Science, Scientism & Dharma

The Watercooler
21

I’ve answered your questions although apparently you either dislike or fail to understand those answers.

So … will my hand physically rot when my body falls down the last time? Yes I believe so, unless I leave cremation instructions which I think are much easier to deal with for those remaining, just scatter the ashes to the four winds!

But what I think you’re asking is do I hold to some form of naive idealism? Do I believe that my hand exists only ‘in my head’? I know what exists ‘in my head’, and it’s not a phantasm hand, it’s actually just a clump of brain meat that reacts to physical stimuli that impact on my body’s sense organs. I know this because science tells me so!

I think your confusion here is that you can only conceive of my phenomenalism in terms of your own internal/external concepts, thus for you I’m an ‘insane’ idealist who thinks the phenomenal world that exists ‘in my head’ is actually external to that head. I’m a sort of psychotically deranged solipsist in your understanding yes?

The problem is that I don’t believe in either your ‘external world’ that we can’t directly sense, nor in your ‘internal’ world of mental processes, ‘mind’, mere appearances etc. I don’t think the internal/external Cartesian dualism is a particularly helpful way of talking about one’s own existence in this phenomenal world, in fact I think it’s delusional.

Is this more or less where you’re coming from DKervick?

22

I didn’t say a single thing about what exists “in my head”. I have refrained from offering any conjectures about the ontological ground of phenomenal conscious experiences, and have instead asserted only a few minimal observations about the contingent causal relations that hold between those experiences and other things which are not conscious experiences.

Please do not first translate my question into your own misconstual of it before answering it. It is a very straightforward question, which anyone can understand as stated, and which you have once again dodged answering in a simple way.

But inferring from your answer that you do think your hand will continue to exist even after you have ceased to have experiences of any kind, then that result seems to imply that you accept that the existence of your hand does not depend on its being perceived or in some other way experienced by you. As I said before, that is what I mean by saying that the existence of my hand is independent of and external to conscious experiences of my hand.

23

I said “yes” DK … do you still have a problem?

24

No, no problem. So we finally have that settled.

25

What’s settled?

I take it you’re no longer interested in unpacking your notion of ‘phenomenal experience’ and what it means to say that physical phenomena are “external to conscious experiences”? To say my hand is ‘there’ is to say I have a phenomenal (and thus empirical) experience of it, and that it thus exists. I can come back to it, look at it, and it remains the same, if not identical, hand.

How do you derive ‘externality’ from this simple phenomenal fact? And surely ‘externality’ implies that something, i.e., mental processes, are ‘internal’ to that ‘externality’? Else what is the ‘external world’ external to?

26

I just said what I mean by saying something is external to conscious experiences. It means that it exists independently of conscious experience. And that means that it is possible for it to exist, even when it is not being experienced.

I thought you had just agreed to this, but now it seems you might want to take it back.

That might be what you mean when you say your hand is there, but I don’t think that’s what most people mean when they say there hand is there. And it is definitely not what I mean. Most people take there experience of their hand to be evidence of, but not constitutive of, the existence of their hand. That this is the way they understand these matters is borne out by everyday ways of describing them. If they were administrered a drug that numbed their sensation of their hand, and then closed their eyes so they could no longer see it, and then were asked, “Do you think your hand is still there?” I suspect most would say “Yes.”

27

Now you definitely are repeating yourself. ‘Externalism’ in the ‘problem of the external world’ does not just mean ‘independence’ as it also implies a metaphysics of perception, whereby subjective experience is an ‘internal’ mental process that reaches out to the external world by way of a priori reasoning. But then you say you want to keep ‘externality’ but not the ‘internality’ of mental processes.

Your notion of ‘externality’ is meaningless without the ‘internal’ baggage of the ‘problem of the external world’ that you previously said you ascribed to. I think you want to keep your Cartesian cake and eat it too!

Well actually ‘most people’ just see their hand there, at the end of their arm, and ascribe its existence to actually just being … there. This is what the philosophy of mind calls ‘naive realism’, the belief that seeing is believing, and that the (phenomenal) experience is the thing itself.

Being aware that this phenomenal experience is a phenomenal experience but still holding to the belief that one sees one’s actual hand, is called direct, rather than unaware or naive, realism.

I think you’ll find that ‘most people’ are actually rather confused that some scientists consider their ownmost phenomenal experience of their hand to be an unreal, ‘internal’ mental process, and that the real hand exists in an external world beyond their senses.

But I think we’ve circumnavigated the outline of this metaphysics of perception and its internal/external metaphors, whether you hold to those or not, in total or in part.

This notion of an ‘external world’ remains for me the fundamental theoretical divide between scientistic and phenomenological thinking, the latter of which is how I understand Buddhist thought. This phenomenal world (sabbe sankhara) is what is real, and it is on the basis of what is real that we can talk about and interpret that apodictic reality.

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28

It seems to me that you don’t actually know what position you want to defend about the dependence or independence of the hand’s existence on its being perceived, and have gone back and forth on that most basic question now a few times. That’s OK. It is a question that has bedeviled many.

I’m sorry you are unwilling to entertain and discuss the positions I have actually defended and insist on reinterpreting them in terms of the Philosophy 101 taxonomy of views you learned some time ago.

I can’t think of any contemporary philosophers who defend the view that one can reason a priori from the existence of conscious perceptual phenomena occurring in the mind, however they construe that mind, to the physical processes that exist external to and independent of the mind, and for which the mental experiences are taken as providing evidence. That relationship is construed by almost everyone as a contingent and natural one, not a metaphysically or conceptually necessary one amenable to a priori confirmation.

I can say that I do take it for granted that if all human beings and other sentient perceivers were annihilated due to some calamity, the rest of the natural world would go on existing, because the existence of the latter does not depend on the existence of the former. I think this is the view of their subject matter held by the vast majority of scientists, which is only to be expected, because the concepts employed in natural scientific theories and models do not entail anything about whether the entities referred to by those theories or concepts are perceived or not.

Nevertheless, as a matter of contingent fact, those phenomena do stand in various contingent causal relationships to various perceiving human individuals, which allows those people to reliably extract evidence from their perceptual experiences, and treat them as evidence for the entities and events that caused them. Since these relationships are only contingent, they can be severed without bringing an end to the existence of the entities involved in them.

FWIW, I don’t think any of this has any significant connection to the Buddha’s path.

29

Ha, well I hope your unperceived third hand is happy existing all by itself in your suprasensory external world!

The phenomenal world of course would cease to exist though wouldn’t it? There would be a nibbanic dissolution throughout the entire multiverse! But the natural course of the physical universe would continue? One would presumably hope so anyways. But your notion of the ‘external world’ would also cease due to its metaphysical belief system requiring someone to believe in it?

So I take it you are now recanting your and ‘almost everyone elses’ allegiance to the metaphysics of perception and its ‘external world’? For a relationship between your perception of this phenomenal world and the physical things in it that is ‘contingent’ in what sense? As a contingent belief?

I think sir you chop and change your contingent beliefs here to suit yourself!

So we’re back to the pragmatic DKervick who is a believer in the actuality of an ‘external world’ only in a ‘contingent sense’ in that it helps explain his relation to the natural phenomena encountered in his phenomenal experience of this phenomenal world?

You mean if I die the entire process of the universe and everything in it continues in a never-ending cycle? Ummm … yes! Almost as if all physical systems are involved in a never-ending cycle of rebirth one might say?

But I’m still completely in the dark as to how you logically go from this simple, phenomenal fact to then say there is a world that was ‘external’ to the experience of that phenomenal world all along. And that a belief in this suprasensory ‘external world’ does not necessarily entail a belief in the ‘internality’ of subjective experience, presumably because then that would entail an entanglement in metaphysics that would belie the apparent pragmatism of your (anti) philosophical position.

And so the tangle of thinking continues to entangle. Are we not all engaged in this generation’s entanglement?

30

There is no third hand. My perception of my hand is one thing; my hand is another thing. Under ordinary conditions, when my perception of my hand ceases, my hand will nevertheless continue to exist. Thus the existence of my hand is independent of the existence of my conscious perceptual states and experiences. That’s what it means to say my hand is external to my conscious mental states: it’s existence is not constituted by, or otherwise dependent on, any of my conscious mental states. Most of the things in the world are clearly external to my mind in this sense.

This is very perplexing. On the one hand you accept that the existence of at least most of natural world is independent of its being consciously perceived by anyone. But on the other hand you seem very reluctant to accept that that means most of the world exits external to conscious perceptual experience, even though I have said many times that by saying that one thing exists externally to a second thing means nothing other than to say it’s existence is independent of that second thing.

Certainly if human beings and every other conscious and concept-wielding entity ceased to exist then the concept of an external world would cease to exist as well, since concept formation depends on the existence of concept makers. But the things in the world that exist independently of consciousness and conceptualization would go on existing, and still would be independent of conscious experience and conceptualization, even though there would no longer be anyone around to conceptually represent and affirm that independence.

To say that some relation R that holds between two things x and y holds contingently is to say that it is not metaphysically necessary that R holds between x and y. Consider a glass that is sitting on top of a table. The glass and the table stand in various spatial and causal relationships to one another. But these relationships are contingent ones, not a matter of any kind of metaphysical necessity. No matter how much one learns about the intrinsic nature of the glass itself, one cannot deduce logically, conceptually, or in any other a priori manner the existence of a desk supporting it.

Turn now to the relationship between the glass and my conscious perception of the glass. These relations also hold contingently. I have refrained from conjecturing whether any spatial relationships hold between the glass and my conscious perception of the glass. But I do think some causal and representational and evidential relationships hold between these two things. Those relationships all hold contingently.

31

“One not percipient of perceptions not percipient of aberrant perceptions, not unpercipient, nor percipient of what’s disappeared: for one arriving at this, form disappears — for objectification-classifications have their cause in perception.” - Kalaha-vivada Sutta

32

“One not percipient of perceptions not percipient of aberrant perceptions, not unpercipient, nor percipient of what’s disappeared: for one arriving at this, form disappears — for objectification-classifications have their cause in perception.” - Kalaha-vivada Sutta

33

‘He has no (ordinary) perception of perceptions, he has no deranged perception of perceptions, he is not without perception, he has no perception of what has disappeared. For one who has attained to such a state form disappears, for that which is named “diversification” has its origin in perception.’

34

"Dhamma in this sense means “the phenomenon of which you are aware, which provides a support for consciousness” … In this context, which is mostly limited to the six senses, I would use “phenomena”. This is a technical term in philosophy meaning “that which appears or shows”. Or more specifically, from Google’s dictionary: “the object of a person’s perception; what the senses or the mind notice”. - Ajahn Sujato

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35

Of course. If one is not percipient of the Great Stupa, the form of the Great Stupa disappears for that person. But that doesn’t mean that the Great Stupa has literally vanished, or depends for its existence on being perceived.

For what it’s worth, the Buddha seems to have believed that consciousness occurs when the organs of perception make “contact” of some kind with the forms of objects. That’s pretty much it. It is hard to pull much of a detailed philosophical theory of any kind out of these terse formulations, and from the other scant suggestions in the EBTs, because they are compatible with with many possible views. That’s probably why subsequent Buddhist thought went in so many different directions, philosophically speaking - because the early texts are philosophically indeterminate.

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36

‘I’ don’t understand reality therefore ‘I’ am still in a state of open-inquiry. ‘I’ realise that the world appears for ‘me’ in a certain way. What we call the Great Stupa - what is it ultimately made of? If it exists it must be made of something - what can it ultimately be reduced to? Please explain to me what is its ultimate out-there nature? Not bricks and mortar - you understand?

37

Subject/object dualism arises when we believe in an inherently existing subject. The subject has no inherent or essential existence in and of itself. The body is a dependent arising that has an ever-changing nature. Energy and information flow-through and constitute the flow-through we call the body/mind. Where does the ‘I’ cease and the world begin? Where does the world end and the ‘I’ begin? There is just phenomenal flow - ever changing - without essence.

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38

Except of course you still hold that the physical object is ‘external’ to the ‘conscious perception’ … and that this is related to the “problem of the external world” … although not in any sense as to the ‘internality’ of mental processes. You want your ‘externalism’ but without defining consciousness as ‘internal’, which is what I meant by you want your Cartesian dualist cake and you want to eat it too!

But in order to argue against ‘internalism’ you then state that:

Except for the ‘external’ bit which isn’t a metaphysical concept because it doesn’t also mean mental processes are ‘internal’…?

What this looks like to me is that your initial defensive position was a fort built on pragmatic contingency and thus apparently metaphysics free, but when you opened the gates to do battle on the field of thinking, resplendent in your shiny cognitive armour, and planting your banner firmly on the high ground of your “problem of the external world”, you realised it was in fact a metaphysical swamp. Then forced to defend ‘independent externalism’ you tried to ditch the extra baggage of ‘internalism’ but kept sinking into the quicksand of the Cartesian metaphysics of perception, and now have retreated back to the Fort of Pragmatic Contingency! There you shout over the battlements that the whole of science is on your side and everyone else is ‘insane’, as an apparent diversion from thinking about your fort’s foundations being built on a metaphysical mire.

Meanwhile out here in the phenomenal world, ‘most people’ go about their everyday business completely absorbed in their shared phenomenal experiences, even including ‘doing science’ and ‘thinking about external worlds’, while trying to find a degree of happiness in maintaining a familial home amidst the constant vagaries of life, ageing, sickness and death. Such is the phenomenal world of existential phenomenology!

Seriously, your bald statement that the relation between your consciousness and physical objects is ‘contingent’ is rather forced don’t you think? And the fact that you still hold to a form of (interactive) dualism is your metaphysical position regarding the nature of the relation between subject and object.

For me however, the interesting question here would be to ask what is ‘contingent’ about the neural correlates of perception? There is an associative relation there that is being mapped by the neurosciences and interrogated by the philosophers of mind. And this correlation is between your brain meat and the world of phenomenal experience where we first encounter things, including physical things.

This phenomenal world would seem to be somewhat more encompassing than your rather strange notions concerning consciousness including the absurd fact that for you “my hand doesn’t exist as a phenomenal event in any sense”.

39

There is no such ‘thing’ as a (thing in itself). Therefore, there is no such ‘thing’ as the (thing in itself). Every-thing from the smallest to the largest, whether it persists for a short period or ‘appears’ to be old and long lasting, you will not find their ultimate existence as a thing in itself - so-called internally and externally.

40

This does not mean you can drive on the wrong side of the road etc. Conventionally, the road exists - ultimately, ??? When it comes to the relationship between the ultimate and the conventional???

This reminds me of the quantum/classical distinction. Science is still lacking a theory that fits the quantum and the classical world into a single model. One ‘take’ on the ‘Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics’ seems to suggest that objects in space require an act of observation. Its far from a common-sense understanding as found in ‘naive-realism’ but truth may be stranger than fiction? The fact is, we really ‘don’t know’ for sure?

What we do know is we have all run through this cognitive maze-way a few times - or many - and ended up none the wiser. Instead, of behaving like metaphysical/physicalist lab-rats in search of the cheese/reality it might be useful to just stay-still and see what happens? Gnosis may be closer than our noses?