The Buddha claimed to have direct insight into the workings of kamma, and he said this is potentially accessible to each one of us. As I am sure you know, this is in fact one of the three vijjas, “insights”, that constituted the Buddha’s awakening experience. So this ontology is not based on typical metaphysical speculation, but on experience.
Well, I don’t think this is the full picture. The EBT texts that deal with this, e.g. DN 27, seem to speak of the realms evolving first and then the beings being reborn there:
As the cosmos expands, sentient beings mostly pass away from that host of radiant deities and come back to this realm.
I am not sure how literally these descriptions should be taken, but I think they point to an interesting philosophical problem. Here are some musings.
One of the basic facts of our existence is that we live in a shared reality. This is so because we can meaningfully communicate about our sensory experiences. There is a strong, although not absolute, commonality in how we experience the world. Our individual ability to shape that shared experience is limited. Or at least that is how it seems in our human realm.
Now the fact that our experiences are shared can in principle be explained in a number of ways. The traditional western explanation is to bring in matter as an underlying reality, that is, the philosophy of physicalism. In this view, because our minds emerge from the same underlying physical properties, we have a shared experience of the world.
But this is not the only way to solve this problem. Another way is to postulate a world mind that we in some sense are part of, much as they do in Advaita Vedanta and historical Brahmanism. In fact all theistic religions could in principle explain our consensus reality in this way.
From a Buddhist point of view, neither of these explanations is satisfactory. We need to consider alternatives. One possibility is that our shared reality emerges from communicating about it. Our sensory perceptions are clearly shaped by our interactions with others, which may explain why we see the world in much the same way. This idea is strengthened if we bring in rebirth, which would mean that our shared reality has been created in this way over enormous spans of time.
It is also possible, I suppose, that mortal equivalents of a world mind might have a stabilising effect on the world. If we assume some sort of mind-to-mind interaction, then it is would not be too difficult to come up with a theory of how this might work. This could perhaps be seen as a watered down version of how a universal creator is responsible for consensus reality.
I want to make it clear, however, that I am not proposing that our reality is in any way fixed. According to the EBTs, e.g. DN 26, the realms of existence are themselves fluctuating. The human lifespan, for instance, is said to vary enormously from epoch to epoch. It is just that this variability manifests over enormous periods of time, and does not affect our shared experience of the world.
Also, I am not saying we do not have any effect on the world around us. I think we do. It is just that our individual influence and contribution is very small.
So far as I can see, all of this needs to be taken into account if we are going decide on the relationship between mind and matter. In the end, we might be better off leaving those leaves on the forest floor.
@sujato This answer was both inspiring and saddening.
I’ve just finished reading the articles you’ve linked. I’m not a specialist in the field, so it is always good to learn a little bit more. Do you realize those articles go against your argument? The studies indicate that the amygdala is indeed related to fear (in a way I was able to further understand, thanks ). And also the studies show that the hippocampus is related to memory, together with other important areas such as the neocortex.
Indeed, to say they are “related” is vague. But also it is a sign those guys are not jumping to false conclusions from the studies (such as confounding correlation with causation). But also those things are related in very fundamental ways. It is not like the relation between memory and, say, Mars. After the removal of both his hippocampi, Henry Molaison was not able to generate new episodic memories until the end of his life. But… it could be some sort of coincidence? Let’s grant that possibility.
I’ve had a frightening experience with memory loss at the beginning of this year. After getting an injection of the vitamin in a drugstore, I fainted due to the peak of adrenaline. Falling down, my head hit the ground in an area around the right temporal and the frontal lobe. Also, my labyrinth was all messed up, so I would continuously feel that I was falling. I “woke up” some 14 hours later, only to discover that actually I was never “sleeping”. During that time, my family told me, I lost a lot of old memories, and couldn’t form new episodic memories. I answered correctly to questions about my name for example but didn’t know about the death of my grandmother or my dog (who had died many years before that). And also I’d repeat things over and over. Probably I was conscious throughout the whole experience, but all my memory system was messed up so that later my experience (due to lack of recollection) was that I was unconscious the whole time. Fortunately, there was no permanent damage. The loss of memory was correlated but not caused by the trauma in the brain? Let’s grant that possibility here too.
This criticism about methodology is indeed very important! But those articles you linked are not arguing against psychology, social sciences, or medicine. The issue at stake is how to improve scientific study, not invalidate it in general. At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemics, I´ve watched some interviews with John Ioannidis, who works exactly arguing that most of the papers in the medical area have major methodological flaws. But he is very much an enthusiast of medicine and wants to improve the studies, not to undermine them. That’s the part of your response that saddened me. It seems like you would go as far as invalidating a whole field of science because it seems to disagree with how EBTs are generally interpreted. IMO that’s not a wise approach.
They teach us quite different things about the mind. But I love that you mentioned russian novels! I’d add Machado de Assis, a brazilian genius writer contemporary to Dostoyevski.
No one will argue against the fact that psychology and neuroscience are very new sciences. But they have had their own fantastic discoveries and innovations like bionic eyes for blind people to see, bionic arms and legs, techniques to cure chronic pain in phantom limbs (Ramachandran has written a delightful book about it), techniques to treat hemispatial neglect, to treat aphasia, etc.
That’s the inspiring part of what you wrote. Indeed, there is a limited amount of benefit that can come from individual treatment. Actually that’s also something I think we should all think about as Buddhists. I don’t know about Australia, but in Brazil, there is among Buddhists a tendency to disregard or bypass social issues and promote individual meditation practice as the one and only path for a healthy society.
I happen to be architect, so I’ve had the chance to be in touch a little bit with the discussions and actions about social justice related to urban planning wen I worked in some slums here.
Here you are pointing to the important fact that isolation and lack of meaning or sense of belonging are major causes of suffering nowadays. And that has to do with our socio-economic system, our history, etc.
If you are criticizing middle-class individualist ethics, we agree on that. But it’s not only people with money who suffer mental illness and can be benefited by the discoveries in the field of psychology. And also good urban planning and just access to resources won’t solve all of the people’s problems.
My mother works as a volunteer in a very interesting institution near a slum in her town, Laço. They treat hundreds of people who could not have access to expensive hospitals or clinics. Part of the treatment is giving them the chance of having a sense of community and not being so marginalized as most mentally ill people are. They have many simple activies together such as gardening, photography workshops, etc., All led and organized by themselves. And also they have access to individual psychological and psychiatric treatment.
That’s exactly the argument I used some years ago when debating this issue! (when I had a position mostly similar to yours). Firstly, I’m not arguing for a materialist interpretation of EBTs, but that EBTs are not necessarily against a view of the emergence of mind out of bodily properties. Those (EBT and emergentism) can be seen as two different frameworks in talking about the mind which are not contradictory with one another (in which case there is no need for us to argue against or even invalidate a whole field of science, as I did many times in the past and it seems like you are also doing).
And the lack of precedence is not an indication that an interpretation of EBTs should go for or against such theory about the mind. There are so many other things in contemporary culture which are new and with which Buddhists are just starting to think about and create dialogues! For example: the theory of evolution. It’s quite different from the myth presented in DN27. And there is no precedent about how was the dialogue with the theory of evolution in the past 2500 years, simply because the knowledge contained in the theory of evolution was not present until just recently.
That’s amazing ! I’ll create a new Q&A topic to ask some things about the translation which are not related to what we are discussing here.
Indeed. The Buddha doesn’t quite say that something or someone is reborn, but he clearly states that birth is conditioned by Kamma and that at the break up of the body, consciousness sustained by craving causes the consciousness of the new birth (like the example of the fire spread by air which we discussed above). Those elements that are being “transmitted” from one life to the next are not physical, but that does not mean they are independent of the physical or have any independent onthological existence (like a wave that exists without water). Much to the contrary, they are indicated in the suttas as dependent of physical conditions. To the point that orthodox Theravada interpretation is that a new life arises immediately after another one ends (which is not necessarily the one and only interpretation of EBTs, to be sure).
PS.: I’ve written “transmitted” because Buddha indicated to Sati that there is nothing being transmitted. It’s not the same consciousness which dies and rearises in a new life.
Disagreed. For the reason, I demonstrated above on the theory of evolution, as one example.
That’s what I suspect also. That all this talk about Buddhism being soteriological and not metaphysical are not endogenous to the EBTs, but a modern superimposition.
I believe Schmitthausen argues in the same direction. But in any case, that’s not an indication that EBTs imply necessarily an idealist metaphysics.
Do karma and rebirth really imply the view that physicalism is not true? Comparative example: does the fact that a wave is transmitted from one side of the pool to the other prove that wave is independent and doesn’t emerge from the interaction of water and wind?
Good point. And all the science about emergence of mind from bodily properties are about human and animal minds. There is no such scientifical analysis of formless or form realms. So that question is quite separate.
There is a post about the base of consciousness in arupadathu in which it is more throughouly discussed. But just to refer to EBTs: I’ve found a single sutta in which the Buddha talks about a wise person wondering that in formless realms beings are made of perception. There is no direct explanation about the issue, and the explanation of arupa samapattis says that although rupa is present, it is not experienced.
And as @sujato has indicated above here (or in the other topic?), consciousness in the formless realm is always dependent on rupa, even if it is only of the rupa of the previous life that caused it.
That’s interesting! But I don’t think EBTs go so far as supporting the idealist view that ends up in solipsism. Although phenomena are always referred to as subjective experiences, they are in the EBTs presented as also indicative of a reality that is outside of the individual subjective experience. It indicates a reality which is shared by many, and which according to Sarvastivada Abhidharma interpretation is the fruit of dominance (adhipatti-phala) of collective actions.
Yes. But that is not to blame psychologists or materialists. The fragmentation of society, lack of values that give purpose to life after the fall of Christianity, the industrial revolution, world wars, nuclear crisis, the capitalist ethics centered on work and production, economic crisis, the rise of nationalism, etc. There are just so many interrelated historical elements leading to where we are! It’s quite simplistic to say for example that climate change is to blame on physicalist philosophy. The most active environmentalist can also hold physicalist views and that wouldn’t affect his beliefs about the preservation of Earth’s ecosystem.
Indeed! But leaving those leaves on the forest would also mean to drop the view against any such interpretation about the relation of mind and matter. If the leave is in the forest, how can you say what it is not?
The critical thing to me is to be aware of the limits of a physicalist philosophy that denies the possibility of rebirth. This is really enough. I don’t think we need to come up with a precise philosophical position that fits the EBTs. We may just end up philosophising without end in sight, while Mara laughs his evil laughter at our expense. It is rather frightening to consider that the reason we are still here may well be that we have indulged too much in such discussions in the past. It really matters where we draw the line.
Kahneman would agree with you about the lack of rigor in psychology studies, in particular, inappropriate sample sizes. Perhaps that’s why he decided to focus on Economics, for which he won the Nobel Prize. Economics uses larger sample sizes.
Personally I think there is a theory of evolution of a different kind in the Suttas,
Through the round of countless births and deaths I have wandered without finding
the housebuilder I was seeking: born and suffering once again.
O housebuilder, now you are seen! You will not build the house again:
all your rafters have been broken, and the ridgepole has been destroyed,
my mind has reached the unconditioned, and craving’s end has been achieved Dhp
Bhikkhus, I do not see any other order of living beings so diversified as those in the animal realm. Even those beings in the animal realm have been diversified by the mind, yet the mind is even more diverse than those beings in the animal realm SN22.100
I see it like this. Just like with a river, over millions of years it carves out a hugely complex river valley. There may be many forces involved but mainly one force is responsible, gravity.
Mind is the forerunner, craving which delights now here now there is the creative principle, the builder, the architect. If indeed there is an correlation between brain and experience, that is how it has to be, to have this particular kind of material existence.
But science has said no such thing. Science has told us the physical workings of the brain and how if the brain is influenced within a certain way mind will be experienced in another way, but that doesn’t tell us that the mind emerges from matter. It tells us nothing about the mind at all really. Science can’t answer the problem of consciousness. It’s beyond it’s reach. Science can only tell us about functional consciousness. It can’t tell us anything about phenomenal consciousness.
Citation required! The body breaks up at death. The five aggregates continue.
My argument was this:
you claimed that “There is no big controversy in recognizing for example that the amygdala is related to the experience of fear, or that the hippocampus is involved in the formation of new episodic long term memory”
to claim that these things are “related” is true, but too vague to be a scientific claim.
if you make a more specific claim, it is more scientific, but it is no longer uncontroversial.
And that is what I was citing by pointing to these papers. This was the result of all of five minutes googling, so don’t expect an authoritative survey of the field! The state of psychologists today might be compared with pre-Gallilean physicists, who understood that there is a relation between weight and gravity, but beyond that, little was agreed or certain.
That sounds very distressing, for you and your family. My mother had a fugue state a few years ago, she lost several hours and came too wandering the streets.
I know. But I am. I think they are too invested in their fields to really grasp the implications of the science.
I am far from the first to have claimed this. In fact, the seeds of my skepticism were perhaps planted when I was a student in the mid-80s. Then, I read a paper—sorry I can’t recall any details, but it was a peer-reviewed paper in a major journal—that surveyed the state of the empirical support for the efficacy of psychological treatments, and concluded that there wasn’t any. This paper was following up a similar survey that had been done in the 60s with similar results. And it pointed out that nobody had meaningfully responded to the methodological and other critiques of the earlier paper, they had just … kept on.
That’s their issue. But it’s not mine. My problem is quite different. I want to understand how it can be that a society so advanced as to produce nuclear weapons, internet, and space travel continues to ravage the environment so much that is no longer able to even promise its children that they will have air to breathe or water to drink. And the best answer that I can see is that our physical sciences have totally outstripped our culture and ethics and emotions. And I fear that continuing to invest in the same ideologies that have led us to this (guestures vaguely around) only guarantees more of the same.
Oh, pick me, I will! They are older than nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, relativity, genetics, and a dozen other fields of physical sciences that have reaped far more substantive results.
Sure, and look, I am as thrilled by these things as the next person. But these are invariably very specific and localized successes. You can’t point to a specific exception as evidence against a general hypothesis.
Indeed! Yet somehow, mental health services are overwhelmingly provided for the wealthy.
That sounds amazing, your mother must be an incredible person! And this is exactly the kind of thing that, in my view, is really effective in dealing with mental health issues. And incidentally, it is not too different from the role that monasteries play in traditional Buddhist cultures. You don’t need fMRI scans or big Pharma to do this, just simple kindness and community.
Blame isn’t the point, it’s about fixing the problem. And there’s nothing that indicates they’ll ever be more successful than they have been in the past, which is to say, not at all.
We keep on thinking that one day, if only we organize the right way, convince people the right way, do the right kind of study, isolate the right research project, that people will get it. But they don’t. And they never will. Why? Because you can’t engineer enlightenment. You can only grow it, slowly and uncertainly, through culture; which is arguably what culture is.
But this is a straw man argument, I never said anything like this.
To reiterate my argument. There is nothing in the history of the scientific study of psychology or other so-called soft sciences that indicates that they will ever have the kind of overwhelming success that the physical sciences have known, and upon which the prestige of the notion of “science” is built. For this reason, I see no reason to conclude that so-called scientific method is any better for learning about the mind than any other method. This being so, there is no reason to think that the soft sciences will ever catch up with the problems that application of the hard sciences has created since industrialization.
The success of soft sciences, such as it is, is easily explained simply by the fact that lots of smart people have worked on these problems for a long time. Imagine that we took a million intelligent people and got them to work on understanding the mind for a hundred years, but gave no methodology or resesearch theory. Surely they would come up with something!
Again, you misread me. I am dismissing a whole field of “science” because it is empirically a failure. It has nothing to do with the EBTs.
Show me that it has been empirically a success in a general sense, and I’ll happily change my views. But by psychology’s own measures, mental illness is on the rise.
The increase in mental health issues is most consistent between the 1930s and the early 1990s. There is little doubt that anxiety and depression increased between these decades.
Sorry if this has been mentioned and discussed previously, but how do you interpret this passage at DN 27 #10.5 to #10.10:
“As the cosmos expands, sentient beings mostly pass away from that host of radiant deities and come back to this realm.
Here they are mind-made (manomayā), feeding on rapture, self-luminous, moving through the sky, steadily glorious, and they remain like that for a very long time.
[…]
Now, one of those beings was reckless. Thinking, ‘Oh my, what might this be?’ they tasted the solid nectar with their finger.”
Here we have beings that are ‘mind-made’ but still manage to think and act. This implies that cognition and consciousness are not necessarily dependent on a physical brain.
And this is what all ontologies ultimately have to explain, physicalism only seems attractive because it provides a solid explanation of how this works, however, it utterly fails in explaining how consciousness arises from the physical and thus cannot be a correct account. Because of this, we now have some other options: neutral monism (sometimes called dual aspect monism), panpsychism, idealism, dualism, and some form of pluralism (more than two ontological primaries). The suttas don’t take a hard stance on these options, though I think one can rule out dualism.
This is generally termed Objective Idealism. Of course, you can have non-theistic accounts of this view, as well as more process based accounts of it. So I would not immediately rule out all options. A world mind need not be eternalistic and unchanging, it could be like a constantly changing ocean of mentatal processes, Schopenahuer’s Will comes to mind, or some interpretations of Nietzsche’s Will to Power.
This is the other idealist option, sometimes called “subjective” idealism. It’s an interesting view, but I think it has issues, because it seems like the external world is there whether or not there are minds thinking about it. After all, the universe existed for aeons before sentient beings arose. Of course, this theory is itself an abstraction which sentient beings came up with themselves, but its empirically supported. Also, one could at least conceive that there are universes without sentient beings, how are these possible? Indeed, the issue is so serious, that subjective idealists like Berkeley often have to posit a God to support the external world.
I think then that the most parsimonious explanation is that the universe is just a field or ocean of experience (which is not-self and always in flux). Physical objects and beings are just the congealed, individuated or hardened forms of these conscious patterns. This view is not alien to ancient India of course and can be seen in the Upanishads which influenced early Buddhism (and perhaps is referenced in some suttas, like Agañña). Of course, a Buddhist version of this would not be eternalistic or see the world mind as a God or as pure bliss and so on.
So far as I can see, all of this needs to be taken into account if we are going decide on the relationship between mind and matter. In the end, we might be better off leaving those leaves on the forest floor.
I am certainly sympathetic to this agnostic position, and it has been my position for some time. The reason I have recently changed my mind a little bit on this is that I have begun thinking how its possible that physicalism / materialism managed to become such a dominant force in our world. I think its because they were able to appropriate the mystique of the power of the physical sciences to explain the external world and make it seem like their metaphysics is allied with this (protip its not, its just a metaphysical interpretation of the scientific data). This is why I think I had such a hard time accepting rebirth and karma, and it was a huge obstacle for me. I think that providing a probable and rational metaphysics can help some people overcome that mystique. Now, I am not saying whatever metaphysics we come up with should be some absolute doctrinal view. It would just be a skillful way of saying: look, physicalism is just one metaphysical theory, and its not the best one either. There are other ways to interpret the world which are even better and which easily allow for karma and rebirth.
We just don’t live in ancient India anymore, our intellectual culture as it is at the moment is dominated (though this is slowly changing again) by physicalist presuppositions. So I am not sure if leaving all the same leaves the Buddha left on the forest floor is as skillful right now. That doesn’t mean we have to pick them up, but maybe we can lean down and take a peek and this might help with right view.
True, what I mean here was that, there doesn’t seem to be a mechanism for continuing on to a next life if physicalism is true, for once the body breaks up, these constituent parts are not going to be part of some life process that has continuity with the previous life.
I’m totally for an agnostic position! And my point is exactly about that: questioning assumptions about those leaves out there in the forest.
In the last few weeks, I’ve studying Pramana (Buddhist epistemology developed by Dignaga and Dharmakirti). One big use of Pramana is to attain a valid inferential cognition which is endowed with certainty. But until now it quite doesn’t do the trick for me, because there are a lot of assumptions which can’t be proven if a person is not omniscient (for example you can’t know that there is always fire when you see smoke, especially nowadays with all those chemical reactions of theatrical smoke).
Their description of the types of invalid cognition has helped me, though, especially to recognize when I’m just wondering about something I don’t understand, which helps me refrain from affirming anything about it.
So… as you can see. I have a loooooong way until the elimination of doubt.
Yes! It is important to identify physicalism as metaphysics. And not the only possible one nowadays.
That’s exactly what I’m questioning. Why do we assume that only because physicalism is prevalent nowadays, as part of contemporary culture, this means that there is no space for Kamma and rebirth? How can a nonbuddhist physicalist be so sure that there is no continuity of the aggregates carried on by physical causality? Did that person trace all the results of all actions of a dead person and their effects on all newborn beings? And how can anyone be so sure about any sort of metaphysics like idealism, dualism or physicalism, or just about things one doesn’t know directly, like the working of Kamma?
How can you be so sure?
Same question.
I can’t remember exactly which commentary explains this (from Buddhagosa? I can’t remember, sorry!): a mind-made body is interpreted as being a subtle form, so it is not immaterial. And it is created by the mind (thus the name).
Another one, “Made of perception”, is an expression of which I didn’t find any clarification yet.
Again you seem to be implying that this is the case because psychological studies are not helping. The success of the cognitive sciences shouldn’t be compared with such a different field as physics, and shouldn’t be measured by the amount of mental suffering present in the world.
It should be measured by there being an increase or no increase of knowledge regarding mental illness, regarding how the brain works, etc. In that regard, yes, there is a general increase of knowledge. It’s not about particular specific successful cases.
Do you realize the same rhetoric could be used against the Dhamma? Since the XIX century, there are more and more Dhamma teachings available in English. And more and more people follow the Three Jewels*. But still, there is more and more mental illness in the english-speaking world.
Do you see how this logic doesn’t really make sense to invalidate the Dhamma?
(* obs.: according to Pew Reserach Center, there are less and less Buddhists in total, year by year.)
Thanks. Indeed she is. And I agree with a lot of the criticism you have about the effectiveness of individual therapy without changing the living conditions of people. If the social structure produces mental illness, it’s quite hard o change that without changing that very social structure.
Because the very logic of the metaphysics of physicalism do not allow for rebirth and kamma, at least not in the way it is understood in early Buddhism. Physicalism holds that the mind is just what the brain does. Once one dies, the brain is no more, broken up into parts and eaten by animals and microbes. The classic view of rebirth and kamma hold that after death, there is some continuity of consciousness that takes up another body. But if consciousness is just a function of the brain, then nothing of it can move on, it is totally annihilated for that individual, since it is like the software running on a computer. Why is this so hard to understand? Let me turn this question around, how do you think its even possible for physicalism to accommodate for rebirth?
And how can anyone be so sure about any sort of metaphysics like idealism, dualism or physicalism, or just about things one doesn’t know directly, like the working of Kamma?
I never said that I am absolutely sure, I just think that non-physicalist theories like Idealism are more reasonable and have a better explanatory power than physicalism. Not only that, but it allows for rebirth and kamma, which physicalism does not.
The reason I think this is useful is that if we are going to reject physicalism, I think it is useful to have a basic theory of what a competing ontology could look like that also allows for kamma and rebirth. If we don’t, I fear kamma and rebirth will be hard to take seriously in certain quarters who already think physicalism provides the best ontological explanation.
The EBT don’t say that they are made of subtle matter but of mind. But even if we accept the explanation of the commentaries, then do you assume that they have a brain made of subtle matter, identical to the brain made of gross matter for us humans?
Even if they do, it would still mean that thinking and consciousness is not necessarily dependent on a gross physical/material brain. Doesn’t this prove that mind is not always an emergent property of the body? (unless you include the subtle material body in the generic term ‘body’… but in that case this goes beyond what scientific materialists state when they say that mind is an emergent property from the body ,i.e. the gross physical body).
PS: I might have missed your entire point, if so I’m sorry. I must say that your level of debate and philosophical references is way beyond my knowledge. Makes me think that I shouldn’t engage at all and just be a spectator
You are probably right. My personal experience, however, is quite different. I have never had a physicalist conviction, yet I felt a sense of validation when I came across the anti-physicalist arguments of David Chalmers, Thomas Nagel, and Bernardo Kastrup. To this extent I agree with your point. My problem arises when the same philosophers, especially Kastrup, try to produce a metaphysics of their own. Criticising an existing paradigm may be hard, but establishing a new philosophical outlook is immeasurably harder. You need to see the world in the right way, so as to base your speculations on something solid. Kastrup uses empirical evidence, internal coherence, and parsimony as some of the main criteria for his views. But these are only useful in so far as they properly and fully reflect reality. And from a Buddhist perspective, he fails this test.
The main problem is his postulation of a mind-at-large, which he seems to regard as a permanent backdrop to our individual experiences. He argues that this idea is parsimonious. Maybe, but parsimony only works if the theory fits reality. The most parsimonious theory of all is that there is nothing, yet that is clearly wrong. The lesson is that one should not lean too heavily on parsimony. From a Buddhist point of view, a permanent mind-at-large can never be experienced; moreover, it can be known through insight that such a thing cannot exist. Parsimonious or not, such fundamental insights need to be incorporated into any valid philosophy.
There are other lesser problems with Kastrup’s philosophy. His idea of dissociation explains individuation, but not how there can be continuity over many births. Perhaps his ideas can be tweaked to accommodate this, but that requires that he sees the necessity of doing so. Again, for your philosophy to reflect reality, you need to see the world in the right way.
Then there is the additional problem that even Buddhists often cannot agree on what Buddhism is. How are we to build a satisfactory philosophy based on divergent ideas of the world? I am afraid much time will be wasted. At the moment I prefer to remain philosophically agnostic.
The change seems to me to be quite fast, almost as if we are approaching a tipping point. I think a number of secular Buddhist, especially those who reject rebirth because they adhere to the physicalist paradigm, will soon be left behind, without a proper footing either in Buddhism or the new emerging philosophy. It shows the potential danger of being too wedded to the contemporary zeitgeist and not having enough appreciation for perennial wisdom. Like any generation, we are too hubristic, lazily thinking of ourselves as more evolved, rational, and enlightened than previous generations. More respect for the insights of past generations would serve us extremely well.
In a similar vein, it also makes me think about the danger of being the creator/spokesperson of a spiritual/philosophical movement (any movement): once one’s name becomes associated with a certain set of views, it must be incredibly hard to change one’s own view. That insight came to me about Stephen Batchelor a few years ago (I hope no one will mind me using him as an example). I suppose it would be hard for someone like him, who’s name and reputation is so associated with ‘secular buddhism’, to one day change his mind and say ‘Hey guys, I now believe rebirth is real, forget what I said for so many years, I was wrong’. I’m not saying that he couldn’t do that, I’m just thinking that it would be incredibly hard for anyone in such a position. In that sense, it’s much easier for someone unknown to change one’s views.
The passing away, perishing, disintegration, demise, mortality, death, decease, breaking up of the aggregates, and laying to rest of the corpse of the various sentient beings in the various orders of sentient beings.
This is called death.
Yes, the “aggregates”, so why single out rupa? The aggregates break up (in the sense of a single continuity aka a “life”), but they continue in the sense of a stream of conditions. What takes rebirth is not separate from rupa. This idea stems from the fallacy that rupa is the body, or matter more generally, and it leads to a mind/body dualism. Rupa is much more subtle than that.
I think that is true for common-or-garden varieties of physicalism, but not of all possible theories. An obvious case would be uploading consciousness to a computer. A physicalist could assert that consciousness is an emergent property of matter, but it need not be an emergent property of this specific matter. There is nothing irrational about supposing that the same consciousness can be based on different material substrata.
I’m aware that rupa can mean something along the lines of “appearance” in the Upanishads but in the suttas isn’t it more along the lines of matter, through it being defined as that which can be deformed etc Bhante?
). And also the studies show that the hippocampus is related to memory, together with other important areas such as the neocortex.
! I’ll create a new Q&A topic to ask some things about the translation which are not related to what we are discussing here.
