Re: Mind Is Brain!! Is Mind Is Brain??
Posted: Mon Mar 18, 2013 12:15 am
I'll make my comment more directly applicable to the question at hand.
My claim (for which I have no real basis) is that, to the degree that one perceives emptiness directly, one is less able to claim confidently that matter gives rise to mind.
An "argument" I use with my reductionist friends goes something like this. Can you be sure that this isn't all just a dream? (No). So can you be confident about the actual existence or nature of any of the contents of the dream? What is a brain but a particular content (or more specifically, set of contents -- colors, textures, etc.) of this dream? But aren't you sure that awareness itself exists? Or if you'd prefer, equivalently, that something seems to be happening? So how can you be so utterly sure that something whose very existence is questionable is caused by something whose existence is not questionable?
The more astute amongst them might ask me to define "dream" or "illusion" at this point (since the common definition assumes that it's something caused by a brain), but of course this was never meant to be an analytical argument. The whole point was to get them to deeply probe the nature of experience directly -- sometimes for the first time. And when it becomes clear what it means for conventional reality to be an illusion (or like one, or potentially one), the arguing stops for a little while.
(That said, I don't know whether anything I've said has any basis in Buddhism. But I feel the Buddha would approve, in that it relies primarily on one's own direct investigation.)
My claim (for which I have no real basis) is that, to the degree that one perceives emptiness directly, one is less able to claim confidently that matter gives rise to mind.
An "argument" I use with my reductionist friends goes something like this. Can you be sure that this isn't all just a dream? (No). So can you be confident about the actual existence or nature of any of the contents of the dream? What is a brain but a particular content (or more specifically, set of contents -- colors, textures, etc.) of this dream? But aren't you sure that awareness itself exists? Or if you'd prefer, equivalently, that something seems to be happening? So how can you be so utterly sure that something whose very existence is questionable is caused by something whose existence is not questionable?
The more astute amongst them might ask me to define "dream" or "illusion" at this point (since the common definition assumes that it's something caused by a brain), but of course this was never meant to be an analytical argument. The whole point was to get them to deeply probe the nature of experience directly -- sometimes for the first time. And when it becomes clear what it means for conventional reality to be an illusion (or like one, or potentially one), the arguing stops for a little while.
(That said, I don't know whether anything I've said has any basis in Buddhism. But I feel the Buddha would approve, in that it relies primarily on one's own direct investigation.)