Bacteria and Mind

[Sriram]

People commonly speak of consciousness as though it is a 'thing' and as such might be found. So there is the idea that it represents some kind of ground to reality or that it might through spiritual practice be refined to a pure state, hence the assertion sometimes made that the self is 'pure consciousness', as if consciousness could exist independently of anything of which it was conscious. The belief that it is 'formless' might suggest that there is a category of things completely independent of any physical or material basis, which sounds rather like the supernatural. This is supported by the resistance to any claim that consciousness could be emergent. Psychologically, I suspect these notions are rooted in the desire to locate the self outside of the fluid, contingent world, such that it might be considered eternal, combined with the hope that we might in some sense be perfectible through our own efforts. The Buddha's teachings on no-self (the rejection of an independently existing, eternal self) have over the centuries been subject to repeated attempts by Buddhists to smuggle in some version of the Atman (soul or self), presumably because many people find the idea that there might not be some eternal core to their being intolerable. Metzinger defined consciousness as the appearance of a world, which chimes with the traditional Buddhist view of mind. Zen is full of stories about people who found peace when they realised there wasn't a mind - or indeed a self - to be found as such and hence nothing that needed renovation. Hence the rather radical view that freedom comes with being no-one, rather than someone very special.

We can discuss Buddhism separately if you want.  The Theravada school does talk of Anatma or No atma. But that is a self contradictory stand because it also talks of rebirth and Nirvana. If there is no atma ...what is reborn? And what is it that achieves Nirvana?  What is the difference between materialism and Theravada in that case?

The Mahayana school therefore rejected the anatma concept and accepted the idea of three states of existence, the Trikaya.   The Nirmana Kaya, The SambogaKaya and the Dharma Kaya.

Buddha is believed to have taught the idea of Anatma to beginners simply because it  enabled the elimination of the Ego self which is a major hurdle in realization. Once the Ego self is eliminated what exists is the True Self.

In any case, I think contemporary experiences such as NDE's can be taken as more reliable than any ancient religious teachings.

[wigginhall]

The True Self is the final hurdle to be surmounted. 

[Sriram]

The True Self is the final hurdle to be surmounted.

By whom?

[wigginhall]

What is whom?

[Sriram]

What is whom?

The one who is asking.

[Sriram]

Here is the Anatta Lakkana Sutta.

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/mendis/wheel268.html


It is no different from the Upanishadic ..'Neti'....'Neti'.

[wigginhall]

This reminds me of the poetry competition set by the Fifth Patriarch in Zen.   First a monk wrote this, highly commended:

Body is the bodhi tree
Heart is like clear mirror stand
Strive to clean it constantly
Do not let the dust motes land.

But then this shattered everyone's conceptions:

Bodhi really has no tree
Nor is clear mirror the stand
Nothing's there initially
So where can the dust motes land?

Hui-neng, who became the Sixth Patriarch, and was illiterate.

[Bramble]

Very nice, Wigginhall. If I remember correctly this was a competition to see who was best qualified to take over from the retiring abbot. The first author was the monastery's top scholar whom everyone assumed would win hands down, so none of the other monks even bothered to submit a poem. Hui-neng was the lowly monastery cook and not even a monk. He posted his contribution next to the first one during the hours of darkness so as to remain anonymous and only the abbot guessed who had penned it. Hui-neng was then smuggled out of the premises so he could go into hiding until things quietened down, as there were fears that the scholar might finish him off. I think we can guess which of the two still harboured a True Self. 

[Sriram]

This reminds me of the poetry competition set by the Fifth Patriarch in Zen.   First a monk wrote this, highly commended:

Body is the bodhi tree
Heart is like clear mirror stand
Strive to clean it constantly
Do not let the dust motes land.

But then this shattered everyone's conceptions:

Bodhi really has no tree
Nor is clear mirror the stand
Nothing's there initially
So where can the dust motes land?

Hui-neng, who became the Sixth Patriarch, and was illiterate.

Sounds all very quaint and profound and all that.......but how all this fits in with rebirth and Nirvana no one is able to explain. Buddha himself claimed to have taken many previous births. How it is different from modern materialism is also not clear.

Hinduism is very clear that all impermanence is of the Ego world.  It is  an illusionary world much like our virtual reality world. Seems very real but is only mind generated. What Hui-neng talks of could very well apply to this Ego world.

The real world is beyond the ego world and involves realizing the reality of the true self.  That is Nirvana and Mukti. Freedom from illusion and impermanence.

[Bramble]

Real world, ego world, illusionary world... how about this world?

[Udayana]

True self = no self  we just flip & flop between them.

Catastrophe theory... complex systems suddenly invert ... illusions ... vases become faces become vases... 

Minds become matter becomes mind and is blown away.

[Sriram]

Real world, ego world, illusionary world... how about this world?

This IS the Ego and illusionary world. Once we are out of the body, we will realize its illusionary nature.

Just as we live in a Virtual Reality world as long as we wear the goggles. We experience all its joys and sorrows. The moment we remove the goggles we realize our true nature  and realize the impermanence and illusionary nature of the VR world.

Its the same with this world. Millions of NDE's confirm that.

[wigginhall]

True self = no self  we just flip & flop between them.

Catastrophe theory... complex systems suddenly invert ... illusions ... vases become faces become vases... 

Minds become matter becomes mind and is blown away.

There is something in that.  But no self, as Bramble outlined, is intolerable, and as people approach it, say on a retreat, they start to sweat and shake with intense suffering.   This is about letting go, and eventually, if they let go of everything, there is the 'dazzling darkness' that the Christian mystics used to talk about.   It's a nothing that is full of everything.

A lot of people then experience ecstatic feelings, which can go off for weeks.  But eventually, they bounce back to the ego, and this is difficult.  But there is always the next breath!

[torridon]

You have said 'consciousness emerges in a brain' which seems imply that it has been detected by scientists, if so, it presumably has a form with qualities that have been demonstrated somewhere, in which case it would be interesting to see how they distinguish it as 'consciousness' and not something else.  The other view is that it is formless and would not register as particles nor waves, but without it the scientists at CERN would not be able to discover anything nor postulate what they consider 'reality' to be.
As you say, it might be a spurious idea, but a (let's call it) Hindu approach is not to analyse it as a substance but to use it more harmoniously by identifying with it and merging with it, rather than allowing it to become 'self/ego' centred.  The idea is to be more conscious and relatively free from being absorbed in mental forms and forces.  To communicate this idea to others it is necessary to use words and symbols so that a practical method can be followed.

This is a terribly restricted view of reality.  Why should everything be a particle that can be detected by a particle detector?  Dark Energy has not been detected yet. So also Dark Matter and Parallel Universes.  Even gravity can only be felt through its effects on other bodies but cannot be detected otherwise. The Graviton has not yet been found.

Secondly, we are talking about the Subject itself here. Not about some external object that needs to be detected. 

Thirdly, QM does talk of Consciousness and its effects on particles.  The Copenhagen Interpretation says...."The act of measurement affects the system, causing the set of probabilities to reduce to only one of the possible values immediately after the measurement. This feature is known as wavefunction collapse."

Consciousness has been detected and measured by science, however it is not a fundamental property of nature, it is an emergent property of neural activity.  Now we have found a way to detect it and quantify it, it can become the subject of mainstream science which is more comfortable with things that are quantifiable, and consciousness is measured by an index known as the pertubational complexity index, which is an indicator of the degree of integration of neural activity. What hasn't been detected by science is anything that might correspond to what people refer to as universal consciousness as this would have to be a fundamental property and not a derivative.

The above does not solve all the problems of consciousness however as we still do not understand some of the underlying fundamentals that give rise to subjective experience; how can aspect be such a profound determinant ? by which I mean, for example, the subjective experience of loudness, say, is really loud, or the taste of chocolate might be really sweet; but the exact same things viewed from a third person aspect are not remotely loud and not remotely sweet at all, all you have is ions silently flowing up synaptic gradients.  To reconcile these needs a better understanding of subjectivity and emergence, but I don't think it helps to imagine some sort of ether-like substance that will solve the puzzle, just like magic.

[torridon]

Just as we live in a Virtual Reality world as long as we wear the goggles. We experience all its joys and sorrows. The moment we remove the goggles we realize our true nature  and realize the impermanence and illusionary nature of the VR world.

I would say that is what the brain is, in a sense, it is a virtual reality headset that is wired permanently in place, never to be taken off.  It creates a personal experience of reality for the body it is attached to, without it there is no meaning.  Take your head off, and you are going to be dead.

[torridon]

Its the same with this world. Millions of NDE's confirm that.

NDS's confirm no such thing, that is just a highly speculative interpretation of a certain class of cerebral phenomenology; remember what the nice Mr Ockham taught us about where there are simpler explanations.  Even if there were some profound universal property of the cosmos giving rise to sentience, that would not explain how it could be complexified and channelled in the absence of a brain in exactly the same way that a living working brain does when creating complex phenomenology such as vision and hearing.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

If consciousness is omnipresent it rather begs the question of why it hasn't been discovered. No researcher at CERN has ever seen particles of consciousness dropping out of collisions.  This idea is reminiscent of ether; when scientists discovered that light was a wave form they inferred that the universe must therefore be permeated by this invisible omnipresent stuff, ether, that would allow light waves to propagate.  Maybe universal consciousness is a similarly spurious idea; we already have in quantum theory the most accurate description of reality ever produced, perhaps we should be working with that rather than inventing new invisible stuff.

How are they doing with Dark matter Tori?

[torridon]

How are they doing with Dark matter Tori?

Aha, very good; except that we have strong indirect evidence from science that something real that we have called dark matter exists. Universal consciousness on the hand has no evidence, direct or indirect, it being rather a speculative nebulous notion that some hope would solve the problems of conscious experience.

[ekim]

Consciousness has been detected and measured by science, however it is not a fundamental property of nature, it is an emergent property of neural activity.  Now we have found a way to detect it and quantify it, it can become the subject of mainstream science which is more comfortable with things that are quantifiable, and consciousness is measured by an index known as the pertubational complexity index, which is an indicator of the degree of integration of neural activity. What hasn't been detected by science is anything that might correspond to what people refer to as universal consciousness as this would have to be a fundamental property and not a derivative.

The above does not solve all the problems of consciousness however as we still do not understand some of the underlying fundamentals that give rise to subjective experience; how can aspect be such a profound determinant ? by which I mean, for example, the subjective experience of loudness, say, is really loud, or the taste of chocolate might be really sweet; but the exact same things viewed from a third person aspect are not remotely loud and not remotely sweet at all, all you have is ions silently flowing up synaptic gradients.  To reconcile these needs a better understanding of subjectivity and emergence, but I don't think it helps to imagine some sort of ether-like substance that will solve the puzzle, just like magic.

Interesting.  However the alternative approach is not about solving external existential puzzles nor imposing subjective interpretations upon physiological activity.  It is more about an inner approach of remaining in a simple state of consciousness where its inner stillness is favoured rather than any notion of 'perturbational complexity'.  The bliss associated with this counter balances the more frantic neural activity of the scientific and technological approach.  I suspect that the imaginative universal ether-like notion results from the experience derived from e.g. meditation where consciousness feels unbounded and expansive.  It invites the analogy of something like an individual raindrop merging with an ocean.