Rebirth, rebirth, rebirth

I think I would need to take some time to get the gist of what you are saying - is it related to ‘R. Sheldrakes’ ideas in any way? As Buddhists we encourage open-inquiry so you are free to come up with whatever model you like. As Buddhists with an interest in the early strata of the teachings we try to make sense of what the Buddha taught. In these early teachings the Buddha provides a model of ‘consciousness’ that is ‘produced’ as a consequence of contact between the six-senses and their respective forms of stimuli. Consciousness is defined as a conditioned-process dependent on contact between a sense-door and a sense-object. In the case of the mind - as the sixth sense - we have contact between the mind-door - a subtle sense-sphere - and mental objects i.e. thoughts and emotions. However, when we talk about subject/object dualism we are not talking about substantive inherently existing ‘things’ that have a separate and autonomous existence. They refer to interdependent processes that are impermanent, unsatisfactory and, not-self.

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No not at all, my philosophical specialty is Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenologies and so I’m interested in understanding phenomena simply as they present themselves rather than interpreting them in terms of something else, such as ‘morphic fields’ or as epiphenomenal products of underlying physical structures and processes.

I’d also call myself a Buddhist by practice, have a passing acquaintance with various sections of the vast Tipitaka and a more in depth acquaintance with Bhuddaghosa’s Visuddhimagga, with a keen interest in understanding the paticcasamuppada. I also have some knowledge of the rather convoluted history of the early Pali texts, the oral tradition, and their never-ending commentaries.

So yes, physicalism is a stubborn dogma in scientific thinking that has finally come up against the hard problem of the phenomenal world. For me, Bhuddist meditation has provided an amazing access to this world of one’s own phenomenal experience - of attention, perception, feeling, will and phenomenal materiality. And it’s this access that informs my phenomenology.

As regards this ‘apparently objective phenomenal process’, would you say sankhara as a whole are mere subjective mental products of neurochemical processes? Or are they something impersonal that happen to us? Is the volitional component of phenomenal experience, sankhara khanda, something that I do as an individual, or does it precede and constantly give form to ‘me’?

For me, the latter answer opens the door to the possibility of rebirth linking consciousness as an ‘objective’ phenomenal process, at least in principle.

Hi zueg,

Perhaps I misunderstood your use of the term “animates”. To me that term means something like “is responsible motion and life processes.” So to say that a particular being is animated by some non physical entities or phenomena would be to say that that thing is alive, and possessed of the kinds of motion and energy characteristic of living things, because of those non-physical entities or phenomena.

If there are indeed non-physical mental phenomena, and they are genuine causes and not just epiphenomena, they will only be partly causally responsible for the precise direction of the ongoing physical processes that constitute a person’s life. I don’t think there is any serious thinking out there proposing that these phenomena somehow explain the metabolism of oxygen, the pumping of blood by the heart, the manufacture of proteins within cells, the average temperature of the body, the timing of the sleep cycle, the maintenance of muscular coordination and balance etc. Most of what makes up a person’s (and any living animal’s) life are a bunch of more-or-less mechanical, bio-physical processes that are relatively well-understood. Conscious phenomena aren’t animating my body, although they might be partially responsible for the precise direction of some of its motions.

The reason I think many of these speculations are a red herring, as far as rebirth is concerned, is because whatever the precise nature of these phenomena turns out to be, the causal dependency of our conscious states on on biophysical states is so comprehensive, pervasive and manifest that it is hard to understand how any full-blooded kind of “rebirth” could take place. Maybe such an explanation could be offered, but it involves way more than simply assuming that conscious mental processes are grounded in some non-physical domain of nature.

Consider all of the conscious phenomena that are taking place in your mind right now, and just reflect on how dependent they all seem to be on the ongoing functioning of your body. If your eyes were destroyed, you wouldn’t see. If the nerves in your hands were destroyed, you wouldn’t feel what you touch. If the muscles in your chest and head could not be felt, your experience of anxiety, fear, elation and other emotional states would be radically different. And all of these sensory subsystems can be testablly seen to depend on things happening in your brain, along with your cognitive functioning. If large enough portions of your brain were destroyed, is there any doubt that almost everything mental that is in anyway part of what makes you you would come to an end?

So it seems to me we have every reason to expect that, whatever the phenomena of consciousness consist in, their occurrence as part of a personal identity depends very completely on the ongoing functioning of a particular biological organism. Given the evident causal interdependence of mental and biophysical phenomena, it seems to me that he most plausible hypothesis now is that the hard problem will by solved by the integration of the phenomena of consciousness into some kind of model of a unified bio-physical system, in some way that we do not yet fully understand. Perhaps the progress of science here will go something like the progress of optics, electromagnetism and electrodynamics. At one time during the history of early modern science, many people expected to explain light entirely through the motions of material corpuscles. But the model that emerged, and that was eventually well-confirmed, involved the existence of an electromagnetic field, and the the setting up of forces and waves within that field by the motions of charged particles through the field. So there was a kind of field-matter “dualism” discovered, with both matter --> field and field —> matter causal interactions. But it was all one system. And one never got the result that some highly-organized and unique electrodynamics phenomenon taking place in the fields could persist intact in the absence of the charge particles motions that were responsible for them.

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I just like to comment that the Buddha did not ‘discover’ rebirth. In many suttas it is said that he experienced/realized his former lives in the night of his enlightenment. And with the divine eye he was able to follow beings into their next life. But this doesn’t mean that he was the first one to propose or describe it.

There have been rebirth-ideas in the Rigveda already, and more prominently in the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad

BU 4.4.4: As a weaver, after she has removed the colored yarn, weaves a different design that is newer and more attractive, so the self, after it has knocked down this body and rendered it unconscious, makes for himself a different figure that is newer and more attractive—the figure of a forefather, or of a Gandharva, or of a god, or of Prajapati, or of brahman, or else the figure of some other being…

BU 4.4.5: A man who’s attached goes with his action, to that very place to which his mind and character cling. Reaching the end of his action, of whatever he has done in this world — From that world he returns back to this world, back to action.

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Hmm … I don’t think so. There is the propensity to take things as a self that is occurring as part of my ongoing conscious life right now, and the propensity to take things as a self that is occurring as part of your ongoing conscious life right now. In one sense we might say those are the same propensities, in that they are the same kind of repeatable phenomenon, but in some other more strict sense they are different propensities, because they are two distinguishable patterns of activity rather than one.

Now I assume that 100 years from now there will still be many conscious beings, in all of whom, in some way, that process of taking various things to be a self will be occurring, and in which we can thus say that that same kind of propensity is occurring. But what will make one of them me and another of them you. We seem to be assuming some unexplained transmission of a pure individual propensity or pattern of mental organizing activity from one time to another, which operates independently of the contents that are being organized. How does this happen.

But more importantly, if we assume that those mental contents that are being organized and deludedly taken to be a self 100 years from now are radically different from the ones being organized and taken to be a self right now, then what possible difference could it, or should it make to my attitudes toward the future and past?

Are you involved in huss and heide’s phenomenologies in a professional capacity or out of personal interest? What drives your interest in Buddhist meditation - what is your most fundamental aspiration when it comes to the Buddha-Dhamma?

Do you feel that meditation has the potential of leading to a place in your life where the ending of dukkha may be realised? Do you believe that husserl’s and heideggar’s phenomenologies are all you require to realise the 3rd noble truth?

What if someone told you they’d give you a billion dollars to enjoy right now, but in order to pay it back, you’d have to endure some kind of torture when you turn 95 years old. But they assure you that by your 90th birthday you’ll already have dementia, memory loss, senility etc…so by 95, you won’t remember who you are at all - you’ll be totally out of it.

Would you take that deal? I doubt it.

Because at some level you realize that it won’t actually be an altogether different being who experiences the suffering of that torture - you might have some insight into impermanence and not-self, so you can intellectually declare that the 95 year old person will not be “you” in an absolute sense - but common sense demands that you have some practical concern for the future continuation of your aggregates.

You don’t have to understand the mechanism behind this continuation completely in order to take it seriously - just like you don’t have to understand the nuanced details of human biology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, etc…(all of the conditions that allow you to exist from one moment to the next) in order to have concern for your own well-being in this life.

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But the kind of continuity that lasts over the course of a single ordinary human life is at least commonplace and familiar to everyone, even if they don’t fully understand everything involved in it. And so we have a standard and time-tested way of navigating it - even if it might turn out that some of those ways of navigating it are not particularly enlightened from a deeper spiritual perspective. That seems different from faith-based and speculative beliefs in possible future existences whose characteristics never even seem to be described in any coherent way, much less confirmed.

I have to say that participating in this forum has been a learning experience for me. While I certainly knew before coming here that rebirth was a part of the traditional Buddhist world view, I had no idea how important it was to many people. Since for me, the whole point of the Buddha’s path was to work on gradually effacing, and eventually eradicating, all of one’s many ego-driven anxieties and desires about personal futures and all of one’s ego-driven regrets and griefs about personal pasts, I never had to slightest interest in adding another gigantic layer of worries and griefs, especially not ones based on relatively flimsy testimonial evidence.

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Or, there could be two empty processes which both mistakenly perceive the content as ‘me’.

For me, it’s because I’ll feel about those future khandas the same way I do now, which means there will be suffering and it will feel as real and personal then as it does now.

But I think I am going to respectfully step out of the debate now, sorry for not answering all the points you made in this post! Be well :slight_smile:

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You too! Thanks for the chat.

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Why are people always debating the topic of rebirth? A new person is born, inheriting the karma of a previous person, but without being the exact same person. It seems pretty simple. Even if we don’t personally believe in rebirth, we can at least accept that the Buddha taught it and move on.

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I agree with most of what you say, Bhante, and I’m reminded of one of King Milinder’s first questions of the Venerable Nagasena concerning , as I recall, the notion of rebirth in relation to the central doctrine of anatta (no-self). This notion of rebirth, not of a Self but of the absence of any permanent entity at all, seems to have represented, at the time the Buddha articulated it, the great departure from beliefs of rebirth that went before his awakening, and, in fact, still does. I remember an anguished visitor to our temple in Darwin years ago asking the question…if there’s no self what on earth is it that’s reborn?..our beloved monk at the time was a little startled at the anguished earnestness with which the question was asked and I’m not sure his answer satisfied the questioner. We can be sure that the question has been asked innumerable times since Milinder (Menander) posed it. And the fact the Buddha articulated the notion in the first of his Discourses to the 5 ascetics is astounding given its depth and complexity. The process of debate around the doctrine will continue, of course, and we laypeople will need much guidance from good teachers. We will also need to understand that, occasionally, we will be offered “evidence” of rebirth, such as…“Mozart was a genius, therefore that’s proof he lived before”… Alas, it’s proof of no such thing, but I feel confident that the great depth of what the Buddha proposed must be the result of such a profound awakening, like thunder or fire, that has carried it down to our own time. The three universal characteristics, Impermanence, Suffering and No-self, are the gift we are blessed to have.

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Hi DKervick,

all these examples are not of causal dependency but of observed and reported correlation between phenomenal experiences and our physical body. Of course without physical eyes to see, this human body would be blind to the external sensation of light and so on, but the hard problem is that physical eyes sense only physical stimulations, with electromagnetism exciting the retina and causing nervous stimulation of the visual cortex through to the whole brain.

That visual phenomena arise with excitation of the retina is self-evident to those with eyes to see, but it remains that in science we currently have no idea what these visual phenomena consist of, how they might arise from neurochemical processes, and even when they do, why evolution even needs them to function! As biological machines all evolution requires of our physical bodies is that we receive external sensory inputs, process that physical data, and output appropriate behavioural responses that help the species survive and thrive, at least in the short to medium term. The addition of phenomenal experience on top of this physicality would seem to be of no use, thus a useless epiphenomenon.

There is absolutely no causal mechanism yet proposed in the sciences to explain the what, how and why of phenomenal experience, there is not even a general consensus on what an outline of that mechanism might be or where to begin looking for it. The hard problem remains hard, and at the moment all we have is correlation without causal dependency.

So with physical systems there are physical causes and products. With us humans however there’s an addition to the physicality, so with something strange that we rather ambiguously call ‘consciousness’ there arise phenomena on its contact with materiality. That’s about all we know at present, and the neuro-scientific search for the neural correlates of consciousness remains a very vague mapping of the most general outlines of that contact.

We moderns literally know next to nothing of phenomena!

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My doctoral specialty is huss and heide’s phenomenologies.

To experience and understand it as far as possible in this rather short and stressful lifetime.

Yes, at least with respect to the Theravadan tradition of anapana and vipassana that I’m acquainted with, and if not in this life then…

Ha, no! I don’t do comparative philosophy and would prefer to leave the Bhudda Dhamma as it is, the conversation is all one way, with Dhamma informing my Occidental thought and not vice versa… although of course I think and interpret everything in my mother tongue, English, which comes with its own philosophical baggage.

How’s about yourself laurence?

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On the contrary, all of these phenomena can be tested in straightforward ways to show that we have causal dependencies, and not mere accidental correlations. The fact that we may not know what the phenomena consist in, and how they arise in response to sensory organ stimulation and brain activity does not entail that we can’t already confirm hypotheses about their causal etiology. In the same way, people were able to confirm hypotheses about the causal influence of certain kinds of magnetic rocks on pieces of metal, or pieces of amber on a piece of fur, long before we had adequate models to explain these phenomena and theoretically unify these isolated causal dependencies with larger causal patterns of electromagnetic processes.

In the present situation for psychology, the situation is much better. We possess a great deal of knowledge about the dependencies of specific kinds of conscious and cognitive phenomena on changes in the brain that are in turn often dependent on changes in sensory organs and receptors. It seems to me most of this causal knowledge is now so obvious that we all take it for granted most of the time. Whatever people profess to believe as a result of their religious training, I doubt that most people these days really believe that their personal identity would in any meaningful way survive the massive disruption and destruction of their brains and brain activity. That’s why they would tend to look on the prospect of the latter events with terror and foreboding.

There is nothing deeply magic about causation. Causation consists in patterns of change that sustain various generalized regularity claims and claims about counterfactual dependencies, and the manner in which the changes propagate. We have lots of solidly confirmed knowledge about causal relationships between conscious mental phenomena and body processes and changes.

I don’t see much of a significant opening, at this point, for a defense of rebirth based on
philosophical worries about the hard problem of consciousness. As you say, we seem to be very far away from understanding the full picture of how ordinary consciousness arises even within a single continuous human life, and thus are in no position to propose detailed models of how rebirth might occur, much less to test those models. At this point, one who wanted to defend the possibility of rebirth would be on no less shaky ground if they opted for very speculative physicalist model of rebirth rather than very speculative dualist models.

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Hi,

I’d rather say that we have lots of solidly confirmed knowledge about correlative relationships between reported phenomenal experiences and their associated physiological processes. And we do have detailed causal models for the physical systems associated with that phenomenal reportage, but again, the hard problem is one of causality between phenomena and physicality and I think your notion of ‘cause’ is perhaps rather broader than mine.

Could you name one instance of “solidly confirmed knowledge” that details how a physical process causes a mental phenomenon?

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Yes, I think we probably do have different attitudes about the nature of causation. Let’s do a thought experiment.

Suppose a person from the 16th century were time-transported to our own, and brought to my house. There is a lamp hanging from my ceiling, and a switch on the wall that operates it. (It’s a dial that both activates the lamp and adjusts its intensity.) Do you think this individual would be in a position to confirm that operating the switch causes the lamp to emit light, even if the individual were not permitted to open up the lamp or the wall, or to learn anything first about modern electromagnetic theory or electronics?

It seems to me that the answer is “of course”. There are all kinds of elementary tests the person could perform to test simple hypotheses about the causal connections between the lamp an the switch. And if we allowed the person to accumulate statistical data on many such lamps and many such switches, and run regressions on that data, they could learn even more about the causal functions of such switches, and what they do and do not cause. Learning that events of type A cause event of type B often precedes knowledge of how events of type A cause events of type B.

Much of what we know about psychophysical interactions is knowledge of his type. The dependencies are so numerous, and commonplace, that causal dependency can’t really be doubted, even if a full understanding of the entire causal story is yet to be developed. If I stab you in the leg with a needle, you feel a pain phenomenon. This is a repeatable experiment. I can add all sorts of controls to rule out the possibility of accidental correlation or a common cause. And if I administer certain kinds of topical anesthetics, I can stab you without causing the pain phenomenon, which tells us both even more about the details of the sequence of causal dependencies. If you direct your open eye at a tree, you experience a visual impression of a tree. If you cover your eye, the visual impression goes away. If I open your head and probe various parts of your brain with an electrode, I can make you feel sadness, or smell bacon. On the other hand, it can easily be established that if I induce the bacon smell phenomenon, that doesn’t make bacon appear in a frying pan, or make bacon particles appear in your nose, which provides important data to help us understand the most probable direction of causal dependency in ordinary cases when you smell bacon cooking. Etc.

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The confirmation of causal hypotheses does not always depend on the establishment of a causal mechanism. For example, medical testing can sometimes establish that the ingestion of a certain compound causes, for example, a reduction in muscle inflammation. This can be confirmed even if the experimenters remain in the dark about the mechanism at work, knowledge of which explains it.

Correct, and I take it your volition in this case is the phenomenal cause for my pain? That and of course my wilful decision to allow you to stab my leg! Given that we were both conscious at the time such that we could be held responsible for our actions then this is an example of phenomenal causality.

But what does this say about the phenomenon of my pain in physical terms, apart from that it is correlated with physical damage to my flesh? I would certainly report that correlation and you could duly note it in your experimental report along with any physiological changes in heart rate etc. However, this correlation is ‘causality’ only in a general colloquial sense, and I might then learn not to take part in your pain experiments, but it says nothing about how the physical process ‘causes’ its associated painful phenomenon.

Likewise here your examples are all about physical causes and physical effects, what does this say about the correlated phenomenon of feeling relief with taking medicine for muscle damage?

Again, there are only correlations, accidental or strictly repeatable, between phenomenal experiences and physical processes, while their physically causal relationships remain an enigma for scientific thought.

Given this phenomenal enigma, which is the hard problem of consciousness, I can see no logical scientific basis for a denial of the possibility of rebirth linking consciousness. If one doesn’t know what one is talking about, at a completely fundamental level, then how can one discount anything in the phenomenal world?