"Neuroscience tells us the thing we take as our unified mind is an illusion, that our mind is not unified and can barely be said to “exist” at all. Our feeling of unity and control is a post-hoc confabulation and is easily fractured into separate parts. As revealed by scientific inquiry, what we call a mind (or a self, or a soul) is actually something that changes so much and is so uncertain that our pre-scientific language struggles to find meaning."
Yeah, and did you know that scientists say that everything is vibrations and energy and so clearly it's scientifically true that by chanting our vibrations change the world?
There's as much 'science' in what I just wrote as what I quoted.
EverAndAnon Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > There's as much 'science' in what I just wrote as > what I quoted.
Yes, there are reasons to speculate about connections in science and consciousness, but Buddhism is not necessarily a more profound source than most philosophies. I think there is a lot of popularizing it because of some teachings that seem to imply a quantum connection if you view conscious measurement as necessary for the role of observer. Plenty of interpretations (mathematical forms) of Q.M. do not need the observer to accurately predict outcomes.
The idea of conscious observer may merely result from the idea that our understanding of outcomes requires us to have consciousness to understand the outcomes. Nothing mysterious about that. It's like saying, you have to have eyeballs to receive real images in the visual cortex. (or perhaps more aptly, the vice-versa.)
I think Decartes said it simply: I think, therefore I am. And yet, if in fact science shows that free will is an illusion, he and other philosophies of like manner may not have it quite right. The illusion idea may be that we are almost entirely acted upon in deterministic ways with the salt-n-pepper of random, stochastic quantum type fluctuations, which are what appear to give us enough mystery to make the determinism elusive, and create the illusion of free will.
No one really knows at this point.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/20/2011 09:43PM by Jesus Smith.
Dave the Atheist Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > My brain wants to explode every time I try to > decipher buddhist reincarnation.
Carl Sagan asked the Dalai Lama “What would you do if science were to prove without a doubt that there is no basis for reincarnation – that it does not exist?”
The Dalai Lama said, “We would abandon it. We would stop teaching it.”
First let me say that I'm not Buddhist. They have made interesting discoveries through the ages by means of intelligent observation. I mean, they had no laboratories for repeated experimentation.
I can't remember where I read this, but a science article claimed that we change out every atom in our physical body every seven years (if anyone knows more about this than I do, please comment). Yet we retain memories that come from a different atom set, as it were. It seems we are moving through matter in waves. We are either less than, or more than, material.
The Buddhists have said that what we think is reality is really more like a heat haze. It can't be captured.
Vladimir Nabokov wrote about a common cotton sock. It slides on to a foot, and it walks around all day. Later it falls on to a carpet, and it flies into a laundry hamper. It flits around from place to place, ending up in a dresser drawer, where it will await it's next use. All you have to do is spin time a little faster, and a sock is as animated as any living thing.
I don't believe in any religion, our existence is too strange to be defined.
Don Bagley Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I can't remember where I read this, but a science > article claimed that we change out every atom in > our physical body every seven years (if anyone > knows more about this than I do, please comment).
While there is significant rotation of material in the human body, there are cases in which there is no rotation. For example, diseases which have misfolded proteins in the extra-cellular membrane do not refresh. There are some parts of cells that do not refresh as well.There are some that refresh very quickly, but neither kind retain anything like memory in the mind.
> Yet we retain memories that come from a different > atom set, as it were. It seems we are moving > through matter in waves. We are either less than, > or more than, material.
This statement is not necessarily a result of material refresh. Memories are not from the exact, specific, particular set of atoms. It is the specific arrangement and dynamic creation of electro-chemical (or electromagnetic) energy (depending on which view of learning you subscribe to). that arrangement is very precisely duplicated via normal cellular process. While in a sense, there are matter waves all around us (all matter is at some level wave-like), this is not the same thing as material refresh. I don't understand what you really meant by we are either less than or more than material.
> The Buddhists have said that what we think is > reality is really more like a heat haze. It can't > be captured.
Huh? A "heat haze"? You mean like the mirage? The change in refractive index due to thermal gradients close to the earth surface? that's like our thoughts? Not captured? This phenomenon can be created in a lab easily.
> > Vladimir Nabokov wrote about a common cotton sock. > It slides on to a foot, and it walks around all > day. Later it falls on to a carpet, and it flies > into a laundry hamper. It flits around from place > to place, ending up in a dresser drawer, where it > will await it's next use. All you have to do is > spin time a little faster, and a sock is as > animated as any living thing.
Lol. What acts on the sock? Does it have organized electro-chemical reaction and neuromuscular junctions? I don't think this is even close to the same. Normally inanimate things are acted upon by things that act. That does not make inanimate become life.
> > I can't remember where I read this, but a science > article claimed that we change out every atom in > our physical body every seven years (if anyone > knows more about this than I do, please comment). > That's frequently said by non-scientists but is completely wrong. Much like the completely wrong notion that 'within seven years, ever cell in your body gets replaced'.
> > Yet we retain memories that come from a different > atom set, as it were. > So even if it was true that all your atoms got replaced, why would it matter which exact atoms are present in our body? Atoms don't have personalities, they're completely interchangeable.
> >It seems we are moving through matter in waves. > Why? Our way of moving doesn't seem even remotely wave-like. In fact, it's the complete opposite of wave-like.
> >We are either less than, or more than, material. > What's the definition of an inmaterial object? And what does it mean to be less than material as oppossed to being more than material?
Jesus Smith and EverAndAnon. Thanks for replying. A lot of what I said was literary conjecture, and I'm glad you replied. I'm not a mystic--I prefer science.
From what I've read, theorists consider consciousness to be sub-atomic.
As for Nabokov's sock, that is an allegory. Of course the sock is manipulated by a human, but the author has asked us to consider the sock on its own. It is an exercise of the imagination. Reality can look very different when you do that.
Question: do we not shed atoms through sweat and excretion? Doesn't the very marrow of our bones produce blood cells that are only temporarily in our bodies?
I don't think we store information the way computers do. It's not digital. We model our reality with impressions.
And I think it's a good analogy to the body. What animates (literally, "ensouls") and manipulates it? Again, an exercise of the imagination...
I take issue with the 'matter of fact' assertion that "Our own brains produce the thing we call the mind..." There is an 800-page book by Edward & Emily Kelly (both professors in the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia), "Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century" (2007), which demonstrates the inadequacy of this picture by assembling evidence for a variety of empirical phenomena which it cannot explain.
I looked at reviews. There seems to be a division of opinion between those that want to believe in more than materialism and those that are skeptical. Bottom line seems to be, the authors find several anecdotal evidence for supporting their irreducible claims (that there are phenomenon that can't be and never will be explained by a materialist view).
Skeptics seem to be charging them with loose definitions of what passes for evidence.
Oh no, Richard Foxe. We agree on something? I never would have thought. I have imagined you to be some kind of wild and dreamy person. But I have to say, at the end of the day, consciousness is hard to define, isn't it? It's not digital or binary; it's something other.
I think consciousness is hard if not impossible to define because it precedes all the words (and words are just symbols) that are used to define it. It can certainly operate without words (as it does in other species, and probably in humans most of the time).
Actually, I am a rather skeptical and wake-up-from-the-dream person...only I suspect that most of what our senses tell us (and the common interpretations of their data) IS a kind of dream. Funny that in a nighttime dream we seem to have these same senses, which tell us that what we're dreaming is real--that is, until we have a lucid dream!
It seems on the face of it that we do experience the same world through our senses, at least enough to talk about it and manipulate it. But if that were really true--if we really all did sense the same--would there be so much interpersonal friction, disagreement, arguing, alienation, war...?