new paradigm. Everything seems to fit. Anyway, I hope some young, brave, creative group of philosophers who want to do more in their life than proving with logic that there is no free will, will be motivated to start delving deeply into this fascinating possibility.
When I say things like:
The kettle is boiling.
The cup is in the cupboard,
There is no third person point of view.
I am using the third person form. I have no problem using it to talk about the world as it is, abstracted from how it is experienced, I do it all the time. What I object to is smuggling a fictional experience back in in the form of a third person who experiences it. I do not object to reifying kettles, but to reifying grammar.
There is a kettle.
There is a third person mode of speech.
There is no third person, and no third person point of view.
If you think there is a third person, be so kind as to introduce them to me.
And that's me done with this.
1) Life
2) Consciousness
3)Time
4)Death
Should we ignore it?
There is a third person, which is precisely the person that isn't there, or the event you aren't there for. We talk as if there are general principles that supervene on the particular objects of sense, and we must, or talking wouldn't be possible in the first place, and they're predictive... when they are... but definitely not always. It's more like semi-hypothetical.
The weird thing about universals is how vague they are about particularity. No single attribute of the cup, or the cupboard is necessary to identify it, and not even its function, as drawings and photographs will do as well, even when they can't be used at all for it, but I still think that there is a semi-hypothetical nature to them that suggests that they could be used as cups or cupboards, even when they can't be.
I can tell you "this rock here is a cup, for our purposes", and you can nod, and then we can talk about my rock which is in no way a cup, no problem.
I like to think though, that these are all abstractions that are taken directly from experience, and do reduce entirely to the particularity, and the universality cannot be tied down because it is both hypothetical, working in contexts, and like a rough analogy. I'm deeply suspicious of the existence of universals beyond working analogies of form and function, as well as family resemblance, or historical origins in the precise same particular.
Universals are what we make of them, and not things found around us. Austin's critique, from “Are There A Priori Concepts”.
Yep.
...which so much resembles a strange loop.
So that's what I'm stuck in!
...and then we created art, which taught us all how to see, hear, feel smell and taste, and then...
We didn't, a tiny minute fraction of us did, and then we all dance to their tunes. Where even they were dancing to someone else's tunes, you aren't entirely innovative, and mold breaking in everything that you do, just like one thing if you're one in a billion.
The old hiarchy is not only big, but there are many many of them
No, we all did; some of us said "T'was me!" Some of us believed them.
Well, no one is an island, and it takes a conspiracy of everyone for such a thing to work at all, for sure. It isn't even as if people are against it, really. We're deeply social, and mimicking creatures -- just looking for the best tune to dance to, to dance the best dance.
But there is always a person. Problems arise when someone insists on an object existing apart from b some human observation. It doesn't. It is the human mind (and other minds) that morphs a quantum state into what humans recognize as an object. Without the human mind, what exists is a quantum state, that is simply unknown.
"Quantum state" is a higher level abstraction than just an experiential cup is. "Quantum state" may be more spooky, and interesting, because it lends itself to more mystery than cups do, but I don't think that it's more real than a cup is, because it's further removed from experience than a generalized cup is.
Unenlightened said earlier something like nothing looks like anything absent sight. That's pretty much a tautology, and not only do cups I imagine look a lot different to ants, but I doubt that they even see them at all, rather than an undifferentiated part of the environment, significant only to the extent that it's an motor-cortical obstacle, or sticky with sugar or some such, but still wouldn't differentiate it in the same way, let alone look at it like we do. We don't just see some physical object, we see a whole array of things in the cup, some of which isn't even present in the visual field, but is filled in with expectation.
I doubt that anyone is all too big of an naive realist, whereas they think that objects exist precisely as experienced by them, independent of experience, at least if they've ever given it any thought or research at all. The thing is not about appearances (that's the point that things don't "look" like anything at all absent sight, that's just a tautology), but object permanence is all that is at issue. That the cup is in the cupboard when no one is looking, or around, or knows about it even, because the world exists independently of subjects, not that perception exists independently of perceivers.
Quantum state is the limits to which we can describe anything that has not been observed. We can speculate as to what it is (I speculate it it's a hologram of some sort) but we cannot say, it is impossible to say, that what is there, unobserved, is a "teacup". It it's not. It is totally unknown as is what happens after death and how "it all began".
Quoting Wosret
There is something there. It is called a quantum state. What that may be independent of any observer if any sort (an ant or a human) is entirely inaccessible. This is when the so-called third-non-person comes in handy for some. It inserts a a non-human as an observer with all the attributes of an observer. This sleight of hand is used all the time when a human mind is needed but a human mind is unwanted.
The question is whether or not this independent world can be said to contain cups. Some will say that it is wrong to reduce experienced objects like cups and cupboards to whatever material stuff is floating about in space. Is a cup nothing more than a particular arrangement of excited states? Seems there's more to a cup than that. And if there is, then even if we grant the independent existence of these field quanta, it doesn't then follow that we must grant the independent existence of cups.
A window isn't just glass but glass that is shaped and used a certain way, and so it might be that cups aren't just collections of particles but collections of particles that are interacting with an observer.
As an example, see enactivism. It claims that when we perceive we aren't just presented with information about an independent world but that our interaction with the independent environment creates the world that we see. The cups and cupboards that we see are part of the enacted world, not part of the independent environment.
Not really... "quantum" is derived from "quantity", and is just a quantification, or a mathematical representation of the minimum values involved in a physical state. We would be hard pressed to quantify a physical state having never observed it, and there is no perceptual levels involved at all in quantification, it is, as I said, a higher level of abstraction, further removed, not closer to reality. Although many would argue that math is more real than anything else, that is a view to hold. Imagining that "quantum states" are at all about observation is like imagining that you can see what "one" looks like without there actually being one of anything at all, but just "one" as the pure abstract entity.
I don't feel that one gets closer to metaphysical reality, the further removed from sense, or experience we go into abstraction. I really don't think that we can even really understand abstraction as all without representation.
However, one wishes too speculate about what is "out there" it ultimately comes down to the speculation of a mind. It is impossible to discuss it as if there is some independent object and labeled as such (a teacup?) just swimming in the universe without acknowledging that it is a creation of the mind. Outside of this, it is simply unknown and no label can be applied.
In this manner, the mind now becomes permanently entangled in every discussion, as it should be since it is the source. I just want to make clear that there is no "cup" floating somewhere out there that is magically being imprinted in some brain cells.
As I said, I doubt that anyone holds such a naive view -- but I think that it's important to appreciate that everything you know about cups, and what's being talked about cups comes from your personal experience of cups, so that one doesn't get a better understanding of them, let alone could even apprehend what is being talked about at all, except through that experience. So I just don't buy that some mathematical quantification of states of the cup is somehow more real. I think that the cup on my coffee table is immensely more real than any indistinct general cup, let alone a mathematical description, at least it never can be to me, or my comprehension. Nor to anyone's.
It's not a matter of whether it's real. It's a mater of whether it's independent of perception. Something can be real but dependent on perception. The claim is that a cup is independent material stuff being perceived, and so dependent on perception, and not just independent material stuff.
Actually, I think most people hold this view, that there is a cup out there independent of the mind.
That cup is certainly real, as your mind perceives it.
Problems only arise when a non-mind mind is inserted into a discussion as a placeholder in a direct attempt to remove mind from the equation.
There is object permanence. Does it look like anything sound like anything, taste like anything absent those sensuous modes? Of course not, that's tautologous, but beyond that any conception of them is necessarily empty, and modeling them in some other way always reduces to the sensuous for comprehension of what is even being discussed, and never bridges that gap. The thing in itself, is always out of reach. I like the idea of undifferentiated oneness, chaos, and things, and don't think that anything represents it better than negation.
Consider a collection of bricks. Is it a building? Only if it's structured and used a certain way. There's no denial of object permanence in claiming that there isn't a building if those bricks are knocked down.
So consider a collection of molecules. Is it an apple? Only if it's being perceived a certain way. There's no denial of object permanence in claiming that there isn't an apple if those molecules aren't interacting with an observer.
Most people are not physicalists, or materialists, and believe in an incomprehensible world beyond the manifest. I think that in strawmaning such a naive view, the supposed alternative ain't much more sophisticated.
As I said, I don't buy that "molecules", or atoms, or quanta are more real than apples. They reduce to the perceptual world, and are just a reformulation of the naive view. Like one has gone deeper by looking closer at their smaller parts, or counting bits, or energy outputs...
I didn't say they're more real. I said they're independent of perception (assuming scientific realism).
I don't know what you meant than, that object permanence isn't object eternalism?
So an apple "happens" when an observer interacts with some other stuff in the environment (e.g. field quanta, if scientific realism is the case). The observer is real, the other stuff in the environment is real, and the resulting apple is real. The observer can be independent of the other stuff in the environment, the other stuff in the environment can be independent of the observer, but the apple is dependent on both the observer and the other stuff in the environment. If we separated out the observer and the other stuff in the environment then we wouldn't have an apple anymore, just an observer and other stuff in the environment.
Everything is kind of a mixture of things, and all entangled up in the environment, and we differentiate it. Water and beans too. I don't think that coffee is special in this regard.
Well, I can't really say much about what the hypothetical joe blow thinks about this. A brain absent a mind is a non-functional brain, I imagine.
A brain? But this is the rub, isn't it? Now watch the physicalists come out of hiding. Here comes the non-mind mind in the non-third-person person to create the brain.
I overspoke a bit, because of course no metaphysics can be proved.
So all that I can say on that matter is that it seems to me that there's probably reincarnation, because it's implied by the most parsimonious metaphysics. ...and that I wouldn't expect there to be detailed reports of previous lives, because, by that metaphysics, they aren't expected.
Yes, I was going to say that too: Detailed past-life reports are difficult to debunk or verify.
Either way, you pretty much have to take the word of some author. ...unless you have the time, money and opportunity to go out and do all the field-work, and the meticulous checking.
So the matter of likelihood is all that can be stated.
Michael Ossipoff
.
No.
It could equally be called a "spiritual state". The cup is there in the cupboard in spirit.
It's not what most physicists think happens. It looks and smells like new-age wishful thinking.
No.
Let's be totally clear here. Science only recognizes systems in quantum states. How it is morphed into a thing is totally a subject of metaphysical speculation.
Says someone who mistakenly thinks they are the apodictic authority on the matter and has given no evidence or sufficient argument to support their erroneous claims.
Objectivists can't stand this and are praying for the day for quantum theory to be overturned as Einstein did until his death. Sorry. No wiggle room on this one.
You can keep repeating that falsehood all you like. Until you back it up with evidence and/or convincing argument; it remains the falsehood it is.
The physicists find much more than quanta. You must be listening to people who just call themselves "physicists."
There is both.
No, there is more and there are many things existing in many galaxies unseen by humans. They exist just fine.
No, it doesn't....it really doesn't.
"You can keep repeating that falsehood all you like. Until you back it up with evidence and/or convincing argument; it remains the falsehood it is."
So, the wishful thinking of one's mind is solely yours.
You keep saying that as if you have no idea theres' no evidence of that and you have provided none. It's cute.
I don't care about the quantum definition of a teacup. Quanta is your nonsensical fixation.
No, that describes you perfectly, not me. You're the only one whose own personal textbook on physics says "all is quanta."
I know you don't.
Oh, those good old days of Aristotle and Newton. We do miss them don't we? Life was so much simpler.
You think they're entirely gone? The quality of on-line universities must really be declining.
And why the pretence that the only interpretation is the the von Neuman, when his is not even the preferred interpretation?
And philosophers do play with quantum thingies. Even as physicists play at philosophy.
Sometimes most physicists are wrong. When Newton introduced the concept of gravity he was accused to dragging spirituality into science.
Are you really in a position to rule out any of the many quantum theories?
I can definitely see a cup, but I have to see it.
This is absolutely key to understanding the philosophical issue. Until I see it, it is .....??????
Thanks at least for getting too the crux of the issue whether or not you agree with me.
What? Why would I want to do that?
So, proove that when you close the cupboard door the cup becomes no more than a quantum thingy.
It was probably an accident. You didn't mean to say "no" to Von Neumann. You meant "I don't know."
The fact that you call it 'a cup' and that it performs that function is dependent on human designation, perception and convention. If you were a micro-organism-sized intelligence that lived in the water in the cup, it might be 'the ocean', as far as you're concerned. You imagine the cup 'being there', in the cupboard, when nobody's around looking at it, but that's still an image, an imaginary act, constituted by your human mind, which classifies objects according to their shape, function and so on and situates them in the imaginary 'empty space'. There is no intrinsic cup apart from that.
We nowadays have an instinctive mental image of the 'there anyway' world, which is what scientific, or even plain vanilla 'realism', means. Philosophy used to comprise trying to fathom the real nature of existence, but nowadays it comes down to endless debates about 'whether the cup is really there' ('the cup' being a stand-in for 'anything'), and then the reflexive affirmation that yes, the world simply is as it appears. So we no longer de-construct or reflect critically on the nature of 'ordinary' experience. That's why 'the observer problem' became a problem in the first place: it demolished the idea of a 'mind-independent reality'. And it still is an outstanding problem in philosophy, for that reason.
You keep saying this, and yet you never provide proof or a link. So, all you've been doing so far is quoting from the book of Rich.
So, go ahead and provide a link showing "until it is viewed, it can only be said it is in a quantum state." The book of Rich just isn't enough.
Also, Wikipedia, for what it's worth says Wheeler's theory of Quantum foam doesn't apply to the whole universe, but to "a speculative extension of these concepts which imagines the consequences of such high-energy virtual particles at very short distances and times."
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/141226/is-there-an-objective-external-reality-according-to-quantum-physics
"Since certain properties (i.e., an electron's position) of a particle aren't well defined until they are measured, does this mean that quantum objects don't possess these properties, unless they are looked at?"
So, try again, Rich. So, far all you got is still Book of Rich, and you're no physicist.
http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/03/26/521478684/mind-matter-and-materialism
"Also, the logical link I draw between theories of mind and theories of matter does not rely on quantum physics as an explanation for consciousness.Some folks like Rodger Penrose have argued that quantum phenomena occurring in the brain are the root of conscious experience. I am not particularly taken by these arguments (but see this for new ideas along these lines). Instead, I point out that the irreducible democracy of quantum interpretations leaves the role of agency (i.e. the observing subject) as an open issue of contention.
Any explanation of mind is an account of "being a subject." That means quantum interpretations where the epistemological aspect of quantum physics comes to the fore make simple materialist views of consciousness a whole lot less simple. Why? Well, it's simple.If your theory of being-a-subject (i.e. consciousness) relies solely on matter, but your theory of matter can't get rid of the subject's being, then you're walking on swampy ground."
Philosophers have been saying that it is impossible to know at least since Kant.
The main error in your quantum thinking is the "nothing but"; the cup is both a cup and a quantum foam. They are not mutually exclusive.
While quantum physics might treat the universe as not a bunch of "solid, distinct things" all other physics does exactly that. Again, it is an error to think that because Jupiter is made up of quantum thingies, there is no Jupiter.
Another error is to give undue priority to the consciousness account over the standard Copenhagen approach. It is only the minority view consciousness approach that lends itself to your account. In the Copenhagen approach a wave function collapses when it makes a difference. Consciousness is not a part of that account.
I just want to know if in the future if I refer to materialist views of consciousness as swampy, will I need to reference this article? If so, I'll bookmark it.
Of course. Science defends materialism because it butters their bread. One has to be totally shielded to suggest what Penrose says. Otherwise, you are summarily marginalized, ostracized and run out of the profession. Penrose probably doesn't care anymore.
How about addressing the philosophical critique I made above? my 749.
I have no idea what your critique was about. It's already been concluded that materialism is swampy. No observation then it is an unknown. There is no teacup. With observation, voila, teacup.
Anyway, nice that Penrose gets it.
So you will not address this?
Quoting Banno
Whether or not I am in agreement with Penrose is of no mind to me. What I am glad to see is that at least he is moving philosophical thought forward and is not stuck in the 16th century.
Sorry. I thought you wanted to talk about pseudo-science. My bad.
That's your problem, in a nutshell.
I hate to say it, but Rich has a point. Recall the famous anecdote - I've quoted it to you before - of Einstein, out on one of his afternoon walks in the woods, when he mused aloud to his companion. 'surely the moon must exist when we're not looking at it!' I'm sure that Einstein was asking this rhetorically - he is of course convinced this it must, as Einstein was a convinced scientific realist. But the question remains: why was he compelled to ask that question? Why would he have to ask it? Why bring it up?
But of course, it is possible to simplify further and claim there is an object out there without an observer, but then we would have to push back physics 100 years. There is no boundary. There is entanglement. And consciousness is involved. Simply put.
BTW, did you object to that a materialistic viewpoint being described as swampy?
Of course it doesn't, nor am I saying it did. I think that Rich has a point, but that Rich doesn't appreciate how radical the statement 'no subject, no object' is. I have, for example,Brian Magee's book on Schopenhauer's philosophy; it has a chapter on this very point, called 'no object without a subject'. But Schopenhauer wrote his magnum opus on this very point - hundreds of pages of argument - and furthermore, philosophy has, on the whole, long since rejected Schopenhauer's style of idealism. So you can't simply take for granted that people are going to accept such ideas.
People are, by and large, instinctive realists. They believe that the world of the senses, and the world described by science, is the real world. It is very hard to see it otherwise. Magee's book makes the point that Schopenhauer's (and Kant's) philosophy has some points in common with Indian philosophy. But he also points out that Vedanta, for example, is a philosophy which traditionally takes decades of study to understand. It's actually a very subversive type of philosophy, in that it undermines what most people take for granted.
If students are taught in grade school that the universe was energy (Qi, Quantum, Prana), and this energy creates energy imprints in the fabric of the universe (itself) as is a hologram, and the image does not appear until it is observed with a reconstructive wave, then nothing I say would surprise anyone. But this would disrupt an entire industry that depends upon envisioning humans as robots, so it is not taught and thus the image of the universe is molded by economic determinants.
;
Anyone who's disapproves is similar drummed out, reinforcing the self-reinforcing nature of the materialistic view of life. We are billiard balls just knocking around and only scientists know how to put things right. The making of a new-fashioned priesthood.
BTW, you have no idea what I've studied and how I arrived at my ideas.
You just supported what I previously wrote about your erroneous notion of "all is quanta":
?Rich "No, nobody in physics supports your "all is quanta" claim. So the only ones setting physics back 100 years is you and that claim."
The problem is you keep saying Rich has a point, but you don't specify what that "point" is, and the point he's been largely and avidly making is the erroneous and unfounded one that "all is quanta."
That is true, but Science's descriptions of the world are certainly not to be unfoundedly rejected and saying that "all isn't quanta" doesn't mark one as a instinctive realist.
The point is that pretty much everyone agrees that materialization is swampy. It is archaic. Nothing can be said about anything without an observer. it is the mind that sees, hears, feels, smells and everyone's mind is different.
Mind is the memory that it is creating.
Oh boy. You're speaking from the Book of Rich again. Not only does not everyone agree that materialization is "swampy," but not everyone even knows what (or agrees on) what swampy means.
The only one who has been trying to keep a myth alive on this forum has been your trying to keep your myth of "all is quanta" alive. It should and would be dead if you didn't keep repeating it like a mantra.
The only one who has mentioned the nonsense of everything magically popping out of the brain has been you right there. And your silly "all is quanta" mantra nearly replicates that. No wonder it is considered greatly silly.
BTW, swampy is an image of muckiness, lack of clarity, muddy, incoherent. You know, like a swamp that you might have seen somewhere.
And you have no brand of science; just lovely fantasies from the Book of Rich.
https://phys.org/news/2014-01-discovery-quantum-vibrations-microtubules-corroborates.html
"However, evidence has now shown warm quantum coherence in plant photosynthesis, bird brain navigation, our sense of smell, and brain microtubules. The recent discovery of warm temperature quantum vibrations in microtubules inside brain neurons by the research group led by Anirban Bandyopadhyay, PhD, at the National Institute of Material Sciences in Tsukuba, Japan (and now at MIT), corroborates the pair's theory and suggests that EEG rhythms also derive from deeper level microtubule vibrations."
The Book of Rich says that quantum vibrations are the mind. This is what modern philosophy should be investigating. Ignore materialist science which has long been antiquated and should only be studied as a relic of the past.
Keep trying.
Those who cannot create relegate themselves to becoming stop signs.
https://physics.aps.org/articles/v8/6
"Fledgling theories of macrorealism may well form the basis of the next generation “upgrade” to quantum theory by setting the scale of the quantum-classical boundary. Thanks to the results of this experiment, we can be sure that the boundary cannot lie below the scale at which the cesium atom has been shown to behave like a wave. How high is this scale? A theoretical measure of macroscopicity [8] (see 18 April 2013 Synopsis) gives the cesium atom a modest ranking of 6.8, above the only other object tested with null measurements [5], but far below where most suspect the boundary lies. (Schrödinger’s cat is a 57.) In fact, matter-wave interferometry experiments have already shown interference fringes with Buckminsterfullerene molecules [9], boasting a rating as high as 12.
Have you discovered a derivation of qualia from quantum mechanics? (I suppose that would be something.)
The observer effect illustrates a difference between causation and interaction.
I haven't come across anything in quantum mechanics that necessitates what we think of a minds, nor derive minds, nor is incompatible with minds; maybe you've come across something otherwise?
You Aren't Living in a Hologram, Even if You Wish You Were (Ryan F Mandelbaum, Gizmodo, Jan 2017)
I am hoping that I am not the only person on this forum that observes the utter irony and pathos of such a statement.
Ah...and finally the banal, ambiguous, and nebulous personal attacks. Considering the "quality" of the ideas you do like, I consider your disdain for mine a compliment and a comfort.
The statement you quoted is referring to the latter.
Quoting jorndoe
Glad to hear. If you want more compliments just ask.
Sure.
What are the microbes swimming in? The cup. They see an ocean, we see a cup, but we are talking about the very same thing.
So we can conclude that there is a something that is an ocean to the microbes and a cup to us.
What is not justified is the conclusion that there is neither an ocean nor a cup.
Folk read a pop science book and walk away with the misunderstanding that what is true or false about he movement of objects in space is relative to your position and velocity. So Ann will see an object moving to the right, Beth will see the very same object moving to the left, and that there is no truth here, no fact of the matter.
But Special Relativity actually concludes the exact opposite. What is happening is the same for both Ann and Beth. Ann will see the object moving to the right, and also be able to calculate that Beth will see it moving to the left. Beth will see it moving to the left, and be able to calculate that Ann sees it moving to the right.
They see the very same thing in two different ways, and are able to conclude that they see the very saem thing in two different ways.
Hence Radical Interpretation.
One problem with this approach is that somehow, despite each of us being in our own subjective world, we manage to agree on the vast majority of things.
How does that happen?
There are similarities and differences that we share in our perceptions. Some may see one and someone else will see red. A keen eye may see a fish, and someone else will see nothing. When there is agreement it is learned agreement. Who knows what someone else is actually experiencing in their mind? We just agree that this thing we will call a fish.
Sheldrake explains the similarities by what calls Morphic Resonance which it's hierarchical in nature. The differences of course are the differences in our own skills in perception. Someone who practices specific skills of awareness will see and differentiate much more than one who doesn't.
Fleshing out the pertinent language game?
"We are swimming in the ocean" is true for microbes IFF microbes are swimming in the cup.
(adding all relevant velocities and such)
I didn't know microbes could talk.
Yeah. No need to pay any more attention to Rich.
It is idealism to a point, but one that cannot lead to solipsism.
This seems not a QM thing where consciousness is collapsing the complex wave function into cup. But a few million years ago, there was no Jupiter, there was not even particles. That Jupiter only exists now.
Somebody posted in my one thread that to exist is to be named. I brushed that off at first, but it has been working its way in all this time.
And again in Wittgenstein's rejection of both idealism and realism.
http://www.sheldrake.org/reactions/tedx-whitechapel-the-banned-talk
Partially in agreement. Something is out there. It is real. But it is the mind that experiences it as a form. What I am experiencing may be different than what someone else is experiencing, but via the learning and sharing process we agree on certain attributes, and agree to call it Jupiter.
With no one experiencing it, there is still something real out there, but it unknown what it is.
Precisely the reason analytical philosophy became a wasteland.
This is a strange turn in views that I have been recently exploring. I by no means assert any of this, and it probably runs into conflicts at some point, meaning it needs work.
It's a very subtle and complicated argument. My take on it is: there is an irreducibly subjective pole, aspect or element to reality. That is, there is no 'ultimate object' which exists 'independently' of all perception - which is pretty well what has been shown by quantum mechanics, it is the deep philosophical issue at the bottom of the whole 'observer problem'. People will go to amazing lengths to avoid this conclusion, including the 'Everett speculation'.
I really have no more time today, off for the weekend to stay in hotel with wife, she will not take kindly to me talking to my 'invisible friends', so, back much later.
Mind you, very few in these amateur fora have a grasp of the critical tools involved.
But that's just not the case. It is a metaphysical presumption made by one small group of physicists and not generally accepted.
Physicists and philosophers have been modifying their interpretations based upon the constant steam of new experimental results. Only a very tiny, tiny, tiny minority are still clinging to the 16th century materialistic view of the universe.
What I am denying is the elicit conclusion that this quantum mechanical stuff shows that "there is no 'ultimate object' which exists 'independently' of all perception".
But, to confuse you a bit more, I'll add that I agree that there is no "ultimate" object, and deny that this means that there are no objects.
Quantum physics itself is silent on what is being observed. Bohm's re-working of the classical Schrodinger equation, providing equivalent results (albeit more difficult to use) suggests that quanta is real and causal and probabilistic.
Using the realism of Bohm's equations we can avoid the many-many-many (onto infinity) worlds interpretation but are forced to accept non-locality (which Bohm named the quantum potential). Non-locality was a big show-stopper 50 years ago, but post-Bell it had been experimentally observed in one experiment after another in starts as large as molecules and and far away as satellite distances (the recent Chinese experiment).
So where does that leave us. Utilizing Bohm's and Bell's extraordinary accomplishments we can suggest a metaphysics that claims everything out there is real, entangled, and without boundaries. Each of us experience it via our very real mind/consciousness. However, how we experience it is internal and can only be known to the individual.
Via sharing experiences we learn to call similar things with the same name. This is done by consensus. However, calling something by the same name does not mean that internally we are experiencing the same thing. There is no way to share actual memory (though some twins claim they can).
Hence, that mind is integral in formation of the experience does not mean that there is nothing real out there. It is just that the actual form (e.g. the rotating teacup) must necessarily involve the mind, because that is the only way to access it, and in the process modifying it. Everything is entangled. This is the huge change introduced by quantum theory. Entanglement and non-locality. This had to be fully digested by any metaphysical model.
Quoting Rich
So we agree to ignore the many-worlds interpretation. We will for now set aside the other interpretations. Our difference is that between the Copenhagen and the von Neumann. That is, is it the consciousness of the experimenter that collapses the wave function?
It comes down to wether the wave collapses when it makes a difference, or when consciousness intervenes.
Now I am happy to admit that at this stage we do not know which interpretation is correct. But it is important to note that the von Neumann interpretation is far form the most widely accepted.
What I object to is the use of the von Neumann interpretation as a justification for dualism. There is a circularity in using the von Neumann account to justify a belief in dualism, when the preference for the von Neumann account is based not on empirical evidence, but on a preference for dualism. One ought admit that one is accepting the von Neumann interpretation because one has a preference for dualism, not because it has better empirical support.
The speculations of physicist are just that: speculations.
Quoting Rich
This leads us to the notion of a private language, which has been thoroughly, and I think successfully criticised. Nor does this follow form what was said before.
THe thread on social construction might be the best place to continue this part of the discussion.
I am actually using the De Broglie/Bohm equations where there is no collapse. Everything is real. The election might be considered a perturbation if the quantum potential wave, thus avoiding all issues associated with the Copenhagen collapse.
Hence, we have a real world out there that is being sensed by a real observer. The new element, a necessary and crucial aspect of quantum theory, is that there is absolutely no way to separate the observer from what is being observed, and that the observation itself changes something. The internal experience necessarily is different than what is out there and different for each observer.
Everything is real but different. Communication of experiences creates consensus.
So you want to use pilot-wave theory?
Bohm-Hiley went in to develop a metaphysics that they called the Implicate Order that can be considered holographic in nature with consciousness embedded in the Implicate Order.
The beauty of Bohm's approach is that everything is real and it also predicted noon-locality which was subsequently experimently observed. Quite a feat.
I think that that's a less than useful way to look at the world.
Not at all! The idea of there being an ultimate point-particle, the indivisible atom, was indubitably undermined by the discoveries of quantum mechanics. 'Atom' as you know literally means 'uncuttable' or 'indivisible'; metaphysically, 'the atom' was the 'uncreated' in the sense of being the unchangeable substratum of changeable phenomena. That was always the basis of philosophical materialism. And it was that that got torpedoed by uncertainty and non-locality.
So the man in the street might colloquially accept that 'everything is made of atoms' and in some sense, that is true - but not in any ultimate sense. We now know that most of what we're made out of was churned out of exploding stars ('we are stardust' ~ Joni Mitchell). So what is the 'uncaused cause' now that the 'indivisible particle' is no more? Not claiming to have an answer to that, just to acknowledge that it's still a question.
That's not what is at issue. The assertion that 'nothing is real' is nihilism pure and simple. You general attitude seems to be realism. There are alternatives to both. But in your case, it always seems to end up with 'the cup really is in the cupboard.'
I honestly can't see any sense in which the cup is not in the cupboard. And I am completely familiar with all the idealist and anti-realist arguments; appeals to QM and so on. I even used to subscribe to them; but now I believe that they are really, at worst, incoherent, and at best, beside the point.
Source: https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl
[sup](Here skepticism should perhaps be read as parsimonious skepticism, albeit not radical.)[/sup]
In an ontological sense, such idealism will have it that the Moon is not actually the Moon, but rather is Moon-experiences. There may be all kinds of chatter about the Moon as if it's real, but, on idealism, I'm led to understand that experiencing the Moon cannot be separated from the experiencer (even in principle), such chatting is like a kind of pretense (maybe even hypostatization), or just linguistic practice perhaps. So there's no mind-independent Moon as such, it's dissipated according to this inquiry, rather it's relata among the experience (e.g. qualia, phenomenological) and the experiencer (the self). All I (the self) can ever know is the experience, and so that's where the road ends, more or less literally. The Moon = those Moon-experiences.
It's been discussed plenty, and remains sort of strangely artificial. OK, maybe "artificial" isn't the right word, but you catch my drift. Sure is self-elevating. I'm not omniscient, since otherwise I'd know that I were. I don't have to experience someone else's self-awareness to take it's independent existence for granted; I don't have to become the Moon to take it's independent existence for granted; I learn of both much the same way, by interaction, observation, whatever.
I'm aware of Hameroff's Orch-OR. Wave-function collapse does not take consciousness. But of course mind is also part of the world per se, whatever exactly it all may be. As mentioned, hijacking quantumatics for idealism is not philosophy, neither scientific.
Is “information is physical” contentful? (Scott Aaronson, Jul 2017)
Seven wonders of the quantum world (Michael Brooks, New Scientist)
Debates with Banno inevitably end up with long discussions about The Real Cup. It's a placeholder for 'reality' itself but when you discuss it in those quotidian terms it kind of demystifies it all in advance.
I am quite happy to be part of the 4%. It always been the case that few are interested in, or understand, philosophical analysis.
There is something there, but it is the mind that forms the cup. You must realized that that seemingly solid object is not that at all when peering into it. Ditto for the water it seemingly carries. It is this transformation from a dynamic wave, that exhibits non-locality (quantum effects have now been observed at the molecular level), to something that feels solid and how is it formed that lies at the crux of philosophical question. One has to dig deeply and not be so quick to jump the chasm looking for a quick and easy answer. Observation is active and entangled. It cannot be considered passive in the process.
Thanks a lot, dude. :(
SP says that for an object in a void there is no true statement about its motion. Period.
Special relativity concludes that Ann and Beth will have different experiences, due to the speed of light, but mathematically the two experiences can be transformed between the two frames of reference. Basically it is a scientific synchronization issue, but what is philosophically interesting is the actual experiences are different.
Similarly, in General Relativity, the person in motion will feel acceleration.
Evidence of this permanence would be what is called inherited traits, innate skills, special unexplainable abilities, etc.
Huh? The microworld is unnatural or something? :o
Quoting jorndoe
Isn't that Galilean invariance? (SP = special relativity?)
There are a few things, like the equivalence principle and constant light speed, playing roles in relativity.
Quoting Rich
What are you trying to convey? Quantumatics isn't science? :o
Right. Speaking of constant motion typically requires two objects, moving relative to one another. Acceleration does not, since one can determine a force, like gravity, while accelerating. The same holds for rotation.
I still don't agre that objects are all in the mind. The mind plays a foundational role in 'constructing' or 'creating' objects. It is this role which is typically forgotten or neglected by scientific realism, and it is also this 'constructive' role that is suggested by the 'observer problem' in quantum mechanics.
'Seemingly solid objects' are actually solid, in that if one is shot by a solid bullet, the encounter will be fatal. But the existence of objects still arises out of the relationship or interplay between subject and object, and experience always consists of both aspects. It's simply that realists believe that you can take the subject out of the picture,and it still continues to exist as if there were someone in it. That is what is at issue.
As I said in my response, the object that exists in some quantum state is real. But until it interacts with the observer ( there had to be an observer of some sort) there is no bullet. It is the interaction that somehow makes this thing that is mostly empty space, into something that feels very solid and deadly to the observer. The mind had to be involved involved in the "discovery". My use of mind is very expansive. I'm not relegating it to some neurons firing off in the brain.
That ain't right. Both Ann and Beth can make true statements, and the transformations Einstein developed show us that they are describing the very same thing.
And that's the philosophical relevance here - that apparently different or contradictory statements can sometimes be shown to be saying much the same thing, given an appropriate transformation. Davidson offers T-sentences.
I suppose that the approach you are taking is fine, so long as it is presented as speculative, and not as a consensus view among physicist. Ta least you have shown some knowledge of physics, a rare thing hereabouts.
So perhaps we could again look at reincarnation. Your view is that memories, along with everything else, might be stored hologramaticaly?
To be sure it is highly speculative. There are reasons I chose this model, primary because it keeps everything real. I do not like illusions as an answer for anything. For me, of it is there and then it is real.
Quoting Banno
Yes. I chose this viewpoint because all the pieces seem to fit. Interestingly, I ran across an interview by Sheeran today where he describes his viewpoint which is very similar to mine. Not surprisingly he related that he is also influenced by Bergson.
I think the cup is a "placeholder" for empirical reality not for reality in itself. Kant, for example, would entirely agree that the (empirical) cup is in the cupboard. But he also might say ( if he were around today) that the agglomeration of particles, or the web of energetic interactions that makes up the cup is 'in' the agglomeration of particles or energetic relations that constitutes the cupboard. All this talk, however arcane it might become, is empirical talk, though.
What could it even mean to ask if the noumenal cup, the cup in itself, is in the cupboard, though? To ask such questions is to push the bounds of coherence. I think the only possible answer to that kind of question would be the advaitic one: 'the cup is both in the cupboard and not in the cupboard, and is neither in the cupboard nor not in the cupboard'.
Humans always come back to trying to answer such questions in terms of something they are familiar with (the empirical). So Rich, for example, wants to say the noumena, reality in itself, is a hologram. This is just as incoherent as saying it is a cup, or a molecule, or energy, or mind. I think questions about noumena have no sense (by definition only the empirical has sense) and thinking about it in terms of the empirical just makes no sense at all.
So, I prefer to think of the noumenal as spirit, because spirit has no familiar sense. (That's why I commented jokingly earlier that the cup is in the cupboard in spirit). Spirit is thus something prior to being, or it is being otherwise than the empirical. But then if you ask the question about whether spirit is real, whether it really exists, you are back into incoherence again, because you are thinking in empirical terms when you ask such questions.
The other side of this is that we are forced to think of things in themselves because we can imagine things being there when no one is experiencing them; in fact we cannot doubt that they are. Empirical objects must be, according to our invariable experience, there when no one experiences them; otherwise our whole sense of a shared world would become incoherent. So, I think that logically the thing in itself is the empirical object as unexperienced and the noumena is 'something else we know not what'.
I am not sure what "4%" you are referring to. Is it philosophers or perhaps analytic philosophers, or do you mean '4% of philosophers'?
Not at all. The macro reveals the micro, but it takes some creative intuition to bridge the gap. It is a continuum without gaps. Everything must spiral together without gaps.
This is all nothing more than empirical talk. What is the mind? How does it construct the cup? Any cogent answer you give cannot be anything more than an empirical answer in terms of light, retinas, optic nerves, visual cortices and so on.
Rich, I have no idea what you are talking about. Such talk cannot be anything more than a kind of evocation of the poetic imagination; which is all fine in its place, but it really tells us nothing in any propositional sense.
Quoting John
I would instead say that the question is without a sense; it is an example of language pushed too far. The "thing-in-itself" can have no use in a language game, except for confusing idealists.
The cup and the hologram are likewise the same, given the appropriate transformations.
The hologram theory does not cause the cup to cease to be.
Yes, I think what I said pretty much agrees with this. I do allow though for the non-propositional advaitic kinds of answers to open up spaces of intuitive or imaginative realization which cannot be explicated in propositional terms. "Of that whereof we cannot (propositionally) speak we must remain silent". ( Brackets mine). So,"silence" then, only in the empirical, not the poetic, or the theological, field.
You are not talking about anything in any propositional sense; so I don't believe you know what you are talking about either. If you did you could explain it all clearly in understandable terms. What you have are merely poetic intimations; which is all fine; but they do not yield anything that could be argued about.
I think that dubious. Help me.
If I take the cup and put it into the cupboard, are you saying that when I close the door it ceases to be a cup?
I agree; and I do think that discussion of, for example, aesthetic or theological ideas, can be very stimulating and fruitful. I read Bohm many years ago, and I liked his ideas about the implicate order; they are very original and stimulating. What I don't think is that we can sensibly argue that reality is or is not like this or that, unless we are talking about empirical reality; the shared world of intersubjective experience. This wanting to argue about how things "ultimately" are is a cause of great problems for human beings in senseless clashes of ideologies and religious fundamentalisms.
After a good little talk, yes!
Can you think of any way of testing the holographic model?
It's an important point. I don't see why it can't be both a cup and a quantum thingy.
This philosopher follows the topic closely and he does answer contact email. I've been too busy lately with the arts and haven't followed recent research closely.
http://www.stephenerobbins.com
It's about what counts as a simple, as not being composite, elemental. It shows - at least to my satisfaction - that what counts as a simple is decided by us, basically by using language.
So my view is that quantum thingies do not count as being more elemental than, say, cups - except if we so decide, for the purposes of doing physics on the one hand, and doing the washing up on the other.
I don't see why we must make that conclusion.
I agree. There are lots of possibilities to consider in different contexts. Hopefully some young, eager beaver philosophers will investigate this model and come up with some new ideas. It is rich with possibilities.
But I'm not sure that this is a physical question, so much as a philosophical one.
My argument is that, contra , it is an abuse of language to say that we cannot know that the cup we just put in the cupboard is still a cup.
@John - reply later, I'm sitting in my car posting via iPhone.
I might agree, and add that that's a good thing. Philosophy is tangled words.
Philosophy is often difficult to fathom, but that doesn't mean it's 'tangled'.
Quoting John
It all goes back to the ruminations of the difference between reality and appearance. If there is no difference, then philosophy is an entirely pointless discipline.
But it's also fundamental to philosophy and science. If there is no ultimate truth - well, that itself then becomes a kind of ultimate truth, namely that of relativism and ultimately nihilism, also, as Nietzsche foresaw.
I indeed do believe there is an ultimate truth but that this is a very difficult idea to articulate or consider. Any kind of moral or philosophical absolute has to be more than simply a scientific hypothesis - I mean, there are some some absolutes in science, perhaps, like the speed of light. But from the perspective of philosophy, which is concerned with existential matters - the nature of existence - such scientific absolutes may not themselves have any ultimate significance.
I think the belief there is an absolute, or that there are moral absolutes, has to be anchored in some manner of religious conviction. That doesn't mean 'blind faith' or clinging to a dogmatic formulation, it is quite feasible to argue for such convictions on a rational basis (something I often try to do, with greater or lesser degrees of success). But, within the Western philosophical tradition, the belief in a philosophical absolute or supreme good, is represented in such ideas as the Good in Plato, or the One, in neo-platonism, much of which was subsequently incorporated into Western theology. And I still think the mainstream of Western philosophy holds such a conviction; its abandonment by scientific materialism, is because materialism is an outgrowth or offshoot of the Western tradition proper.
So, don't agree in the least that the concern for ultimate truths is only the cause of ideological conflict or fundamentalism. It can be, but it doesn't have to be. That's one of the factors that attracts me to Buddhism, in particular - it is able to accomodate a multi-perspectival understanding of reality, whilst at the same time pointing to an ultimate good, namely, Nirv??a, the ending of sorrow - and of continual re-birth, to bring the point back to the OP.
Not straight up familiar, but I took the book from the shelf and read the two passages, and I agree with the analysis there.
I think it does depend on perspective what is thought as simple and what composite. The cup might be thought to be composed of "quantum thingies", and we might think of the cup as the complex and the quanta as the simple, or conversely we might think of the complex quantum configuration as the complex and the cup as the simple thing we see, and hold and drink out of..
I don't think the notion of there being an absolute truth is fundamental to science; and I would say it is not fundamental to all philosophy, either. It might be fundamental to some philosophy. What is meant by "absolute truth" though? Do you mean to say that there is an absolute discursive truth? I could not agree with that; I think all discursive truth is relative to context as the Wittgenstein passages Banno referred to shew.
On the other hand I think there are ideas of moral, aesthetic and even intellectual perfection; but they cannot ever be reached; they are rather ideals to move towards in the wise living of better and ever better lives. To me this is the essence of Christianity. It seems to be the only religion to emphasize individual conscience and the disposition of repentance, and the love that grows from these, over precepts and laws.
So, I agree that moral or philosophical "absolutes" cannot be "scientific hypotheses". I think to refer to them as "absolutes' suggests the unforgiving rigidity of a law that must be obeyed; it seems better to conceive of them as perfections that guide our lives in different ways for each individual, rather than as absolutes that are to be rigidly followed, and at great cost to ourselves if we don't.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't say that the concern for ultimate truths is the cause of ideological conflict or fundamentalism at all. I say that the misunderstanding of the idea of ultimate truth, thinking that it can be discursively formulated, is the cause. The concern for goodness, beauty and truth is the greatest part of humanity; without that we would be nothing.
There is certainly a logical distinction between appearance and reality. But you always seem to be the one of the ones arguing that we cannot know anything beyond appearances, which is a bit confusing given what you are saying here, to say the least.
For me one purpose of philosophy is to clarify our ideas about the distinctions between appearance and reality. Why can't we say that we know reality in appearances ('appearances' taken in the very broadest sense)? Understood this way the question becomes: 'How else could we know reality?'.
That's because there needs to be some distinction between the scientific and (for want of a better word) the spiritual. I don't say we can't know anything beyond appearances, but that the knowledge we have of what is 'beyond appearance' is of a different kind to 'empirical knowledge'.
I saw Dawkins' latest book the other day which he says is about being a 'passionate rationalist'. In fact, he's not a rationalist at all, in the philosophical sense. The origins of philosophical rationalism were the Parmenides, Pythagoras and Plato, and the like. That is very much the tradition of which Spinoza was heir.
Dawkins, et al, are nothing whatever like that. Their idea of rationalism comprises scientific facts, the kinds of things that are demonstrable in empirical terms. So they're actually not rationalists, but 'tangibalists' - the only kinds of truths they're interested in is the kind you can see through a microscope or a telescope.
But there is no end of things that can be discovered by such means. Furthermore such discoveries may have many pragmatic benefits (although also perils, like the discovery of atomic weapons). But they're not able to reveal the kinds of truths that I think you're referring to here:
Quoting John
So, how many folks do you think are conscientiously occupied with 'goodness truth and beauty'? And where in the school curriculum are such ideas taught nowadays? These form a part of all classical cultures, and they're seriously undermined and eroded by scientific materialism and global capitalist culture.
Quoting John
The major point is that, since Galileo's time - the advent of modernity - we conceive of the nature of reality as something separate from us, something which is 'objectively the case', which is what the 'scientific worldview' purportedly guides us towards. But that is rooted in an existential condition which we're now so deeply embedded in, we're not aware of it. Waking up to that requires a different mode of being in the world. (That is the subject of Paul Tyson's book, Defragmenting Modernity, which is on my current titles list. It's also the subject of Owen Barfield's Saving the Appearances).
It would take a long time to find the post, but earlier in this topic, someone asked what it is that carries through to the next life in reincarnation.
Obviously, without continuity of experience, there'd be no reincarnation.
Additionally, all suggestions about reincarnation include the suggestion that some basic, deep attributes, inclinations, attitudes remain.
Yes, some suggest that detailed memories of specific events in a past life can be remembered. Fewer people agree with that suggestion.
This post isn't intended to express advocacy of a position. ...just to clarify what reincarnation would entail, as regards what carries through to the next life.
By the way, how would your basic and deep attributes, tendencies and inclinations affect your next life, in the reincarnation-mode that I've suggested?
Well, for one thing:
Whatever such deep, basic tendencies and inclinations you have, they could be heriditary. Therefore, aren't there more life-experience possibility-stories--or might there not be a better-matched one--in which you inherited those deep, basic attributes?
That could remain so, even if your ingrained attributes are, in this life, the result of habitual behavior instead of heredity.
As I mentioned, it's said that:
What you are is what you get.
If you're like that, that could imply that your parents, and maybe even the society at large, is like that.
And, if such a new life-experience possibility-story is favored, by your deep and basic attributes, then
they influence the world that you'll be born into.
You might say that your next parentage would be particularly, directly affected. But isn't the character and quality of your parents particularly important, as an environmental factor in your chances in life?
(I could testify to that :) )
I'm not saying that that's the only way that your vasanas influence your next life. I only meant to name one possible effect.
Michael Ossipoff
I don't disagree with this, but I see materialism not as being a result of science as such, but as being a result of philosophical empiricism and rationalism, and, really, pragmatism, as well. Spinoza's, Kant's, Hegel's and Peirce's ideas all lead inexorably to atheism if followed to their logical conclusions, even if their author's did not intend this. Hume's ideas do also, but he probably would have applauded that. Feeling ourselves as alienated from nature we have become focused on personal advantage and stimulation; in other words we have become consumers. Of course, science has helped to accelerate technology, enabling our consumerism to become novel, exciting and thus terribly beguiling.
There is a point to rationalism; which is that only rational knowledge can be shared discursively and intersubjectively corroborated, either in terms of deductive logic or empirical observation and inductive inference. The problem with rationailsm is the idea that "The rational is the real" (Hegel). Rationality cannot get a purchase on the Real except insofar as it is given to empirical observation. The Real may only be evoked by poetry, music, the visual arts and religion and mysticism. But these domains do not produce content which can really be the subject of propositional argumentation; which is most of what philosophy consists in these days. I see philosophy as being more of an art than a science; with its 'scientific' dimension being confined to the logical clarification of ideas and ensuring the logical consistency of conclusions with premises, and so on. Even if we are going to talk about God we must do so without contradicting ourselves, except in the advaitic and catuskotic kinds of exercises of plurivalent logic.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree that a mode of being in the world other than the dualistic, dialectical mode of subject/object is needed. In fact we are always already in a non-dual mode of being, and it is only our analyses, that both presume and demand that reality must conform to thought, that hoodwink us into thinking of ourselves as being separate from nature.
I read Barfield's book a few years ago, and I thought it was pretty good,
You might find this article interesting: https://aeon.co/essays/the-logic-of-buddhist-philosophy-goes-beyond-simple-truth
Some recent research:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170130083231.htm
"A UK, Canadian and Italian study has provided what researchers believe is the first observational evidence that our universe could be a vast and complex hologram. Theoretical physicists and astrophysicists, investigating irregularities in the cosmic microwave background (the 'afterglow' of the Big Bang), have found there is substantial evidence supporting a holographic explanation of the universe -- in fact, as much as there is for the traditional explanation of these irregularities using the theory of cosmic inflation."
The core self would be memory which can be simply the fabric of the mind/holographic nature of life. Yes, it would be exactly like a dream.
But as Buddhism developed, it became obvious that the problem of 'agent and action' could not be so easily solved. Hence the development of the notion of the unconscious in Buddhism, which B Allan Wallace would no doubt be expert in.
Must the first-person perspective be moving, or just everything it observes?
From a strictly empirical perspective, "reincarnation", or perhaps rather "immortality", seems to be nothing more than the assumption of perpetually observed change.
I agree that continuity is the critical factor here. If we stipulate that consciousness, and all different states of consciousness are properties of an individual, a self, and separate "self" from "soul", then we can assign continuity to the soul, and allow that the soul continues while the "self", being associated with the thing, the body has a beginning and ending. So, in your example of sleeping, the continuity of a particular "state of consciousness" is broken by the person going into another state of consciousness. But all different states of consciousness are properties of that individual self which maintains continuities through those different states. Now, if we allow that the soul maintains continuity, and that the self is a property of the soul like consciousness is a property of the self, we look at the individual living beings, the selves, as analogous to the particular states of consciousness, which are broken and discontinuous, while the soul provides a continuous existence.
The issue appears to be that people want to think of reincarnation as separating an individual's consciousness from that individual's self, allowing the consciousness to pass from one self to another. But consciousness is inherently dependent on the existence of the self. So to allow for reincarnation we have to go beyond the existence of the self, to the soul itself, and establish the continuity of the soul, which is something other than the self.
Observation can move to nothing (as it does while asleep and not dreaming), but as long as memory is preserved memory can be once again be reawakened. This happens every day of our lives. In birth/death/birth cycles one can say that inherited characteristics, innate skills, inborn traits are preserved memories that are reawakened. Memory is the essence of who we are but there is movement and creative intelligence (Bergson,'s Elan Vital) that gives it life. It is possible to think of both as being persistent, evolving through duration (real time).
Are states of "unconsciousness" hypotheses about the past, or are states of unconsciousness empirical observations concerning the present, and hence a contradiction?
Let's first discard the irrelevant case: If one is able to remember vague details of being asleep upon waking, then presumably one wouldn't want to assert being unconscious in a qualitative sense. Instead, one might speak of recalling a diminished state of consciousness, which is only to speak of recalling a diminished state of attention as evidenced by (or perhaps, defined by) a presently vague recollection of having slept.
Only if one cannot recall anything about being asleep upon waking, might one say that they were truly and qualitatively "unconscious" then. But how does one differentiate an assertion of being unconscious in the past, from being in a present state of amnesia?
The temporal realist will want to insist that they were truly unconscious in the past, perhaps by saying "I recall being unconscious". But the temporal anti-realist will then respond "how do you 'know' you were unconscious in the past? To which the realist can only respond "because i presently experience having no recollection" - which is really only to assert that their current experiences do not involve memories of sleeping.
I agree with your analysis. I can only respond by saying that I had a few experiences in my life when I fell into a non-memory state (unconscious) only to wake up into a memory state. This particular type of reawakening deserves much deeper philosophical exploration.
Being the object of perception is not grounds for individuation. Individuation is something we do, not something we see.
Further, if self is always in a state of flux, the an unchanging self is oxymoronic.
So there remain issues with the coherence of that approach.
Indeed, that is the issue.
The human being is already a harmonised unity of millions of sub-processes as it is. That is the issue of the 'subjective unity of perception'. What it is that enables the unity and simplicity of the self, amongst the torrent of sensory information that it is absorbing, and never-ceasing change, growth and death of the metabolism, is, some would aver, 'the soul'. (Buddhists, however, would not concur.)
Banno is the reincarnation of Napoleon in the sense that both of those individuals share the same subject of experience. Do you have a problem with this definition? You may believe that they are both not the same "person" because you have a particular idea of what a "person" should be, but that just means that reincarnation doesn't involve a persistence of personhood.
I've no idea what it might mean.
The same subject who had Napoleon's experiences now has Banno's experiences. I honestly have no idea what's not to get about that.
Then we have nothing to discuss.
Or perhaps you might explain what a subject is?
The entity that is having the experience. As for what that entity is exactly, that is something I cannot answer, as that is linked to the problems of understanding consciousness. But that doesn't stop us from understanding the former so I really don't see what you're on about.
If you think I did, you have some explaining to do.
I don't, but I thought our conversation was about defining reincarnation.
What about our conversation? Are you doubting whether or not we are having a discussion right now?
Quoting Banno
You're right, there isn't. I've no idea what you're trying to say and it seems like you're deliberately being obtuse.