Thanks everyone for your genuine and careful responses! I’m trying, I really am, but I’m still not persuaded. Here’s why!
You’ve just read your answer into your assumptions. What if the pleasant feeling arises and then guilt arises which continues along at the same time as the pleasure? Here’s the evidence!
It’s definitely true that “feeling” (vedanā) lies very close in meaning to “knowing”, if fact coming from one of the roots “to know” (vid). But as with Viveka’s previous approach, which shifted from feeling to attention, I’m not sure how shifting from feeling to knowing actually solves the problem. If I look out my window I see light and my mind rapidly recognizes trees and buildings, meanwhile I am aware of a sense of existential unease from unread emails. It doesn’t seem obvious to me that they cannot be simultaneous.
As I said in the original post, this argument is used exclusively as a self-evident axiom that is assumed to be a shared understanding with non-Buddhists. So any argument that requires special practices and insights doesn’t represent how this is presented in the suttas.
No-one said it was. The Abhidhamma interpretation is not wrong because it’s Abhidhamma, it’s wrong because it doesn’t make sense that understanding of Abhidhamma concepts were assumed to be shared with non-Buddhists.
Ahh, you must be new here!
I’m not putting in conditions, the context is.
Interesting article, thanks. The basic idea is that the brain can split tasks between the two hemispheres, but not more than that.
Neuroscientist Scott Huettel of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, isn’t convinced of the two-task limit on human multitasking ability. “This shows there are conditions in which you can’t add a third task, but it depends on the type of task and whether it draws on other parts of the brain,” he says.
For example, people are remarkably good at eating while doing other things, he says, because the practiced motor skills involved in eating don’t overlap too heavily with those that interpret visual cues, control language, or run other complex processes.
This is talking about simultaneously accomplishing multiple complex and purpose driven tasks, which is surely more demanding than simply experiencing two feelings at the same time.
To be clear, I don’t believe that brain processes are the same as the mind, but clearly they are closely related. And it simply doesn’t make sense to think of the brain as running on a single thread. It does all kinds of things at the same time, all interrelated in complex ways and manifesting in consciousness in complex ways.
There is a long history in modern Buddhism of saying “we are scientific”, then rejecting the findings of science that disagree with us. In this case, however, I think we have something to learn about how the mind works.
Again, this is the same problem. The position is presented in the suttas as a self-evident axiom. Any response that argues “it seems like this, but it really is that” is simply ruled out by the context.
True, the analysis does proceed from the six senses in DN 15. But not in MN 74; and even in DN 15 it is presented inside the larger analysis as a self-contained argument. It doesn’t say, “if talking to someone who believes feeling is self, first establish the fact that there are feelings that arise based on six senses, then infer from that that only the same kind of feeling can arise in one sense door at one time”.
No, it says (paraphrasing): “obviously only one kind of feeling can arise at a time”. The more I hear complex arguments explaining how to infer this or reason it or experience it in deeper meditations the more I become convinced of my original point, which is that it is far from obvious.
Again, the sutta does not make this kind of distinction about overlapping domains.