Since you keep referring to Metzinger “vision” here again, I'd like you to clarify the two key concepts that you use above, namely: “mind” and “consciousness” considering the distinction made by Metzinger in this conversation. I mean, the distinction between thinking or rationality and consciousness, or as he says, using philosophy of mind lingo, “between intentional content and phenomenal content”. What particularly interest me in this context is his further suggestion that “rationality is probably to a large extent something above brains. It’s a group phenomenon.” So I hope you know what I'm driving at: one can use terms like “mind” or “consciousness” meaning also “rationality” and “thinking” and this simply subverts the idea of “mind” being the brain.
I am completely on your side regarding the irreversible disintegration of our individual brain/body systems after death, there is no question about that. What is I think interesting for us still being alive is this distinction between phenomenal and intentional consciousness, which seems to define to what extant we differ from other conscious beings on this planet. Contrary to other animals which seem to live totally immersed or caught in their transparent reality models (or as Brassier says “in darkness”) we, humans, do have access to other mode of consciousness, namely opaque intentional content, as conceptual thinking, which enables us, for example, to collectively create scientific theories which allow us to pierce though our “epistemic closure” - that evolutionary mechanism of survival.
Well, I referred to Metzinger's inclusion of unusual experiences in what is interesting about mental activity. I also referenced his observation about how some experiences seem to confirm a Dualist worldview, and his view that any discussion like this has an ethical dimension. I think these three points are relevant and important. I repeat them to remind myself to take them into consideration I suppose.
It's probably fair to say that I use terminology related to the mind loosely - but then so does *everyone* else. Most terms are defined differently by different people. Many arguments hinge on semantics. If you asked me directly what I thought consciousness is, I'd be just as likely to say that it is a legacy concept with no parallel in Buddhist literature. Some time ago I tried to stop using the word, but clearly it's crept back into my vocab. I've argued that at any point where we want to translate a traditional Buddhist term as "mind" that "mental activity" is almost always a better translation; that there is no word that accurately translates as consciousness; and that Pāli lacks the metaphor: the mind is a container. I think the epistemological limits outline in early Buddhist texts are still relevant. I mainly try to orient my thinking along these lines. Though I do drift, especially when trying to explain someone else's view.
Actually I don't see what you're driving at when you say that any of these ideas subvert the idea of the mind being the brain or as I say that the mind is the body, or to refine it further that mental activity is a function of a particular type of embodiment. I'm not sure how arguing that consciousness works in different ways, different modes, says anything at all relevant to Sean Carroll's argument, let alone anything that might subvert it. It doesn't take us beyond physics. There is no gap to squeeze anything extra into the equation. If there are different modes of mental activity, then they are also down to arrangements of atoms. Unless you are able to redefine physics? And if you are they I'll happily endorse you to the Nobel Committee.
Many thanks for this essay. I have reading your essays about the afterlife, rebirth and karma with great interest. After reading this latest essay one question (in three parts) comes to my mind.
Do you believe that the Buddha taught karma and rebirth?
If not (and assuming that he reached the same conclusions about the afterlife reflected in your essay), do you believe that he taught about avoiding the extremes of nihilism and eternalism?
And if so, how do you interpret his warning?
The rationale behind my question is that I am assuming that your conclusions support the idea of nihilism (and this is another question in itself: does it do that?), thus making nihilism central to Buddhism and making that warning misleading. In other words, wouldn't it have been more appropriate for the Buddha to say, "guys get the idea of an afterlife off your heads" from the beginning and so avoid centuries of fruitless speculation about karma?
And while we're at it, if the Buddha saw or thought all this and didn't say anything, doesn't that make his teaching into another means of social control (let's get people to behave by promising the certainty of punishment) with a sprinkling of (certainly effective) positive psychological exercises in the context of a certain life style?
Reading what I've just written in stark black and white might come across as combative or something. Please let me tell you that there's nothing further from the truth, my mind is genuinely open and I can't wait to read your answers! This is gripping stuff.
Many thanks for all the effort you are pouring into striving for clarity.
I think there can be no doubt that if the early Buddhist texts represent the Buddha's teaching that he accepted the twin ideas of karma and rebirth. They occur throughout the Canon and are integral to the other teachings.
My conclusions are different, but then I have access to very different sources of knowledge than the Buddha did. In his day the Buddha probably would have concluded that my view was a form of ucchedavāda or annihilationism (which is not nihilism btw). But if he knew what we know now, he'd have changed his mind.
I have argued that if we approach the afterlife from the Buddhist point of view we wouldn't be thinking in terms of being reborn.
Certainly the Buddha's teaching is a form of social control. All forms of societies require controls. All known societies have them. The Buddha certainly taught an idea form of society in the Vinaya, a kind of Utopia which the monks constantly failed to live up to, and thus more and more rules had to be made. We are social primates. We naturally live in groups and such groups naturally need agreed upon codes of behaviour in order to function well. Our groupishness is what makes us strong as a species. Many of our best features evolved alongside group living; they enabled larger more successful groups.
You don't come across as combative. These are good questions. Important questions. I am arguing for a break with Buddhist tradition. Breaks with tradition are commonplace in Buddhism. Of course this break I'm arguing for is major. This is why I've spent so much time mapping out just what belief in karma and rebirth entails - in fact I have several more essays on this subject before that chapter is finished. We need to be clear about what it means to say we believe in these things, and I find few people really are clued up.
As you say it is gripping. I find it utterly fascinating and most of my time is dedicated to following up all the threads. All the recent blogs are going towards a book on the subject. Hopefully finished this year.
Dear Jayarava, The two statements below are yours, first one from an answer to a correspondent on Thinking Like a Buddhist about Karma & Rebirth, the second one on your answer to me, above:
"The thing is that to claim something is true when you don't certainly know from your own experience that it is true counts as a lie in Buddhist ethics."
"I think there can be no doubt that if the early Buddhist texts represent the Buddha's teaching that he accepted the twin ideas of karma and rebirth."
This issue seems important to me, how do you reconcile both statements? I have problems with the idea that the Buddha accepted the common beliefs of his time without direct knowledge of the issues. Several possibilities come to my mind:
The Pali Canon puts words in the mouth of the Buddha that he didn't utter,
The Buddha is fictitious,
The Buddha talked about things he didn't know about, for reasons we can only speculate about, or
Enlightenment enables people to know there is rebirth and karma (and here we seem to be in the realm of the miraculous).
Perhaps the problem lies in thinking of the Buddha as a god with omniscience - knowledge of everything? He himself claims only to know what is relevant to liberation. There were many beliefs that the Buddha did not directly challenge, while at the same time as pointing believers to Buddhist practices. It's not necessary to have perfect knowledge in order to practice is another important lesson from the suttas.
> The Pali Canon puts words in the mouth of the Buddha that he didn't utter,
It is certain that this is true. However there's every possibility that some of the words were his. The practices are of the type that can be tested by anyone who wishes to try them.
> The Buddha is fictitious,
Again it seems certain to me that the stories about the Buddha are mostly made up - even his name is made up. But fictitious characters are none the less potent for being so. Hamlet conveys some of life's deepest truths in his speeches, but he never existed. So what?
> The Buddha talked about things he didn't know about, for reasons we can only speculate about, or
There is no evidence for this. Indeed he is portrayed as quite scrupulous about this.
> Enlightenment enables people to know there is rebirth and karma (and here we seem to be in the realm of the miraculous).
No one I know that has a substantial experience of insight has ever had an insight with this content directly. Some of them interpret their experiences in these terms, but not with absolute certainty. And they all want to believe, so we have to carefully examine exactly what they say.
We cannot reconcile the tradition with modernity. The tradition is clearly wrong on some counts: it's wrong about human physiology, for example; about the process of conception; about the nature of matter. Any number of things. Where the tradition is wrong beyond any reasonable doubt we just have to move on. We have the practices and they are still relevant. If we practice we have particular kinds of experience that can inform how we choose to live and that can transform the way we understand ourselves as beings having experiences. Isn't that enough?
I would highly recommend Evan Thompson's book "Waking, Dreaming, Being". He argues against Metzinger's (his friend) neural nihilism take on the self. It is a clear and insightful look at consciousness from both cognitive science and Indian as well as Western philosophy.
I would highly recommend that people don't make this kind of passive comment. I'm not interested in book recommendations as I'll probably never read all the books I own, let alone all the books I want to read. Assume that I have all the books I can possibly read and more.
As an anonymous internet person your bare recommendation carries almost no weight. It's just your opinion and we have no objective criteria on which to judge it. And believe me you would not want to read what some commenters recommend.
If you're going to comment then take the time to say something definite and on-topic. Metzinger is of minor interest here compared to Sean Carroll. I mention Metzinger in three specific contexts (listed in a comment above). So what does this other book have to say about those specific areas? Anything relevant? At least give us some headlines!
Ugh. Read the NYT review of this book by Thompson. It sounds awful. The misconceptions stand out even in the review.
"Thompson argues that these contemplative practices are relentlessly empirical. "
No. They. Are. Not! Not even close. Not even within a million miles of empirical. And to then discuss the abhidharma is a joke. Only a true believer could assert that the abhidharma represents anything other than the wild metaphysical speculations of people out of touch with their experience. No one with an ounce of objectivity could make this mistake. He's simply repeating the myths of the Abhidharmikas. I've spent the last few months studying various sections of Sarvastivāda and Theravāda Abhidharma relevant to the afterlife and there is no hint of connection to experience in them. One might at a stretch imply it, but that is being generous. It's all post hoc rationalisation based in systems of religious speculation.
So cancel that recommendation and don't waste your time on yet another deluded apologist for Buddhist woowoo. How do authors get away with this rubbish? How do readers get taken in by this stuff? Because those who have religious beliefs seek confirmation everywhere and ignore any counterfactual information.
You say "Millions and millions of experiments, from detailed observations of our solar system down to the manipulation of single atoms, have failed to find any behavior of atoms that cannot already be explained." Well... can you explain the behavior called Life?? Life is the empirical prof that disproof all that you say. In this millions of millions of experiments we never saw life emerging from chaotic atoms. Something in the scientific standard model is missing, something fundamental. And how can you explain the interference of consciousness in the double slit experiment and others... I think your point of view is to much adjusted to the reductive nineteenth century dumb materialism paradigm. Someone who just now about science don't even know about science at all, try to study epistemology as philosophy for instance, and acquire some more information about the philosophical problems of quantum physics perhaps. Here are some random links to make you think a little bit further: http://themindunleashed.org/2014/03/10-scientific-studies-prove-consciousness-can-alter-physical-world.html http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=What_Is_Life%3F&_%28Schr%C3%B6dinger%29= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness http://www.krishnapath.org/quantum-physics-came-from-the-vedas-schrodinger-einstein-and-tesla-were-all-vedantists/
This is superb. I have lots of Buddhist friends who I admire deeply, but whenever anyone starts wheeling in ideas from the philosophy of physics to back up their religious views, there's an 'oh no, here we go' and my heart sinks a little, expecting rationalisations that would make a physicist's toes curl. It takes something special to pull this off.
I hope it's received well, and doesn't cause too much distress - there's no requirement for anyone else to accept these kinds of idea if they are not minded to. But it's good to see contributions to the discussion of this quality, for anyone who is up for being challenged.
Pursuing all the threads, as you say, is time-consuming and requires a level of familiarity with some very complex ideas and a willingness to let go of some very attractive stories - it isn't everyone's cup of tea. For me, it's a thing of joy to encounter those whose cup of tea it is.
@Agrios. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because we have not yet seen something identical to life as we know it emerge from simple chemistry yet, does not mean that we require a new hypothesis. A new hypothesis would be required if you or anyone could prove that life cannot possibly emerge from simple chemistry. So far no one has done this either. So your logic is flawed.
You ignore the considerable progress made towards understanding abiogenesis. The starting conditions for life have yet to be found, but there is no reasonable doubt that they will eventually be found. Several systems of spontaneously self-replicating molecules have already been discovered, not least one which involves RNA molecules. What is deceptive is how very complex the simplest lifeforms are. We're still getting the hang of this, and learning more all the time.
What aspect of life, apart from it's initial starting conditions, are you saying cannot possibly explained by known physics and chemistry?
"Consciousness", a very doubtful legacy concept, has nothing to do with the double slit experiment. This particular fallacy persists because non-physicists do not understand the so-called Observer Effect. I have dealt with this fallacy in an essay called Buddhism and the Observer Effect in Quantum Mechanics. in the double slit experiment "the observer" is the screen which particles hit. Once we understand what physicists mean by "an observer", i.e. that it has nothing whatever to do with "consciousness", then the fallacy collapses along with a good proportion of the nonsense associated with quantum mechanics. I can imagine no better demonstration of the old adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
You write: "I think your point of view is to much adjusted to the reductive nineteenth century dumb materialism paradigm."
Clearly if my point of view is to endorse Quantum Field Theory then I have very little in common with 19th century science. QFT was developed in the 1950s - 1970s so you are simply and objectively wrong on this score. Your own views on science, by contrast, really do seem to be Victorian. Funny how often people with a wrong view accuse me of having that same wrong view.
The first link you list is fallacious. Mental activity can effect matter precisely because the mind is the brain. If it was not, then it could not effect matter (the argument for this is spelled out in the essay you're commenting on). No other possibility is plausible. The last of your links is just bonkers. The other links are seemingly random links to Wikipedia which must be taken with a grain of salt. A list of links to random websites do not constitute an argument. Please don't waste our time.
A poor effort. You'll have to do very much better to get a passing grade from me.
Thanks so much for the positive feedback. Much appreciated. Yes, physics is tricky. I studied it at university, though majored in chemistry. Many Buddhists seem to struggle with the science, though are often keen to co-opt it to confirm their beliefs, even when it patently contradicts their beliefs.
Hi, Jayarava. Thank you in particular for your commentary towards the end of this piece on the importance of recognizing that experiences are compelling to those who have them. Antagonism does not help open minds to possibilities either not previously considered, or considered and rejected because of understandably human emotional responses.
> We have the practices and they are still relevant. If we practice we have particular kinds of experience that can inform how we choose to live and that can transform the way we understand ourselves as beings having experiences. Isn't that enough?
Yes, it certainly's enough for me, as speculation has always seemed to me a dangerous path, when applied to the so called "ultimate questions".
Perhaps my problem is that the more I observe the processes that form my experience, the less inclined I am to call myself a Buddhist. I'm taking Buddhism in this context as meaning the doctrines and practices offered by the groups I'm aware of in the UK.
Practically all of my practice has been in the context of what used to be the FWBO (feel free to delete the parts of this post that mention groups if you think it isn't appropriate) and, just to give you an example, I never quite got to be able to accept the idea of saddhana practices because it seems to me that in them there's a call to use the imagination which runs counter to the development of insight, as exposed in the Canon. For crying out loud, one of my problems is that my imagination keeps on tripping me up! The last thing I need is to make it the basis of my meditation, why visualise figures that cannot be experienced in the world? It seems to me as if relying on that Tantric type of imagery one is having to develop a type of faith that I cannot reconcile with Pali Canon Buddhism. It also feels like at some point the artists were given the keys to the meditation classroom.
So, I started to question that and the Puja, and this and the other, until I started to feel more and more like I'd become part of a religious group (that being the farthest thing from my intentions when I first went), in which not enough challenge was being voiced.
This is quite a long preamble and doesn't seem in my mind to lead to any clear question other than, what to do about a Sangha if you think like me?
You say ""Consciousness", a very doubtful legacy concept, has nothing to do with the double slit experiment. This particular fallacy persists because non-physicists do not understand the so-called Observer Effect. I have dealt with this fallacy in an essay called Buddhism and the Observer Effect in Quantum Mechanics. in the double slit experiment "the observer" is the screen which particles hit. Once we understand what physicists mean by "an observer", i.e. that it has nothing whatever to do with "consciousness", then the fallacy collapses along with a good proportion of the nonsense associated with quantum mechanics. I can imagine no better demonstration of the old adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing." Bravo now you will receive the Nobel of Physics because you solved the problem of the many interpretations of quantum mechanics. So I suppose all the problem is solved by a laconic -"the observer" is the screen which particles hit - can you explain a little bit more because I never saw that perspective before. Yes the "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" I agree, but the recent history of science is the history of "Give me a miracle and a explain rest", Give-me the miracle of life and i will explain everything else but not that, give me the miracle of big bang, the appearance of everything from nothing and I explain the rest. This is a little bit like the science of the gaps. In the case of so called Several systems of spontaneously self-replicating molecules that have already been discovered, don't make me laugh, there is a huge abyss of distance between that highly misinterpreted molecules and a simple RNA molecule. Well i think your position is simply absurd, is the same has someone that go to another planet an discover a car and go on denying the hypothesis that someone conscious made it, and attribute the presence of that car to the random effect of erosion. With the difference that a simple DNA molecule is astoundingly more complex then a car. This is one of the many dogmas of mechanical materialism that for me are just a form of superstition. But because for you I'm not passing grade of your omniscence, I will suht up and leave you alone this new church of basic scientism. Amen!
@Ted "Antagonism does not help open minds to possibilities either not previously considered, or considered and rejected because of understandably human emotional responses."
Yes. My purpose is not to antagonise people. I started this project because I was interested in the truth. All my life I've been like "what the hell is going on?".
Somewhere on my harddrive I have an essay by Suvajra on the 8 opportunities for insight in a sādhana practice. It seems to me that you don't have all the information on sādhana to make a judgement. Anyway not all Dharmacārins do a visualisation. Pūja, like all practices, is about cultivating an experience. I've liken it to Joseph Campbell's idea of the Hero's Journey. Taking that journey in ritualised form is a great idea I think.
@Agrios. "I will suht up [sic] and leave you alone this new church of basic scientism. Amen!"
Good. If you can't play nicely then by all means don't play at all. You're not engaging with the argument you're just calling me names. Once you start doing that you lost the argument as far as I'm concerned. And the thing is that petulant name calling does nothing at all to dent my enthusiasm for the theory. It just makes me think, off topic, that you are an unpleasant, inarticulate person with a poor intellect. And since I moderate comments, I always get the last word with people like you. Amen. :-)
"Even when challenging the interpretation of such experiences, it's important to acknowledge that for the person having the experience it can be very significant."
I'm going to say this "just for the record", and I almost hope you'll just ignore my having said it. (If my past history in commenting on these pages is any indicator, I will no doubt be discussing something that wasn't your point anyway, in which case you should, please, ignore me.)
You no doubt recall that it is my firm belief that the Buddha didn't believe in rebirth, and wasn't expecting those of us who don't have such a belief to adopt it just because we are his followers. If this is true -- and I am reasonably certain that it is -- that's important, but not anywhere near as important as what it is a part of, which is a system that is simultaneously compatible with the growing knowledge brought to us by the various sciences, *and* endorses a great deal of tolerance towards believers in all types of Cosmic Orders, as long as what they are doing is not harmful to others.
The Buddha's agnosticism, as I understand it, is based on a firm embrace of the concept you mentioned: "I don't know." It takes a great deal of grace to fully accept that we don't know, and to go beyond just accepting what we don't know to allowing others to believe as they do in large part because -- as you say in the quote above -- the experiences a person has are very significant to them. But if we can have that sort of grace, it allows us to offer it to others, and that's where the tolerance comes in.
What I see is that the greatest example history has offered us of someone who has had a worldview that both made room for any changes in human understanding of "reality" (aka "the laws of nature") and at the same time accomplished the difficult task of offering grace to those who can't, because of their past experiences, accept our increasing knowledge of the way the universe works -- is the Buddha. This is no mean feat, but this is what he did: in accepting how little he knew, he allowed that maybe -- just maybe -- the other guy might have gotten it right. Maybe the Cosmic order is Karma and Rebirth and the World of Form. Maybe it is Atman and Brahman, and the Formless World. He was so able to see that either one of these could be the way things are that he could describe how *his* moral system and insights would work within those systems as well -- with only modest adjustments in a few definitions of things, of course. Talk about your "inclusiveness of vision."
The reason this is important -- the reason I bring it up, put my finger on this page to mark it -- is because I am afraid that something so important to the reduction of dukkha (indeed, to world peace) will be lost if we take a stance that gets in the face of believers, saying "There ain't no afterlife." There goes tolerance, there goes grace. "Only this is right, everything else is wrong," is, as the Buddha said many times, not the way to go about living our lives.
It takes a lot of grace, on the non-believer's part, on the part of the materialist, to take a stance in which we acknowledge that there *could* be things going on that are beyond our present level of scientific skill to detect. But to me, this is the effect of what the Buddha repeatedly says: pay attention to what we can see for ourselves, and work with *that*, stick with *that*, and don't invest in anything else -- not only don't invest in belief in that which we cannot see, but don't invest in non-belief in it, either. That's all I have to do, and it allows others to have their beliefs without pressure or added strife.
What I can see for myself is that when someone's beliefs lead them to behave badly; then I can talk about the bad behavior, because that's what's clearly visible -- stick to that, focus on that; it's what the Buddha did and I tend to agree with his example, that if anything is going to make the world a better place it is that focus on reducing suffering right here and now that will lead us to the best choices, and lead us, eventually, to the more accurate view of the world that enables everything to get better.
Even for a materialist, karma is not dead. All we need to do is pay attention to what the Buddha was saying about it, and stop interpreting it only in terms of its tie into rebirth. His discussions of rebirth and karma were fingers pointing at the moon, not the moon itself. If we look more deeply, he does not necessarily always say that each act gets its fruit . When he is talking about karma in great detail (instead of in brief) as in MN 136 (as I've argued on my blog) he says we can't really tell from an act what it's outcome will be, though afterward we can look back and see that an act that was going to have an outcome, did (sort of a "Duh!" moment there).
That so many of the texts can easily be read two ways is not an accident, it's skill-in-means, and invites us to look a little more deeply and compare what we see in our lives and in the world with what we hear the Buddha saying, and if we find a mismatch at one level, that doesn't necessarily mean "The Buddha was wrong" (about, for example, karma and rebirth), it might just mean that, in taking the easiest reading, the surface reading, we have not yet understood what he was trying to convey to those willing to do the work, the practice, and see if their lives match up. He encourages us not to take anyone's word, and it seems clear to me that he meant not even his. (2 of 3)
You say, in your comments to César, that you are arguing for a break with Buddhist tradition; I find it interesting that I am arguing for the same sort of break -- I find myself agreeing with all your conclusions about what the reality is that we have to deal with, about karma and rebirth being non-starters, about "the mind" involving the whole body, not just the brain (my practice has made that pretty evident to me, at least), and so on. I believe you and I are heading for pretty much identical ideas of what the practice is about in the modern world. But we do get there via very different routes -- you arrive there, it seems to me, by comparing what the Buddha said to what you see and finding him wrong, and I arrive there by comparing what I'm told the Buddha said to what I see in my life, and finding it wrong, and then looking at how he said what he said, and how it can be interpreted, and seeing how consistently it appears to be designed to be read two ways, how carefully crafted that is, and then looking at the larger context (much of it through Jurewicz work) and I still do conclude that he is saying what you seem to be saying he would say if he lived now. The only difference between you and me is that I see that he was saying it then -- it's just that 2,000 years of tradition has made us unwilling to interpret it that way.
"The practices are of the type that can be tested by anyone who wishes to try them."
And this is what I am saying: yes, this is true. And what you see, when you practice, is what the Buddha expected you to see: that you have no evidence for karma and rebirth working as a perfect, comforting, Cosmic Order. So the next step, after we realize that what we see doesn't match what he said, is *not* to start by throwing out everything he said that we think is wrong, but to first at least give an honest attempt at questioning whether we have really understood what he is saying.
Once I saw the structure of Dependent Arising as being based on the Vedic system of beliefs in the creation of Self, its perfection through rituals, and where those beliefs and rituals were supposed to lead -- once I saw that through that model he was describing something else entirely: our beliefs about self, our rituals that create self, and where those actually *do* lead -- it became totally clear just *how* all his talk about karma and rebirth is metaphorical: part of a huge, beautifully constructed, intricate model that allowed him to talk about the deep and difficult-to-see insight into human behavior, all the while offending no believers in the dominant system of his day -- all the while, actually, giving them helpful lessons couched in terms of that finger-pointing-at-the-moon, karma and rebirth. He lived what he preached -- he argued with no one, except on the grounds of their visible behavior and where it did or could lead. I believe that offering that sort of grace, of the "you may be right, the world may work the way you think it does" variety is not far wrong. Though it did get his dharma misunderstood. (3 of 3)
@Linda I got as far as your belief in something the Buddha did not believe. Having a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence is illogical. When there is considerable counterfactual evidence as well it seems quixotic. Good luck, but my money is on the windmills.
I'd be interested in reading Suvajra's paper if there is a link available.
Of course you're right in that I haven't got all the information and I thank you for the time you took answering my questions. I find it very useful to let out my half-cooked notions in front of people like you who've put a lot of thought and research into these issues; if one doesn't open up to the teachers, they won't be able to fathom the real depth of one's ignorance with total accuracy!
@Cesar I'll see if I can dig out Suvajra's essay. He never published it, so I'd have to ask him if its OK to share it.
I'm happy to hear from you. You seem to be willing to grant that I might know what I'm talking about, but also to ask pertinent, searching questions that require some thought on my part. It's a nice combination :-)
I'd be interested in reading Suvajra's paper if there is a link available.
You're dead right in that I haven't got all the information and I thank you for the time you took answering my questions. I find it very useful to let out my half-cooked notions in front of people like you, who've put a lot of thought and research into these issues; if one doesn't open up to the teachers, they won't be able to fathom the real depth of one's ignorance with total accuracy!
In my view, the very first of Carroll's propositions has been significantly weakened just these past couple of years.
Given the non-locality and non-determinism of quantum mechanics, I'd say that the recent discoveries of unambiguous room temperature quantum coherence in something as relatively primitive as plants deserves more pause than the hand-waving you present here:
> Because this is the state of knowledge, it reinforces proposition one. If there were another stuff out there, or in here, that could affect our brains, we would have found it by now. The mind cannot be a different kind of stuff or we'd have found that stuff. There is nowhere for the mind to hide. This kind of argument that something is hiding just beyond the detectors is what is known as a God of the Gaps argument. God, or the supernatural or whatever, is always just beyond the current state of our knowledge of the universe. But the picture of physics is so well worked out now, that there are no gaps big enough to fit the mind into it. If, for example, the mind turns out to be a product of quantum vibrations in micro-tubules in neurons, rather than the interaction of neurons themselves, it won't change the basic fact that the mind is the brain. And we understand the principles of quantum states too.
Isn't it the case that saying that we understand the principles of quantum states here is like saying we understand that the legs of the table don't just fall apart without knowing anything about the nuclear forces that hold it together?
A quick Wikipedia lookup yields atleast 30 different contested interpretations of quantum mechanics. With so little consensus on what lies underneath QM coupled with a potentially massive amount of QM effects occurring in the brain, substance monism remains a convenient ideology in my view.
"In this one equation are summarised all the laws of physics necessary to understand the atoms in your brain [and body] at the energy, mass and length scales relevant to your everyday lives."
How is the equation shown in the article wrong, or what other formulation would you suggest could replace it?
How are scientists failing to predict the behaviour of atoms at the energy, mass and length scales relevant to our everyday lives? Do you have an example of such a failure?
> How is the equation shown in the article wrong, or what other formulation would you suggest could replace it?
I wouldn't dare suggest any addition or revision to the formula, but rather point out that the equation represents an amplitude. And so while the amplitude of a configuration change may remain constant, I'd imagine that there is room for play in the precise distribution of the amplitude across and/or within the variables in the quantum mechanics portion of the equation.
I'm essentially parroting the first reply found here
> How are scientists failing to predict the behaviour of atoms at the energy, mass and length scales relevant to our everyday lives? Do you have an example of such a failure?
To be blunt, nothing less than a deterministic model for neural activation is sorely amiss.
If quantum coherence does indeed hold in neuronal microtubules as evidenced in a March 2013 Japanese study, then the implications may be, if Penrose-Hameroff's newly revised Orch-OR would have it, that we've got billions of non-deterministic qubit computations occurring throughout our brains.
>The nature of consciousness, the mechanism by which it occurs in the brain, and its ultimate place in the universe are unknown. We proposed in the mid 1990's that consciousness depends on biologically ‘orchestrated’ coherent quantum processes in collections of microtubules within brain neurons, that these quantum processes correlate with, and regulate, neuronal synaptic and membrane activity, and that the continuous Schrödinger evolution of each such process terminates in accordance with the specific Diósi–Penrose (DP) scheme of ‘objective reduction’ (‘OR’) of the quantum state. This orchestrated OR activity (‘Orch OR’) is taken to result in moments of conscious awareness and/or choice. The DP form of OR is related to the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and space–time geometry, so Orch OR suggests that there is a connection between the brain's biomolecular processes and the basic structure of the universe. Here we review Orch OR in light of criticisms and developments in quantum biology, neuroscience, physics and cosmology. We also introduce a novel suggestion of ‘beat frequencies’ of faster microtubule vibrations as a possible source of the observed electro-encephalographic (‘EEG’) correlates of consciousness. We conclude that consciousness plays an intrinsic role in the universe.
Further down they present the state of the consciousness debate as follows:
(A) Science/Materialism, with consciousness having no distinctive role (B) Dualism/Spirituality, with consciousness (etc.) being outside science (C) Science, with consciousness as an essential ingredient of physical laws not yet fully understood
They're proposing (C), of course, where Sean Carroll's first proposal would fall under (A).
Jayarava, you may be interested in an upcoming interview (just recorded) with Massimo Pigliucci, we spend a little time on the values of constructive engagement.
It's funny. I live down the road from one of the labs where they've made real progress in quantum computing. And walking distance from the Cavendish Lab and other places where famous discoveries were made. Almost everyday I pass by the window where Wittgenstein threatened Karl Popper with a poker. And yet I know almost nothing about quantum mechanics.
My sense is that we're in the same boat here. You want there to be something wrong with Carroll's assertion that we understand the behaviour of atoms and yet you cannot quite put your finger on what it might be. Something abstract. Something tricksie.
It's quite obvious that we do not understand exactly how "consciousness" is created. We're not even sure what we mean by consciousness most of the time.
Now some scientists are in the business of speculating on consciousness and then they go looking for evidence for their theory. It's a time honoured method and has been very successful. But not finding evidence just means the theory is not accurate. As far as I am aware no one has yet convincingly come up with an a priori description of the phenomenon from first principles - consciousness is not obvious in the way that, say, the second law of thermodynamics is. There's no theory, so far, that says because of X then there must be something like consciousness. We have consciousness and we're looking for post hoc explanations. No worldview does better than this.
If one group of researches fail to predict something, that doesn't mean that all of physics falls down. Quantum mechanics makes any number of useful and accurate predictions. This is why, for example, the majority still cleave to Copenhagen. Because so far it is the most accurate interpretation. When someone comes up with a more consistently accurate theory, i.e. a theory which makes more accurate predictions, then most people will switch. Not all of course, because there's always room for improvement and some people are just contrary. Any new theory will most likely show us how the Copenhagen interpretation is special case of a more fundamental interpretation, so we will have made progress.
Your argument is that quantum mechanics, combined with the other theories mentioned above, fail to accurately describe the behaviour of atoms, but you cannot give us an example of this failure. The paper you reference isn't an example of a behaviour of atoms that cannot be explained with references to the known laws of physics. It's a critique of a particular kind of speculation, about some earlier speculation they made, in the light of new discoveries which are not evidence for their speculations, but which have caused them to modify their initial speculation. This kind of paper is not evidence based. They don't make predictions and look for evidence, they are trying to construct a complex narrative that is consistent with the known facts. That's an entirely different enterprise.
In the meantime no one is prevented from building a tunnelling electron microscope because the theory of quantum tunnelling is really quite accurate. In the meantime we can put billions of nanoscale transistors on a silicon chip, or make a super-conducting magnet, or do a PET scan because quantum mechanics accurately predicts the behaviour of atoms. Given the right equipment I can happily entangle photons and measure their quantum states, spin and so on. We're living just two years on from the discovery of the Higgs Boson based on a prediction that comes out of quantum mechanics. Doubts about the standard model are getting severely squeezed.
Despite the failure to explain consciousness, we understand the basic behaviour of atoms and we are sure, beyond reasonable doubt, that the constraints are these: 1. the mind is a function of the brain; 2. there are no new particles or forces that we need to consider in our theories of how the brain creates consciousness.
Having decided that the standard explanation couldn't fully explain the explosive reaction of sodium in water these people made some better observations. Based on what they saw "Frank Uhlig carried out quantum-mechanical computer simulations of the process with clusters of just 19 sodium atoms" and discovered what was happening was a loss of electrons creating a coulomb effect in the metal and causing it to explode.
Another success for the quantum mechanics that you want us to believe doesn't work.
You seem to be making a strawman out of me. Allow me to explain.
> ...And yet I know almost nothing about quantum mechanics.
> My sense is that we're in the same boat here.
I do happily admit that the one quantum physics course I took for my undergrad is the only course I ever failed in my academic career as an engineer.
> You want there to be something wrong with Carroll's assertion that we understand the behaviour of atoms and yet you cannot quite put your finger on what it might be. Something abstract. Something tricksie.
So let's leave the equation, and Carroll's 2nd and 3rd assertions to stand.
What I'm suggesting is that there is plenty of room for consciousness to abide by known mathematical formalisms of quantum physics while still casting plenty of reasonable doubt on Carroll's first assertion.
Here's my understanding: My brain is made up of neurons connected at synapses of two types: axonal and dendritic. In the former, an action potential of a neuron triggers an action potential of the next neuron chemically and with a delay. In the latter, an action potential triggers an action potential of the next neuron without delay. The action potentials of groups of neurons connected dendritically combine to form measurable correlates of consciousness via EEG.
The discovery in the past few years is that networks of microtubules found throughout neuron bodies are capable of quantum coherence and are capable of quantum superpositional effects. These effects are effectively non-deterministic and may be responsible for modulating in substantive ways the action potentials of neurons.
Therefore, the conventional reductionist idea that prior mind states completely determine subsequent mind states is now a controversial one given that neuronal action potentials are found to be highly reliable correlates of consciousness.
Penrose's theory of Orchestrated Objective-Reduction (Orch-OR) goes even further, to the fringes I'd admit, in suggesting a mechanism by which quantum gravity (an as-yet-unresolved physics problem of the behaviour of the gravity caused by a single quantum) is intricately involved in observed quantum superpositional effects. He goes even further still in suggesting that the "Objective Reduction" of a particle from superposition is precisely what a quantum of consciousness is. He goes even further in suggesting that consciousness is a priori in this interaction between consciousness and quantum gravity and that therefore the "Objective Reduction" of a particle from superposition is "Orchestrated".
We can actually throw out Penrose's Orch-OR and still be left with a substantively non-deterministic brain. At which point, we're left wondering where the non-determinism comes from. To say that this non-determinism is wholly contained in the brain, in my view, borders on the non-sensical and is a conservative description of the state-of-the-art at best rather than a conclusion.
In my view, the further development of physical laws (ie quantum gravity) has relatively suddenly become crucial to understanding the mind. To Penrose-Hameroff's credit, their 20-year-old Orch-OR theory anticipated the room-temperature quantum coherence discovery of the past few years (they've proposed an experiment to test their theory to boot) so they have my attention, rather than Carroll.
If you grant that no new forces or particles are required to explain the behaviour of atoms at the relevant energy, mass, and length variables then I don't get your objection.
"Therefore, the conventional reductionist idea that prior mind states completely determine subsequent mind states is now a controversial one given that neuronal action potentials are found to be highly reliable correlates of consciousness."
I don't see how this is relevant. It's not something I've ever asserted. It's not something I've ever seen asserted, and it's not something that Sean Carroll is asserting so far as I'm aware. So who is making a straw man argument here? Who even says it's "conventional". I've been thinking and reading about this stuff for decades and have yet to come across this "convention".
But worse, on face value such determinism is unsustainable even in classical physics, since the brain is not a closed system. So as far as this "conventional" idea is concerned it never entered my head because it's obviously stupid. So who are you arguing with? If you're mistaking me for a determinist then you are seriously barking up the wrong tree. You have not been paying attention!
Penrose is indulging in speculative metaphysics as far as I'm aware. The neuroscientists I do read (Damasio, Sacks, Ramachandran, Le Doux, Metzinger, Blanke, Churchland...) do not cite Penrose. These people are all empiricists mostly working from observable phenomena towards theory, though Blanke in particular going the other way these days. I'm also interested in the Big Blue brain modelling project and the nematode worm neuron mapping project and similar endeavours. I'm not particularly interested in the abstract speculative side of things. In any case Penrose et al are not proposing new fields, particles, or forces are they? They're arguing that some previously undocumented phenomena comes out of the existing fields, forces and particles but seen in a new way (that cannot be seen).
There is no doubt that quantum gravity is a desideratum, but gravity has almost no effect on how our minds work because at the energy, mass and length scales relevant to our bodies it's too weak to have any effect. For the electron and proton in an atom, the gravitational force is 39 orders of magnitude weaker than the electrical force. Arguing that gravity is relevant sounds like astrology.
Penrose et al may eventually accurately predict something relevant, but they haven't yet. And even in predicting something they have not proposed new fields, forces or particles - they propose to show that the current fields, forces and particles produce an interesting effects. Even if they are right, and we simply don't know, then they won't have disproven the argument above. They only have made it stronger by showing how the present theories might describe consciousness without adding any new fundamental physics - no new fields, particles or forces.
I can only conclude that you're blinded by this misattribution of a deterministic worldview to me and thus have not really understood what I'm getting at. It is demonstrably you, rather than me, that is having a strawman argument. In addition you do not appear to be arguing against any proposition that I have asserted, so I can only repeat myself. As far as I can see Penrose is working within the paradigm I've outlined, not outside of it. I actually say this in the essay.
Still not sure on this one. As you said earlier - the absence of proof is not proof of absence. Not knowing of any mechanism does not preclude it - although I would agree that it limits where it could be hiding.
I have thought, for example, that there could well be unknown forces that interact between neutrinos - how would we ever know. To put it another way, how would a being living in a world of neutrinos ever learn about chemical bonds?
A more interesting line of enqiry to me (and I just thought about this on the way home) is anaesthetic - a chemical that can cause loss of consciousness either to part of the nervous system (a local) or to thw whole system. Even more fascinating is that subsequent to the chemical wearing off we regain a consciousness so similar to the one we had before that the illusion of continuity is complete for the patient and those that know them.
Is this like a computer on stand by - with the programs in RAM but no processing going on?
My own experience (and passing out is something I am good at, so I've had a bit) is that regaining consciousness is a strange process where the mind is booting up a system at a time, sound comes first, followed by proprioception, followed by touch, followed by sight. No idea where taste and smell come in. All of these come back bit by bit - starting with ringing in the ears for sound and white noise for sight.
Whatever the case - we can selectively turn consciousness off with chemicals - perhaps the closest we have got to separating the live brain from the perceptive experience.
I withdraw my determinism strawman — it's the easiest position to attack. You've certainly compelled me to do some more homework. :)
> If you grant that no new forces or particles are required to explain the behaviour of atoms at the relevant energy, mass, and length variables then I don't get your objection.
To be brief, substance monism is, as has been, a very weak position from which to make any conclusions that end in any kind of patronizing.
The Copenhagen interpretation is merely winning a popularity contest. Quantum mechanics is a formulation of observed behaviour, and an interpretation of those mechanics has nothing to do with the performance of those formulations. The varieties of interpretations are metaphysical speculations, the Copenhagen Interpretation included. The discovery of quantum vibrations in microtubules in 2013/2014 brings quantum metaphysics to the table to shed light on competing philosophies of mind.
Essentially, God's Gap has been widened and resides in the evolution and collapse of the W in Carroll's equation because "warm, wet and noisy" quantum coherence has been discovered to be possible.
> The neuroscientists I do read (Damasio, Sacks, Ramachandran, Le Doux, Metzinger, Blanke, Churchland...) do not cite Penrose. These people are all empiricists mostly working from observable phenomena towards theory, though Blanke in particular going the other way these days. I'm also interested in the Big Blue brain modelling project and the nematode worm neuron mapping project and similar endeavours.
"I have thought, for example, that there could well be unknown forces that interact between neutrinos - how would we ever know. To put it another way, how would a being living in a world of neutrinos ever learn about chemical bonds?"
Of course this appears to exactly the case with dark matter and dark energy. Only close observation of galaxies and clusters of galaxies make it obvious that there is more mass and a repulsive force operating.
But the thing is, and I seem to have to keep repeating this, if it has an effect at the energy, mass and length values relevant to everyday life, we can detect it (can can detect neutrinos and have some ideas about how to detect dark matter). If we can't detect it, then it has no appreciable effect.
Anaesthetics merely disrupt the chemistry of the brain. Nothing special there. Indeed the example of drugs that cross the brain/blood barrier affecting consciousness only reinforces the notion that the brain creates consciousness.
"The Copenhagen interpretation is merely winning a popularity contest."
Yes, because lasers, transistors, superconductors, tunnelling microscopes, and quantum computers are all just a complete fluke that we totally do not understand. You keep writing as though QM is a failed theory. It's one of the most successful theories ever. It accurately predicts the behaviour of matter on the nano scale and lower. How can you be so pessimistic just two years after the discovery of the Higgs Boson? You're basically setting aside the advances of the last 100 years, from the photo-electric effect to the Higgs, because why? Because of a new physical prediction from *the same theory* that is just now being observed. It doesn't invalidate the theory, it reinforces the accuracy of it.
"Essentially, God's Gap has been widened and resides in the evolution and collapse of the W in Carroll's equation because "warm, wet and noisy" quantum coherence has been discovered to be possible."
If you like. I don't see that it changes anything. Look at the macroscopic manifestations of coherence: lasers, superfluids and superconducting. Big advances, but no one is basing God of the Gaps arguments based on them. Indeed the opposite is true. As we explain phenomena we reduce the gap in which the unexplained lurks.
New phenomena widen the explanatory gap. Dark matter and dark energy did this. Suddenly we don't understand 96% of the universe. Once we find a way of explaining the two phenomena the gap closes. If indeed there are observations of quantum coherence effects then presumably we will explain these as quantum coherence in which case I don't see what is exercising you. We already have the theory to describe these and it falls out of the current theory. There is no explanatory gap that I can see, except for the imaginary causal relationship you are so excited about.
"The discovery of quantum vibrations in microtubules in 2013/2014 brings quantum metaphysics to the table to shed light on competing philosophies of mind."
Who cares? I say we don't need any new physics to explain the mind, and you say that we do. But then you demonstrate that the existing physics explains this new effect that has no demonstrable correlation with consciousness.
"@Linda I got as far as your belief in something the Buddha did not believe." You recognize this, don't you, as a favored strategy for continuation of a cognitive bias: shut down as soon as there is something you disagree with; don't listen to the whole argument -- call it a waste of time rather than risk an understanding different from the one you have invested so much in.
You imagine I'm tilting at windmills, but you've created the windmill -- I'm not even standing near it. The only windmill I keep tilting at is the hope that you'll one day see what I'm saying, without prejudice.
I appreciate the effort and time it took to put this post together. Thanks for writing it.
> I started this project because I was interested in the truth. All my life I've been like "what the hell is going on?"
The above quote of yours describes extremely well the feeling and endeavor I am currently embarking on. Perhaps this is why I feel affinity for your writing. But I feel I am a bit behind both on digesting some of these concepts as well as personal experience in meditation and the states it may lead to. Which leads me to my question…
This may be a bit of a Devil’s Advocate exercise but I think it will help articulate what I feel is missing here for me:
When we boil it down, claims about karma or rebirth (as well as psychic powers?) are basically derived from what you call Private Experiences and what I refer to simply as (internal?) subjective experience that somehow come about from states achieved through various meditation practices. Correct so far?
Those who have experienced those states/experiences seem very convinced as you pointed out. But I am now encountering more folks who have had those but say that they are not certain these experiences are what they appear to be, but say that those experiences do happen and confirm that they are very convincing. I don’t know if you have experienced any of those (or any at all?) but I wonder if there are any of those experiences which you would consider accurate or legitimate despite being a subjective experience. For example, realizing No-Self or that the sense of self is an illusion. I know this is not a metaphysical claim per se but it is an example of one that without experiencing it directly can sound like complete nonsense, even if I can posit that it might be legit by intellectually thinking about it, I cannot imagine what it is like or the change in perspective it might bring about.
Sam Harris, who is not only a neuroscientist but what I call a super skeptic (not that either makes him an authority, I know), mentions in his book Waking Up that having experienced No Self it is now inescapably obvious to be the case that the sense of self is an illusion. He also goes on to say that nothing in meditation or states he achieved tells you anything metaphysical about the nature of the universe, but he also says he has not achieved cessation (which seems to be considered the first major realization/insight on the 4 paths to enlightenment, whatever that may be). So I do wonder if he will say anything different after having had the more “advanced” experiences or not.
My question I guess comes down to, do you consider any of the claims of insight that come from advanced meditators to be accurate, or have discovered them to be so to your own satisfaction after reaching a similar state of insight yourself and confirming personally the same insight? If so, what separates some claims from others? I understand that they can be right about one thing but wrong about another, but can we really comment on those claims without experiencing them privately ourselves (other than hypothesizing about them)?
At the end of the day, I am trying to figure out what is true and what is not from the multitude of claims I hear from all these teachers and “enlightened” people. It seems that almost the only way to even begin assessing them is to first have the supposed experience for myself. Empirical claims are easier, although not always easy, to try to dispute, but some are a lot more fuzzy and seem to imply a direct experience is required.
I hope I am making sense and that my question is clear. Thanks in advance.
I'm not "prejudiced" against what you are saying. I'm saying I find your argument unconvincing, largely because you are claiming certainty on the basis of uncertain evidence. And I'm in pretty good company as I understand the mood of the academy - very few people are convinced by your argument (no scholars who I know personally).
Of course you are far from the first person to claim to be able to discern some kind of "original" Buddhism in the Tripiṭaka. But history shows that such presumption has *always* been met with a certain amount of criticism and ultimately with rejection. Because there really is no evidence that can get us back to the Buddha. He's effectively a fictional character. If we don't know his *name*, we are hardly likely to know what he "believed". Your particular claim is less credible than many others. You in a small category of scholars headed up by Mrs Rhys Davids.
I was always taught to stick to the evidence. I'm all for speculating where there is evidence, my speculations have also been published, but one has to be clear that it is speculation and be tolerant of those who find it unconvincing. To become convinced by one's own speculations is usually the sign of a weak intellect. Can you, for example, point to a single positive endorsement of your view by another scholar? Have you even been cited by anyone? Is your idea being discussed in academic online fora? Or is it just you?
Attacking me personally because I have expressed scepticism just shows the kind of argument you are making.
"At the end of the day, I am trying to figure out what is true and what is not from the multitude of claims I hear from all these teachers and “enlightened” people."
Yes. We seem to currently be in the same boat as the Kālāmas were many centuries ago. They posed the question for the same reason, but asked "how should we behave". And the Buddha said, "pay attention and trust your experience of how to behave". I.e. one can figure out how to get on with other people by trial and error.
As far as the advanced stuff goes, no I have no attainments in that area. I have little religious talent. But I have plenty of reason to believe that some kind of radical transformation is possible. I see no reason to doubt it. The arguments over exactly what the experience is like or how to conceptualise it seem academic to me.
If guru-X says the truth is that we have no self, then what you see is a load of petty disciples with no experience of their own, turning this into a dogma, going around preaching "there is no-self", and insisting that anyone who uses a first-person pronoun is an idiot. It's pathetic. A very small number of disciples will knuckle under and do the necessary work to have that same kind of experience. They are the ones to keep an eye on. And they all seem to say the same thing - "it takes practice".
"No-self" is clearly a metaphor because when you talk to these people they have some kind of orientation to the world that is centred on their body - someone is looking out from those eyes! Although much of what Gary Weber says is clearly bonkers (free will denial) he is quite eloquent on what he means by not having a self - it's a specific kind of experience. This interview is worth watching. But then so is the TED Talk by Jill Bolte Taylor.
But on whole the question of what is it like to be enlightened is a bit like a virgin pondering what sex is like. As we know sex is different every time. My most satisfying sexual experiences occurred many years after the first one. So enlightenment is not really one experience. We can all get a taste of what it's like through intensive meditation under good circumstances. Even a talentless meditator like me. Presumably one can cross a threshold where the range of experience no longer falls back to the kind of resting state that I wake up in each day. It's certainly an attractive notion and it seems to happen to many people.
Those who are really, genuinely interested in the experience are already meditating for hours each day and have arranged their lives around the pursuit of this goal. The rest of us are just kinda curious, but not serious. Just as I'll never be a competitive athlete or a professional musician, but draw vicarious pleasure from watching the All Blacks thrash England at Rugby or listening to Dave Rawlings picking out some wild chromatic counterpoint on a Gillian Welsh record. To get to the peak, one just has to put in the hours and be single minded. Of course enlightenment might simply descend on us without warning or practice, as happened to Ramana Maharshi or even to Jill BT. But most of us are looking at putting in 10,000 hours of practice in as short a period as possible in order to have that experience.
I know I'll never do that, so I'm resigned to making a different kind of contribution to the life of my religious community. Hopefully a little intellectual clarity. Not much perhaps, but then I don't have much to offer. But if one knows that one is not climbing Everest, then obsessing about what the peak is like is a waste on time and energy. I'm a base camp assistant and I'm far better off focussing on making a good base camp. Course, being me, I have my own ideas about the best way to go about this, but I do what I think is right and try to take the consequences into account. I try not to be a petty disciple.
Regards user chansik and his contention that the revised Penrose proposal that quantum coherence in microtubules in neurons is responsible for consciousness I'll cite an interesting reposte from the profession, but before I do that I want to draw attention to the basic problem. chansik has agreed that Penrose does not propose new physics: no new fields, forces, or particles. Thus his basic proposal rests on a speculative metaphysical interpretation of the observation that vibrations occur in microtubules.
Microtubules are small structures made of two proteins, which contribute to the structural integrity of all cells. They are also involved in transportation of a variety of constituents within the cell. As the name suggests they are very small and tube shaped (just 12nm inner diameter). What happens in these microtubules has been partially correlated with the patterns of brain waves, but importantly, never positively correlated with any aspect of consciousness. It's possible that if we accept the idea that the brain is the mind (and hardly anyone in this forum accepts this) that something which is involved in brainwaves might be involved in consciousness. Although the arrow of causation may well point the other way as well. No plausible causal mechanism has been proposed for how this coherence might contribute to consciousness (at least this is what others in the profession say - I've been checking references today).
The larger problem however is one of scale. The effect, like all quantum effects, is mainly at the atomic scale. There is some correlation with the macro-scale effect of brain waves, but the causal relationship is unclear as yet. In other macro-scale coherence effects - such as lasers - there is no sign that the coherence is an information storage structure, it's just that by vibrating in time the atoms produce coherent light. If microtubules produce complex effects like consciousness then we'd expect to see parallels in lasers, such as information bearing laser substrates. We don't see this. There is precisely zero evidence that information storage is involved. If there is no information storage involved then the afterlife--conceptualised as the persistence of information storage beyond the death of the brain--can not be predicated on this phenomena. candsik is just making this bit up. Now to what the profession make of this idea. I will cite one response from a team which decisively disproved one of the testable hypotheses in the first iteration of the Penrose conjecture and who are thus thoroughly well versed in the practical implications.
"The original proposal thus contained a critical testable hypothesis. We tested this hypothesis and found two fatal shortcomings, resulting in it being withdrawn from Orch OR in this current review."
The paper is a direct comment on the one that chansik has been basing his comments on.
Jeffrey R. Reimersa, Laura K. McKemmishb, Ross H. McKenziec, Alan E. Markd, & Noel S. Hushe. (2014) The revised Penrose–Hameroff orchestrated objective-reduction proposal for human consciousness is not scientifically justified: Comment on “Consciousness in the universe: A review of the ‘Orch OR’ theory” by Hameroff and Penrose. Physics of Life Reviews. Volume 11, Issue 1, March 2014, Pages 101–103.
"No model of Orch OR can be treated seriously without the following: (i) a precise description of the quantum states of the qubit, (ii) a description of the mechanism through which the wavefunctions representing these states become entangled, including specification of the basis in which measurements of the qubit's properties are performed in situ, and (iii) a means of achieving quantum coherence over the required time scale.
Hameroff and Penrose provide only a vague set of qubit possibilities".
This team of scientists conclude:
"The [latest version of the Penrose–Hameroff conjecture] is thus neither self-consistent or scientifically coherent and violates the basic tenants of good scientific practice. The specification of the quantum qubit should be the centrepiece of the proposal. All other aspects of the Orch OR proposal are only relevant in terms of how they affect the qubits. Without a viable qubit specification there is no connection between the proposal and the observations of Bandyopadhyay and others. Without a qubit there is no connection to postulated effects of quantum gravity. Without a qubit there is no testable hypothesis linking together the phenomena of quantum gravity, elementary biochemical function, and consciousness, and no basis on which “Orch OR theory” can be considered as a proposal worthy of further consideration." (emphasis added)
The trouble with a complex proposal like the Penrose Conjecture is that it's difficult for lay people to assess. And when we turn to the professionals they are deeply sceptical about the conjecture itself, but also about the methods of those proposing it.
The basic problem is that there is sign of a way of storing information in this view. There's no way for this effect to represent anything, any more than the beating atoms in a laser represent anything other than beating atoms. There no potential here to generate consciousness, and thus as far as we can say the mind is still generated by the neurons in the brain.
Of course new evidence may be forthcoming as Penrose & Hameroff claim to have made testable predictions. But the smart money at this stage would be on Reimersa et al disproving it. But even if it amounts to something more, it would not change the basic argument set out in my essay: The mind is the brain, the brain is made of atoms, we know how atoms work, and the second law of thermodynamics makes an afterlife untenable beyond any reasonable doubt - the quantum world provides no way to overcome the increase of entropy that happens at death destroying the information that constitutes a person. Given that there is no information storage potential in the Penrose-Hameroff conjecture the argument their model is in fact entirely irrelevant to the question of an afterlife.
Interesting to read some of the discussion since I last commented. I'm not too familiar with the details of Hameroff & Penrose's ideas - mainly because I'm not aware of it being treated especially seriously by physicists, so I haven't given it the time - but I do have a little expertise in quantum mechanics and field theory.
The equation for "W" given by Carroll doesn't have any room for the kind of vagueness that Chansik is suggesting - it's pretty solid.
If we take out the [Dg} (which appears to represent a quantum theory of gravity that we don't actually have), and the square root of -g, and the part labelled "gravity", the equation we're left with describes the Standard Model of particle physics, which is extremely precisely defined and tested to all kinds of extreme.
The vast majority of experimental and theoretical physicists are privately and publicly fed up with the Standard Model, which is now about forty years old, because despite every imaginable crazy experiment, nobody has yet found the tiniest crack in it using experiments on Earth. And physicists naturally want there to be more to understand.
Also, there must be a particle physics (quantum) connection to astrophysical observations such as dark matter, dark energy and gravity itself. (But we know that none of this has anything to do with consciousness.) There are plenty of unanswered questions about the nature of the internal dynamics of hadrons such as protons and neutrons, and pieces we don't know exactly how to fit in, such as neutrino masses. (We know these have nothing to do with consciousness either.)
The parts we're left with describe either deterministic or random-probabilistic outcomes, which are independent of whichever interpretation of quantum mechanics you favour.
This is the reason there are so many interpretations. Quantum theory doesn't give us conceptual details of exactly what is happening under the bonnet in a way we can understand - it tells us what we can expect to observe if we start with a certain thing and do a certain thing to it. Interpretations are just stories that try to fill in the parts in between. They're important for philosophers, and they're important for the physics of 'quantum foundations' which hopes to find experimental ways to distinguish between different interpretations, and ultimately to lead us towards a better version. Right now, they're all just stories - ways of imagining what's happening - and they're all as good or as bad as each other.
The reason the Copenhagen Interpretation is popular is because it's by far the simplest story for people who are learning quantum theory for the first time. An explanation of Carroll's equation for "W" using the Copenhagen interpretation, however, would be very contrived - it would be far more natural to use the many worlds interpretation (which is also very popular). But the two stories are describing exactly the same causal relationships between observable phenomena.
If you have any particular questions about quantum physics or the Standard Model, feel free to try me. I'm no expert but I might be able to shed a little light on it.
Bob! Someone who actually knows something about quantum mechanics! Gasp.
I know that some scientists were disappointed when the Higgs was found, because it only provided more confirmation for the standard model. I also note that just this week another attempt to locate quantum gravity failed. And I should point out that Carroll is a vocal advocate of the many-worlds interpretation of QM. I suppose what may not be clear is just what difference the interpretations make. Many worlds is even more counter-intuitive than Copenhagen when in comes to the cat in the box!
My sense of this problem is that people struggle with changes of scale. We naturally think classically and on the scale of a human body. So everything gets interpreted as though it were classical and relevant big lumps of matter. And of course that does not work. On the whole one cannot simply shift back and forth between the sub-atomic world and the world of grams and metres; the scale change is around 30 orders of magnitude and that cannot be ignored.
However whichever interpretation of QM wins out, we still basically understand chemistry (which is what I studied) and entropy. Yes QM refines that picture, but as I repeatedly said to chansik (though he refused to listen) no new fields, forces or particles are required to apply QM to refine our understanding of chemistry. Nothing very spooky is happening in coherence, or lasers would be considerably more interesting!
I've never been convinced that deciding among interpretations is even a sensible question. Quantum theory works perfectly well regardless of how we interpret it. Some questions are just the kind of things humans ask (e.g. which slit did the particle go through?) As you say, our intuitions are built for a different scale.
Yes, no new fields, forces or particles are required to refine our understanding of chemistry. The same can be said of ecology, climatology, biology, neurology. They all rely on the same fundamental understanding of thermodynamics, entropy, information, energy, to delineate what is possible from what is not.
If we were to claim that there's a kind of continuity of characteristics after death that can have some effect on physical matter at a later point in time, then this claim also has implications in terms of those laws.
It's up to us whether we want to take the details of those implications seriously. Most people don't, because it's easy to not be familiar with the laws, and it's easy to dismiss them or underestimate them. Being glib about what might be possible is understandably a lot more popular than setting about trying to understand what is already known and how it is known.
As far as I can make out, Carroll's - and your - arguments don't rely on any kind of prior materialistic outlook. They're based on empiricism. If all our observations are relentlessly consistent with a model, in every conceivable context, then adopting a view that goes against that consistency ought to be a big deal.
"If all our observations are relentlessly consistent with a model, in every conceivable context, then adopting a view that goes against that consistency ought to be a big deal."
To be honest Jayarava, I think you are over stating the case here. There have been so many points in scientific history where we think we have the answers and it turns out that we only have a clue to a small portion of it.
Drawing conclusions about consciousness from atoms is a little like drawing conclusions about a house from individual bricks, or about a person from their genome.
Complex phenomena emerge from simple phenomena and there are a range of effects that cannot as yet be predicted from the simpler forms.
As someone who knows how a computer works from Facebook videos down to transistors I am aware of how complex even man's meagre creations are and how complex matters get when talking about what effects what.
Anaesthetics 'merely' disrupt the chemistry of the brain?
The point is that they do so in such a way that removes awareness without destroying what makes it happen. They are the subtle knife that slips between brain and awareness. If awareness is a product of the brain then they stop the brain producing the effect without changing the ability of the brain to produce it when the chemical leaves the system.
How is that not of relevance to a discussion about the nature of awareness and its relationship to the brain?
Re: "To be honest Jayarava, I think you are over stating the case here."
And I'm not convinced that you have understood the case I am making. The discussion is about the persistence of life after death. The minimal case is that a living brain is required to manifest consciousness. A dead brain does not. I don't see anyone against this, however popular fictional zombies are. I need to prove nothing much beyond this and the remarkable accuracy and reliability of the models of physics and chemistry. Doesn't even matter that much to me if the relationship between model and reality is theoretically fuzzy. As long as the map gets me to my destination I'm not going to agonise over the map/territory problem. Having arrived, I've just traversed the territory.
Transferring what a living brain does (with it's 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections) to a single-cell fertilised embryo, even presuming we had a plausible mechanism for doing this (which we don't) is implausible - scale is important. So Buddhist rebirth cannot be the case. In order to transfer what the brain does to a non-material substance would mean that the whole world would look very different than it does - nothing would operate the way that we've seen it operating in millions of experiments. The laws of physics would all be demonstrably inaccurate at times. And since they are demonstrably accurate it is unreasonable to argue for any kind of substance dualism.
Now, if you can show that there is something I need to take into account in considering life after death, then by all means say what it is. I'm really not saying anything about the general points that you are objecting to.
Just to be clear, I'm not drawing conclusions about consciousness. I'm drawing conclusions about the likelihood of life after death. Consciousness remains a mystery. Life after death is no longer a mystery. Beyond any reasonable doubt it doesn't happen. Extraordinary evidence would be required to overturn this conclusion. Extraordinary enough to overturn the Laws of Thermodynamics which have withstood the most intense scrutiny and testing imaginable for a century and a half. There's a Nobel in it for anyone who can disprove thermodynamics.
What is the last thing that we had to change in physics at the relevant energy, mass and length scales? Maxwell's unification of electricity and magnetism in 1862? Can't think of anything after that. Relativity and quantum mechanics are largely irrelevant on this scale. Nothing that overrides thermodynamics that's for sure.
Re: How is that not of relevance to a discussion about the nature of awareness and its relationship to the brain?
Awareness is 100% correlated with a living, healthy brain. We can afford to wait for the causal mechanism to be worked out, because it's not relevant to the afterlife question: we're talking here about the persistence of information (ordered, low entropy states) after the organism's net entropy can no longer be held low by life processes. Life eats low entropy energy and excretes high entropy energy; and it uses the difference to create persistent, self-replicating, highly ordered structures. With the destruction of that order and the progression to a higher entropy state the information associated with those ordered structures is irretrievably lost. One cannot unscramble an egg. So, no afterlife.
We don't even need to know what awareness is or how it works. It would be nice to know which of the possible mechanisms it might be, but there's no possible mechanism that is going to add new possibilities for life after death.
The claim is bold. But rather understated I think.
I’m getting a better picture of your approach to all of this. I’m happy that someone is doing the academic analysis on these things, although I have resolved to climb the mountain and see for myself. Perhaps if I get to an interesting vantage point I will come back to have a conversation. I hope to always have folks that will question any claims I make, especially the outlandish ones, to keep me in check and help me see I’m not deluding myself.
Thanks for jumping in on the conversation on reddit. I hope you don’t mind I posted it there. Reddit is a hit or miss when it comes to discussions but I’ve had some interesting chats and comments on some stuff before, so I always give it a try when I’m looking for additional perspective.
My main approach is actually historical these days. But I have loved science for 40 years now. My hope is that these essays will help to better define the path for those who wish to follow it. In the path metaphor I am a street sweeper. Reddit is indeed curious and doesn't really bring out the best in me, but do by all means post there. Like all writers I crave a wider audience :-)
I thought I'd share some clarifications (from a discussion on Facebook). I felt the need to try to be more careful than Sean Carroll in avoiding overstepping lines beyond which physics has no say.
Physics doesn't give us any kind of mandate to assert that there can't possibly be an afterlife, but it does provide a powerful argument that essentially rules out many common ideas about it, and the argument needn't rest on any kind of materialist premises.
The assertion that "the mind is the brain" isn't really necessary. It clearly isn't a scientific statement when put as baldly as that - but I think we can relax it and start with something more empirical:
Minds appear to be exclusively associated with physical organisms. (You don't really get them elsewhere, fanciful stories and ideology aside.)
We have laws of physics that distinguish the possible from the not possible for matter, fields, spacetime and their information content. They appear to be universally obeyed: no exceptions have been found, despite centuries of intense and inventive experimentation throughout the world. They apply to systems that we don't understand just as well as systems that we do. (Think about the information content of heredity from the perspective of scientists before the discovery of DNA.)
Empirical laws of matter don't require any model for consciousness at all. They're inductive, rather than deduced from axioms. Since the induction is based on the whole of humanity's history of the observation of matter, it's about as strong as it's possible for an inductive argument about matter to be.
(In contrast: the same laws of physics, along with many far more detailed ones, could also be deduced from a beautifully simple set of fundamental principles - the standard model and general relativity. This is the line of argument Carroll is focusing on. If you find Occam's Razor compelling, this adds more strength to the universality of the empirical laws. This type of argument *does* rely on a materialist/naturalist view of consciousness - but it is a different argument to the one I'm suggesting.)
The empirical fact is, we never see violations of the laws of physics by physical systems that we do understand, or by chaotic or other physical systems that we don't understand, or by anything achieved by the interaction of consciousness with matter.
The laws don't tell us what consciousness can or cannot do, or anything about consciousness directly at all - they tell us what matter can and cannot do, mediated by anything.
In particular, they tell us what kinds of influence are or are not possible between the actions we take and the observations we make of matter at a later time.
Humans have a strong tendency to want to believe that their consciousnesses (or the consciousnesses of some very special people) can affect matter in ways that defy the laws of physics. The internet is full of this stuff. If it were true, it would be very easy to set up the conditions in which straightforward observations could be made that could verify these claims. Is it understandable that we want to think consciousness is not bound by these laws? Of course. Have any claims ever stood up to scrutiny? No. Does it matter that we don't know how consciousness works or whether or not it's a material phenomenon? No.
It's also understandable that most people aren't too bothered about having ideas that violate laws of physics. Not knowing or caring much about the laws of physics is always the easiest way out!
Even if we do accept them, the laws of physics still don't rule out an afterlife. Here are two simple ways around them (the first might be relevant to some Christians):
1. If there is an afterlife that has no further effect on any part of the physical world at any later time, that does not violate the laws of physics.
2. If there is an afterlife that does affect the physical world at a later time in a completely random way, that does not violate the laws of physics either.
However...
If there is an afterlife that allows some characteristics of the deceased person to be transferred to the consciousness of another being in the physical world in a way that influences how that being interacts with physical matter, this *does* violate laws of physics.
The claim for this kind of afterlife is that the actions of one person in one life build up a store of structured information (as opposed to something purely random) that is passed to another being.
You might be wondering whether it's really ok to simply call this stuff 'information' if we have no idea what any of it is. The use of the term in physics is clear: if it can inform (give structure to) what happens next (to physical things), it's information.
There's one more way out of this, though, and I'd suggest this might be the most significant thing we can learn from this discussion.
Instead of the magic consciousness-mediated inter-life karma that breaks the laws of physics, we could focus on a socially- and environmentally-mediated type of karma that does not break any laws at all.
We know that the way we live our lives *does* affect the consciousnesses of those around us. It *does* affect the physical state of the world that we live in. These effects do persist after we are gone, they do influence the start in life that new consciousnesses will inherit, and the quality of their formative years. To accept this, there is no need to posit any new subtle or unsubtle cosmic laws of consciousness that have no basis outside of traditional stories or nice fantasies. There are straightforward and simple modes of operation for all these influences - we could shift our attention to those instead.
These influences don't simply carry traits from one life to any 'next' life. They're far less personal, and far more interesting, than that.
In answer to a correspondent in 2006 you wrot the following:
"You seem to be assuming that consciousness is a function of the brain. That is a very western materialist view of consciousness. It's not one I find very beautiful or useful. At the moment I'm more into exploring the idea that the physical brain emerges out of consciousness rather than the other way around. It's also more consistent with the Buddhist tradition."
I just want to check if I've got the wrong end of the stick here. I understand, after reading your most recent essays that you're now suggesting that consciousness really is both a function of the brain dependant on it. Am I right?
The basic argument that "no subtle energy or subtle substance has been detected thus far, and therefore probably doesn't exist" is flawed--not just because experimental tools and hypotheses both constrain what they can conceivably disclose (and subtle energy research hasn't received a huge amount of funding so far), but also because the vast majority of cosmologists believe that 96% of the universe consists of exactly such subtle energy and subtle matter, thus far completely undetectable and unobservable except for gravitational effects (a notoriously weak and subtle force unto itself). Deno Kazanis has written about the subtle matter/energy and dark matter/energy correlations, and it warrants consideration (especially in light of Ian Stevenson's research on reincarnation, which wasn't mentioned here).
I never know whether to laugh or cry when I see elements of science reinterpreted in a superstitious framework to create pseudo-science. I usually do a bit of both.
There's nothing subtle about dark matter - it holds galaxies together and probably made galaxies possible in the early universe. While dark energy is forcing the observable universe to expand at an accelerating rate. The very fact that neither interact very strongly with normal matter or can easily be detected is the only clue we need to know how irrelevant they are to the human body.
Compare with the neutrino which also only weakly interacts with matter - millions pass through your body, at almost the speed of light, without interacting or even deviating in their path. They mostly continue on through the earth itself without stopping.
Because neutrinos interact only weakly with matter they can have almost no impact (literally or figuratively) on matter. They cannot change matter except for one in a billion and the effect is so small that our human senses could not notice it. And dark matter interacts even more weakly. Dark matter cannot influence matter on the scale of a human body - it passes through us as though we are not there. The smallest scale on which we can even notice the effect of dark matter is the galaxy. Dark energy is similar - only noticeable at all when one compares the relative motion of a large number of galaxies.
Since these forms of matter/energy don't have effects on the scale of a human body, they simply cannot be the subtle energy you are thinking of.
Besides which, as I have shown in earlier essays, the subtle "energy" is never referred to as "energy" by the ancients, but across the ancient world is referred to as "breath". There's nothing subtle about the breath either. The breath as the ancients conceive it is constantly and obviously present in the movements of the body - particularly the process of breathing itself.
Certainly gravity is the weakest of the four fundamental forces, but you can feel it all your life. Jump off a building and you'd certainly notice it (for a few seconds). Again there is nothing subtle about gravity.
I've debunked Ian Stevenson before now and don't feel the need to repeat myself on that branch of pseudo-science.
~Namaste~ An Incredible and Credible blog, if you can get my meaning. :-)
I have read through about three quarters of this blog and have thoroughly enjoyed the insightful discourse. I thank all for contributing to discourse that does have significant 'deep' meaning; those who take the time to think and share. I have to one extent very congruent views to Jayarava within most as discussed here, especially within the science/'religion' overlays and conjectures, within a want to adhere to 'harder' science and 'thought' that can be substantiated. However, I have also moved within a fairly recent period to “Being Open”, if you will.
Though many might argue there is 'tangential movement' to the following, I first wish to assert it is the core that must be addressed before anything else has any True deeper meaning, within the depth of the core of the concepts being discussed herein, as well as the context - one primarily being a Buddhist context blog, within as well asking the 'deeper questions'.
I see a Gap, which seems to be everywhere, and I wish to perhaps have some movement to fill it, within what Is possible, of that which can be be derived to Be True, or not.
I respectfully apologize in advance for any who may think I have hijacked the thread/blog; and obviously anything to that which is allowed to 'exist' and in what form is in this thread is at the discretion of Jayarava. I am posting this as I admire the quality of the thought, content/context, and directionality that does exist herein. If this is to be removed, or moved somewhere else; or largely 'ignored', or even rebuffed, I am not 'One/one' to take any offense. ;-)
Some thoughts to ponder and questions to thinks about:
For those who so claim to have separated from Self, ie. No Self; I ask of you: Why are YOU still here?
For those who claim ('Mystical') Enlightenment, again a "Total Realization" of No Self, a total emergence of Being One, and the "Beauty"(Trueness/Realness); again, I ask of you similarly: Why do you still breathe?
Think more deeply within these than you might simply wish to think and dismiss, based on wording that may imply of course more than simply seems quickly evident or simplistic.
These are the real core questions of Buddhism, Human-Reality, and related. Of whether there is a 'soul', a 'soul' that is One, of what Attainment and Enlightenment “Is”/”Truly Is", and perhaps what it is not, or if such exists in a manner classical considered, if some concepts/philosophies/ideals/understandings of Enlightenment may in fact be "The(An) Illusion".
Consider as well, Buddha may not have been Enlightened in a manner attributed to 'Him'('him'), and may be more misunderstood than most who adhere most 'deeply' to Buddhist tenets and movements/ideas/ideals of Attainment. Consider even the potential that within some aspects that which is held most deeply can in itself be in one sense Illusion.
Of course therein begs again the question what is Enlightenment, is it (so) S/singular, what is its True Purpose, if any; what is the 'actual goal' within (our)existence, if any; what is liberation, what is freedom; what does it mean to be human; what does it mean to be 'SupraHuman' - does such exist of a True Nature? One can go on, but I think there are importance to these questions, as 'quasi-obscure' in a sense as they may as well seem posed. I do not see most anywhere really grasping at these meaningfully in any “SpirituoPhilosophical” context, within a reconciliation of that which is most central, core to 'the All/all' of It.
Consider the Enlightenment(enlightenment) of Jesus, how misunderstood he is within the Religion itself, and the teachings therein of Christianity, of that which is most formalized - of the interpretation(s). Buddhism is a religion, as well, of course, though many seems to miss that, as it can be far deeper on many levels within philosophical and scientific parallel(perhaps, at least at the current general scope of understanding/perception).
Are any who B/breathe among us no longer human, who still bear the DNA of a human?
Is A(any) Religion ever Right? What makes it Right? What makes it right and what makes it wrong? Embedded within all there are many, many aspects that are true, or even True; however, Is It ever True? Can A Religion or Philosophy ever be True, or meet some standard within an Ideal?(most all will say 'no' I assume). Is anything ever to be Absolute, or is it all just “Degrees/degrees”? What Is THE Standard to uphold, if such exists, to “Create” a (True) coherent (True) SpirituoPhilosophy?
Is the question "Is there life after death" actually even a valid question; within we have not defined what is life and what is death, what is actually meaningful, and much which relates within such scope?
What is consciousness, 'proto-consciousness', Omni-consciousness? Are they in some manner all the same thing, all Of the same thing? Are any of them real, more real, less real, and in just what way(meaningfully so)?
What really is TrueConsciousness? What really is TrueEnlightenment?
Are any of you reading this not human? Or more than human? Can anyone here point to someone who would seem to be human, but for all intents and purposes is not human, no longer human?
Is not Karma and Reincarnation not overtly obvious as a means congruent with (primordial)religion's nature to be used to control the action of humans, so overtly essential to the times in which such were created? Is it now overtly obvious that we are creatures contained of self, comprised of self-importance, 'Self'/self-preservation, and cannot free ourselves from a want to not exist as some form of self, or (within that) even of Self, and even wherein if we to 'wish'(D/desire) to?
Do we want TruePeace, or do we just think we want TruePeace? Within that do we just want an escape, but are too self-important to escape? Do we ever not want 'something' on some level -- Want “Something”?
I again ask, within this, who then would be *This* and still remain to breathe?
*What Is Of TrueImportance? Or is nothing(Nothing) of any importance, any TrueImportance? Therein, Of (any)TrueRelevance? Is not everything R/relative, or within what does such become not Relative? Within what experience/meaning/relevance of 'one' who breathes is this not so?
(Again, within this, who then would be *This* and still remain to breathe?)
You nailed it: "My conclusions are different, but then I have access to very different sources of knowledge than the Buddha did. In his day the Buddha probably would have concluded that my view was a form of ucchedavāda or annihilationism (which is not nihilism btw). But if he knew what we know now, he'd have changed his mind."
I have read through some of your blogs and discussions in the comments space, and I am actually wondering in what sense you can refer to yourself as a Buddhist. The way I see it, any "-ist" is a follower of somebody else's thinking (with the exception of a pianist). You don't seem to be following anybody, least of all a much-mythologized, fictionalized and culturally-flavoured ancient person named Gautam Buddha. I doubt that you are even "following" a present-day philosopher or guru whose insights have an exponentially larger chance of being available to us without being distorted, over-interpreted and ossified by generations of reverent followers.
So, do you label yourself Buddhist in deference to your teachers of a certain school of thought, who provided you with a certain philosophical scaffolding? Is it like saying, "I have ancient bamboo scaffolding in my mind (and not steel) which enables me to climb, and therefore, I am a Bamboo-ist?"
Or are you labeling yourself Buddhist in order to maintain dialogue and connection with other enquirers/like-minded people who call themselves Buddhists, for good or not-good reasons?
If not for such reasons, please tell me why you continue to refer to yourself as a Buddhist, and not, say, a human being.
Just curious, Krishnaraj Rao krish.kkphoto@gmail.com
Monday, September 07, 2015
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In this essay, I begin with a longish introduction in which I recap some important points made in previous essays about the idea of life after death. I look at the dynamics of afterlife beliefs and challenge the view that the concept of the afterlife is beyond the reach of empiricism. If you're familiar with my treatment of this material you can skip the intro. I then settle in to explore an argument made by theoretical physicist Sean Carroll which purports to show that no afterlife of the kind described by either Christianity or Buddhism is permitted by the laws of physics. I will finish by considering the ethics of debunking traditional beliefs and some reflections on our existential situation.
In Oct 2014 Sean Carroll accepted the Emperor Has No Clothes Award, organised by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and gave a short acceptance speech (watch the video). In this speech he says "We can say, there is no life after death... sorry". It so happens that in the same week I watched the video, one of my colleagues wrote something about our Buddhist teacher's belief in rebirth. She said that while he acknowledged that one couldn't prove or disprove rebirth, that he himself was convinced on the basis of certain experiences he had had. My colleague said, that if she'd had that kind of experience, she'd be convinced also. I'd say that this is fairly typical of the type of argument that Buddhists field for rebirth. There are two parts to this type of argument:
the afterlife cannot be factually disproved; and that
anecdotes about experiences are convincing.
In other words, I can't prove X, but I believe X, where X is any religious belief. This is just what my mum says about God for example.
This problem of private experience being generalised into ontological conclusions is a perennial one for religions. When we try to draw valid conclusions about public reality from one-off private experiences we are apt to make mistakes; when those private experiences involve altered states of consciousness then we almost always make mistakes. Our conclusions might feel right, but they've usually got more to do with what we want to believe than what reality is like. When someone is already convinced of a proposition then any experience that supports the proposition will feel salient, and any experience which does not will feel irrelevant. The more the experience can be interpreted as supporting the belief, the more salient it will feel. A question I cannot yet address is why outlier experiences—drug induced hallucinations, religious visions, oceanic boundary loss—might seem more real than baseline reality, even hyperreal, rather than less real. The question of how real experiences feel is crucial to an overall understanding of how we value experiences.
The Dynamic of Afterlife Beliefs
As individuals trying to reason we seem, almost inevitably, to fall prey to wide variety of biases and/or logical fallacies. The explanation for the woeful performance of individuals on reasoning tasks put forward by Mercier & Sperber, says that as individuals putting forward an argument, we are powerfully, inherently biased to select evidence and supporting arguments that support it. It is only in arguing against a proposition that we think to select counterfactual information. We seem to have evolved to reason in small groups where proponents make the strongest case for their favoured outcome, and opponents argue against it, and collectively the group selects a course of action which most appeals to the largest number (or to those with most influence). See An Argumentative Theory of Reason. In this view, the most common reasoning problem, confirmation bias, is a feature of reasoning, not a bug. It also means that reasoning doesn't work well in highly polarised situations or where everyone has strong beliefs that distort how they assess the saliency of information. Clearly, discussing religious beliefs with religieux is a situation where reason is likely to work poorly. So one of the reasons we draw incorrect inferences about public reality from private experience might be that we are affected by religious views on top of our usual biases and fallacies.
The argument put forward by Sean Carroll effectively says that an afterlife would be a kind of miracle because it breaks the laws of physics. Hume's essay Of Miraclesgives us a useful criteria for assessing the testimony for miracles:
"No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish."
Anecdotally, many of my colleagues in the Triratna Buddhist Order find the falsehood of an afterlife more miraculous, less credible, than the testimony that there must be an afterlife of the Buddhist kind. Usually the testimony in question is about outlier experiences that seemed hyperreal and are judged to be of extraordinary value and significance. For such intuitions about experience to be false would seem miraculous. Again, my mum has the same argument from experience for God.
One of the key points to understand is how we make decisions. While we do employ facts, there is research to show that we assign information a weight or a measure of salience at an emotional level. When faced we competing information about the same decision, we assess which information is salient to our decision by how it feels. We know this because people with specific damage in the mediodorsal-prefrontal cortex, which is involved in emotional regulation, lose the ability to weigh facts in this way. We make decisions based on what feels right and then find reasons post hoc. This is something the advertising industry has known for many years, dating back to the 1920s and the influence of Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays. See for example, Torches of Freedom. The whole spiel about Homo sapiens (thinking people) having reason as our highest faculty is quite wrong. We're seldom any good at it. We emote our way through our lives with post hoc rationalisation to cover our tracks.
The idea of an afterlife is ubiquitous in human cultures. For a self-aware living being, whose raison d'être is continuity, the fact of inevitable death creates an intense cognitive dissonance. Apart from the obvious wish not to die, the afterlife also serves as a clearinghouse for reconciliation of our moral accounting records (which is why karma must keep track of our deeds): actions must fit consequences and since they obviously don't in this life (aka the Problem of Evil), then they must in the afterlife. The afterlife is almost always tied to the idea of an entity which survives the death of the body and contains our essence (i.e. a soul). Certain types of experiences suggest that the perceiving mind can exist as a separate entity from the physical body. This leads to ontological dualism: to the assumption that matter and spirit are different types of stuff (see especially my essay Metaphors and Materialism; also Origin of the Idea of the Soul). I've cited this passage from Thomas Metzinger's book The Ego Tunnel several times, but it seems to be essential to understand this:
For anyone who actually had [an out-of-body experience] it is almost impossible not to become an ontological dualist afterwards. In all their realism, cognitive clarity and general coherence, these phenomenal experiences almost inevitably lead the experiencing subject to conclude that conscious experience can, as a matter of fact, take place independently of the brain and body. (p.78)
However when studied closely, these experiences do not support ontological dualism or the idea that the mind is a separate entity or made from a different kind of stuff from matter. Buddhists also tend to describe their afterlife beliefs in dualist terms (partly because morality requires personal continuity to be coherent even across one life time, let alone many) and then add specific metaphysical caveats when challenged, so as to avoid violating Buddhist axioms that forbid persistent entities. These caveats vitiate personal continuity and therefore morality, but this problem seems to go unnoticed. So the dynamic of afterlife beliefs is like this:
The fact of universal death creates cognitive dissonance.
According to testimony, certain experiences appear to demonstrate that consciousness is not tied to the body, but can exist independently.
So the idea that something might survive the death of the body and continue to "live" seems plausible.
Emotional weighting of facts (salience) makes this seem probable, and the finality of death improbable.
Since the finality of death causes intense cognitive dissonance, post-mortem survival seems preferable.
We make the leap from probable/preferable to actually true; and it feels satisfying because we have resolved the dissonance created by the fact of death and been consistent with our other beliefs.
(Adapted from my 2012 essay on the plausibility and salience of rebirth.)
All that remains is for Buddhists to adapt this to avoid an unchanging entity, which we do by saying that any entity is conditioned and changes (and is this only conventionally or notionally an entity).
The Proposition that the Afterlife is Beyond Empiricism.
The idea that one can neither prove nor disprove rebirth is a proposition formulated within a framework which is strictly dualistic in the Cartesian sense of an absolute distinction between matter and spirit. In this framework no empirical evidence is salient to the question of the afterlife because it comes from the wrong realm: as one dualist Order colleague explained to me, in a mood of high dudgeon some years ago, "no study of matter, however thorough, can tell us anything at all about consciousness." The afterlife being concerned with the realm of spirit is not accessible to empirical methods.
The problem here is one of definitions. The dualist defines the afterlife in dualistic terms. Those terms include the explicit assumption that empirical methods don't apply to the spirit realm. If one accepts the dualistic frame of reference then there can be no argument. The afterlife is axiomatically beyond empiricism. But the definition is circular. Empiricism cannot see the afterlife only because we have defined the afterlife as invisible to empirical methods.
Buddhist texts certainly do not define the afterlife as invisible. Indeed one of the memorable visions of my own teacher involves seeing pretas in their pretaloka. How can we possibly explain this leakage from the spirit realm into the realm of matter? If it is possible to see pretas, then they ought not to be invisible to empiricism. Why do we allow dualists the luxurious the exception that some people can see spirits and yet disallow empiricism? We will develop this line of enquiry below.
A more fundamental question is this. Why should we accept the dualist definition in the first place? Buddhists tend to argue from testimony about experience: especially from so-called "spiritual experience". One of my teachers tells me that based on his "meditative experience" he cannot imagine there not being an afterlife. But once again we're in the territory of making inferences about reality from unusual private experiences. To take a non-Buddhist example, Gary Weber who vividly describes his awakening experience in terms easily recognisable from traditional Buddhist accounts, insists on the basis of his experience that the universe is absolutely deterministic and that free will is an illusion! Why? Because his main teachers are proponents of Advaita Vedanta and this is their doctrine. Weber describes how free he is and, in the same breath, denies that he is free at all. It appears that even the awakened are not to be trusted to tell us about reality.
I've put considerable effort into undermining the idea of dualism. I've tried to show that it is not credible and does not produce meaningful predictions. Dualism is a bad theory. Monistic theories by contrast continue to make predictions about how the mind operates that turn out to be accurate. (See for example this article on ghosts). Sean Carroll's argument will take this a step further. The dualistic matter/spirit framework has nothing to do with Buddhism. I've tried to show that such matter/spirit dualism is an ontological conclusion that is not supported by the epistemology of Buddhism.
I should add that many, but not all, of the people who are involved in this argument on the dualist side are at best poorly educated in the sciences. Their understanding of science is frequently a caricature. But they are egged on by people who should know better, whose attraction to dualism has overcome their education. A clique of social scientists with axes to grind about objectivism are also involved, who muddy the water by attacking the very idea of objective knowledge. To these last Sean Carroll has a witty repost on his Twitter profile: "If the blind dudes just talked to each other, they would figure out it was an elephant before too long." I used this as the starting point for a meditation on whether experience really is ineffable. Too many philosophers are solipsistic. They do philosophy as though one cannot talk to another person or compare notes on experience, or as though this is not a valid source of knowledge. Buddhists do this almost without fail and it hobbles their ability to think about the world.
As Sean Carroll is quick to insist, empiricism comes with many caveats. We certainly cannot explain everything in the universe. Far from it. There are huge gaps. But science is an ongoing and progressive endeavour, and it is by far the most successful knowledge generating activity in the history of knowledge. The shift in knowledge just in my lifetime has been staggering. One of the ironies of arguing with dualists is that they invoke the limitations of empiricism: you cannot explain everything. True. But why does that open the door to any old interpretation that happens to appeal? What ever happened to saying "I don't know"?
This is perhaps enough background for newer readers to allow us to proceed to considering the proposition that there is no afterlife.
Sean Carroll's Argument
Carroll's argument begins with a series of propositions:
The mind is the brain.
The brain is made of atoms.
We know how atoms work.
When you die there is no way for the information that was you to persist.
We'll work through these assertions as he does, with a few extra comments thrown in.
1. The mind is the brain. The brain is the mind in space, and the mind is the brain over time.
@Neurosceptic
Past experience shows that dualists are already switching off, if they are reading at all. Carroll is what they call a "materialist" and what I would call a substance monist. Indeed his view (as he says in the video) is that Quantum Field Theory accurately describes reality: reality is fields. All the reliable evidence we have points to a universe composed of fields. When we look at these fields the nature of them means that what we actually see is matter and energy. After centuries of studying matter in controlled ways there is no behaviour of matter and energy, at the scale relevant to the functioning of human beings, that has been observed under controlled conditions, which requires extra laws of physics. Thus the only sensible philosophical view is monist. We might not know how the mind works, but we have no reason to propose some other thing that can interact with matter. This will become a refrain: if it can interact with matter we'd have detected it by now. In this view the mind is a function rather than a thing or stuff. The mind is what the brain does.
However we have a legacy view which is dualist. This legacy is probably as old as anatomically modern humans and it says, mainly on the basis of interpretations of private experiences, that the mind not made of the same stuff as the rest of the universe. The view is that there is a stuff we might call "spirit" that makes up an invisible and intangible "world of spirit" in parallel to the world of matter and energy and that this spirit animates our bodies (which are otherwise cold dead matter). We now have secular versions of this dualism which argue that experience cannot be explained in monist terms, famously associated with Dualist philosopher David Chalmers and the so-called "Hard Problem of Consciousness". However all dualism does is deflect the Hard Problem, is does not answer it. What's worse is that it defines the Hard Problem as insoluble because the stuff that consciousness is made of cannot be an object of study. Game over for science.
Invoking an invisible and intangible stuff that somehow undetectably also interacts with matter and energy to make us alive and conscious is not logical. Either the second stuff interacts with matter and energy and can be detected in the usual ways, or if it cannot be detected in the usual ways then it cannot interact with matter and energy. If it does not interact with matter and energy, then, for example we could not see it or hear it the way that people claim to. Equally a "body" made of this second stuff could not see or hear either. A subtle body would either be completely unable to interact with the world (to see it, hear it, feel it) or we would be able to detect it. There are no other options.
1.1 Objections
One objection sometimes put forward is that the brain is not complex enough to generate consciousness. I think we still have legacy issues with the concept of "consciousness", which the study of ancient Buddhist thought only highlights, since it conceives the mind in entirely different terms. Even so the complexity of the brain is effectively unimaginable: 100 billion neurons with an average of 1000 connections each, can generate 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 unique states. There is no question of the brain being complex enough.
Some who reject Carroll's first proposition try to explain consciousness using the brain as TV receiver analogy. In this the brain is still necessary for consciousness, but it is a passive receiver of a "signal" from "beyond" the physical world. This is ruled out by Sean Carroll's friend, neuroscientist Steven Novella. He argues that to compare the brain to a TV that simply displays the information beamed into it, is a false analogy.
A more accurate analogy would be this – can you alter the wiring of a TV in order to change the plot of a TV program? Can you change a sitcom into a drama? Can you change the dialogue of the characters? Can you stimulate one of the wires in the TV in order to make one of the on-screen characters twitch? - The Brain Is Not a Receiver.
Disrupting the reception of the "signal", via say brain damage, does not simply distort the image of the show, it changes the plot and the characters. The brain simply cannot be a passive receiver. The brain is actively involved in creating consciousness. This is the only way to explain the correlations that we observe. Correlation is not causation, except when it is.
In fact I slightly disagree with Sean in this area. I think the mind is created by the body as a whole. Certainly the brain is the concentrated centre for the operation of mental events, but the mind function involves all of our body's systems: neural, endocrine, sensory etc. Our minds arise as an emergent property of being embodied in the way that we are. Our minds are defined not simply by where signals are processed, but by how they are generated and transmitted. They are defined by the fact that brains clearly evolved to better direct the actions of bodies.
Those who propose a dualist explanation complain that "Materialists" refuse to accept evidence for the second stuff, that they refuse to even look for it; that Materialists scorn research which proves the paranormal, the supernatural and all that stuff. In fact scientists do take an interest from time to time and when such phenomena are explored under the rigorous eye of scientific method they inevitably fade from view or quite often turn out to be hoaxes. In fact huge efforts have been made to validate ESP under laboratory conditions and it doesn't exist. On the other hand modern day magicians like James Randi and Derren Brown have shown exactly how to spoof many of these effects. One of the originators of the Victorian seance, the Fox Sisters, confessed to their hoax late in life, though this did nothing to dent the popularity of talking to "the other side". The trouble is not that scientists are not interested in evidence for the supernatural, but that believers are too credulous and set the evidential bar too low. They are too willing to ignore debunking and exposure of hoaxes. I know many people who openly want the world to be magical or mystical; who openly and consciousness suspend disbelief because they don't want to believe the evidence. Scientists make their reputations by making new discoveries and/or showing how old discoveries have been misinterpreted. Einstein is famous precisely because he overturned the existing paradigm and gave us a completely new way of looking at our world. No one ever got a Nobel Prize for science while ignoring interesting evidence for some new way of looking at the world.
As unpalatable as it sounds, Sean Carroll's bald statement that the mind is the brain, is not far from the truth. I would say that the mind is the body; or better that the mind is a function of the processes that make up the body. We will have more to say on why this must be so under statement three, but for now let us move on to the second statement:
2. The brain is made of atoms.
This, I hope, will be fairly uncontroversial. We've been analysing matter for a long time now, we know what all the elements are and how they behave on a gigameter-scale and nanometer-scale (the mysteries are on a tera- and pico- scale and beyond). We understand the chemistry of all naturally occurring atoms (and a handful of synthetic atoms) and can explain the properties of known substances in terms of the properties of these atoms with incredible accuracy. We know how atoms combine into molecules and can predict the properties of new molecules from which atoms they contain. We know how molecules interact to create emergent properties. My bachelors degree was in chemistry, so I'm confident about this.
Of course the dualist can still posit super-natural substances or forces that are involved in the structure of the body and brain, substances and forces that are beyond the reach of empirical science, but our refrain still applies: if these supernatural substances or forces interact in any meaningful way with atoms, then we can detect them; if we cannot detect them, then they cannot interact in meaningful ways. Millions and millions of experiments, from detailed observations of our solar system down to the manipulation of single atoms, have failed to find any behaviour of atoms that cannot already be explained. Which leads us to statement number three.
3. We know how atoms work.
Carroll admits that this is controversial. His point is not that we understand all the laws of physics, nor even all the laws that govern atoms. What is is saying is that the laws that are relevant to the functioning of our minds and bodies are known. He adds, "There no room for news laws of physics that would affect how the atoms in your brain actually work". And here is a summary of those laws of physics in one intimidating equation:
[Image]
"In this one equation are summarised all the laws of physics necessary to understand the atoms in your brain [and body] at the energy, mass and length scales relevant to your everyday lives."
For more on this equation see Sean's blog: The World of Everyday Experience, In One Equation. For anyone who would like to get into this material in even more detail, Sean has claimed that The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Are Completely Understood. There are links on the blog to follow up posts.
Now I freely admit that I don't understand all of this. But I don't have to. I do understand enough of it to be confident that the rest of it is true, and I have personally tested out a proportion of these laws, especially where they relate to chemistry.
We don't know it all, by any means, but we know enough. As Sean says:
"If there are any other forces, particles, fields or phenomena they can't affect the atoms in your brain and body because either they are so weak that they could not affect the atoms, or we would have found them. Those are the only two options."
So for example, we might not understand dark matter, but dark matter has no appreciable effects on human beings. We could dive into a swimming pool full of dark matter and simply fall to the bottom without interacting with any of it. This is not so weird. Even second millions of neutrinos from the sun pass through our bodies, indeed pass right through the earth, without ever interacting with our atoms. Dark matter's effects are only evident on the scale of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. We might not fully understand the Higgs Boson, but it's only evident on the scale of subatomic particles accelerated to 99.99999% of the speed of light and smashed into each other or in the second or so after the big bang. The macro effect of the Higgs is gravity, which we can predict with astonishingly high accuracy using the science of Einstein. Indeed Newton and Laplace will suffice for everyday use. Yes, there is a huge amount to learn, but it's at the extremes, not in the middle. As far as the human-scale world is concerned, "at the energy, mass and length scales relevant to your everyday lives," we understand it quite well enough to predict the behaviour of atoms at levels of precision well beyond what we can perceive.
Because this is the state of knowledge, it reinforces proposition one. If there were another stuff out there, or in here, that could affect our brains, we would have found it by now. The mind cannot be a different kind of stuff or we'd have found that stuff. There is nowhere for the mind to hide. This kind of argument that something is hiding just beyond the detectors is what is known as a God of the Gaps argument. God, or the supernatural or whatever, is always just beyond the current state of our knowledge of the universe. But the picture of physics is so well worked out now, that there are no gaps big enough to fit the mind into it. If, for example, the mind turns out to be a product of quantum vibrations in micro-tubules in neurons, rather than the interaction of neurons themselves, it won't change the basic fact that the mind is the brain. And we understand the principles of quantum states too.
3.1 The Map is Not the Territory
Against this is "the map is not the territory" argument. It is true that our mathematical models are incredibly comprehensive and accurate, but this does not mean that we understand reality. As human beings we never have direct access to reality. By reality we generally mean the facts about sense objects that are independent of our minds. Since our perceptions are always mediated by the brain, at best we're operating at one remove from reality.
Against this limitation on individual perception, is the fact we can compare notes on what we observe and use this to factor out the component due to individual minds. What is left is what the universe is like. Some dismiss this "consensus reality". What I'm thinking of is not just something that people agree to. The observations I'm thinking of compel us to a single conclusion. Reality must be like this and not like that. It's how we have been able to establish what kinds of forces operate on atoms and develop mathematical descriptions of the resulting behaviour. Atoms are predictable. There's no question but that atoms exist at the energy levels relevant to human existence. Of course we know that atoms are made up of smaller entities, and as Sean Carroll says the whole of reality is more accurately conceived of as interacting fields. But the fact remains that if there were another force acting on atoms we'd see it and we don't see anything that is not attributable to the known forces: gravity, electro-magnetic and the two nuclear forces. If there is a supernatural force, then it is too weak to have any effect.
Even the most ardent Dualist must admit that our maps are pretty good. We can now manipulate individual atoms and even their smaller constituents to create computers, communications networks, GPS satellite networks, vaccines, and all that kind of stuff, based on our maps. The maps are accurate beyond the perception of any person.
Similarly by comparing how different people experience the same object, for a large number of objects, we can tell what the mind is like. This is what neuroscientists have begun to do. So in fact we have a pretty good idea of what reality is like, and we're beginning to understand how the mind works (with a lot of information coming from how the mind breaks down; cf First Person Perspective).
3.2 It's Just a Theory
Another counter-argument is the "It's Just a Theory" argument. It is true that we cannot absolutely prove these scientific theories, as Sean Carroll himself has written about (See his blog What I Believe But Cannot Prove). In an absolute sense we cannot prove anything, and this leads some people to conclude that no certain knowledge is possible. Relativism of this kind ought to undermine all explanations equally and yet somehow it does not. Somehow it is treated as a justification for dualism or mysticism. Taken literally, no certain knowledge means no knowledge at all. No assertions of fact can ever be valid. This seems like an unproductive stance to take. Arguing "I know that there can be no knowledge" is a tautology.
A scientific theory is a not "just a theory" in the sense that any old theory can be substituted and work just as well. In order to be accepted as a scientific theory an explanation must explain relevant observations. Carroll uses the example of Einstein's General Relativity proposed a century ago this year. Not only did it explain an existing problem, the precession of the perihelion of the orbit of mercury, but it made a series of new predictions that could be tested (Wikipedia has a list of these predictions). For example General Relativity predicted that light travelling close to masses would follow a curved path because masses curve space-time. This was confirmed by observing stars during a solar eclipse in 1919. Subsequently General Relativity has survived every test. To the limits of experimental accuracy General Relativity predicts the behaviour of matter and energy on large scales. For example our GPS satellites would not work if we did not factor in relativity because time passes quicker for satellites in orbit than it does for people on the ground because masses slow down time! Far from being 'just a theory' General Relativity is a theory that has withstood intense testing and scrutiny to the point that there is no reasonable doubt about it. If non-believers can think of a new test that will prove General Relativity wrong then they are welcome to try. Fame and Nobel prizes await the person who succeeds. (See also the video 'Why Science is NOT Just a Theory').
The hypothetical possibility that a theory might be disproved does not invalidate the theory. At some point the theory of General Relativity must be reframed in such a way as to marry it with quantum mechanics (though Stephen Hawking has said he doubts this will ever happen) but the chances are that General Relativity will not be invalidated by this, it will simply become a special case of a more comprehensive theory. Carroll says of his view of the universe:
"...it would be unreasonable for me to doubt it; those beliefs add significantly to my understanding of the universe, accord with massive piles of evidence, and contribute substantially to the coherence of my overall worldview."
And just to repeat,
"...at the energy, mass and length scales relevant to your everyday lives" we know all the laws of physics... "If there are any other forces, particles, fields or phenomena they can't affect the atoms in your brain and body because either they are so weak that they could not affect the atoms, or we would have found them. Those are the only two options."
There is no reasonable doubt that we know everything we need to know about atoms to rule out the afterlife. Which brings us to statement four.
4. When you die there is no way for the information that was you to persist.
If propositions 1-3 are true, and to the best of our knowledge they do seem to be, then everything we are depends on the arrangement of atoms in our bodies. Everything. Indeed we know that if we start to disorder those atoms, especially in the brain, then we begin to lose parts of ourselves. One of the most poignant examples is dementia. As parts of the brain are damaged or replaced by scar tissue, memories fade, the personality is distorted and the intellect fails. The person we knew gradually fades from view, until they are gone quite a while before the body dies. No form of death is pleasant, but watching a person die slowly this way is especially painful. There's no question, but that the destruction of the brain leads to the destruction of the mind. If the mind were not the brain we would not expect the devastation of dementia to be so complete. It would not matter if the brain was destroyed because the mind is not the brain. But this is what we see: destroy the brain, destroy the mind.
Here again there are exceptions. The brain is extraordinarily plastic. So people who suffer from hydrocephalus, for example, can end up with a brain volume of about 10% of average and still function. It's not clear how this affects the number of neurons, and since humans have widely differing brain sizes but a very similar number of neurons, that the volume issue is less interesting that it seems at first. A 5ft tall woman will have considerably less brain volume that a 7ft man, but may have considerably more intellectual capacity. Some epilepsy sufferers have had half their brain removed and continued to function. In this case the part of the brain removed was diseased and not functioning anyway, so the loss of it was not as catastrophic as it might be for a healthy individual. Typically this operation is an extreme reaction to one side of the brain producing almost constant seizures and the ending of seizures is a good trade off for any down-side of the radical excision of one side of the brain. Still, it is remarkable how the brain adapts.
The main reason that the information that makes up 'me' is lost as death relates to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that in any closed system entropy increases. If we add milk to coffee, they mix spontaneously and form an homogeneous mixture. Unmixing the mixed milk and coffee is more or less impossible. A living being takes in low entropy energy and excretes high entropy energy, thereby allowing it to maintain the order of its atoms that might otherwise tend to become disordered. When we die this process stops and our atoms quite quickly become disordered and the information stored as ordered atoms that constitutes "us" is lost. Five minutes of not breathing and the disorder is irreversible.
And because there are no significant gaps in the physics there is nowhere for something that survives the destruction of the brain to hide. There's nothing extra to survive your death; there's no way for your consciousness or your karma to be transmitted to another brain. There's just no room for that to happen. For Buddhists this argument is especially salient. The history of Buddhist ideas is dominated by the problem of continuity: too much and it starts to look like a soul, too little and karma cannot work. Different sects push the boundaries in both directions, almost always attracting derision from their fellow religionists. Physics, it turns out, says that beyond any reasonable doubt there is and can be no personal post-mortem continuity. If we are relying on a God of the Gaps argument for consciousness we just ran out of gaps for the mind or the spirit to hide in.
It's game over for the afterlife and we have to start rethinking religion. Really. It's time to start over. Sean Carroll, speaking specifically to the conclusions people draw from near death experiences, puts it like this:
"There are only two choices: some ill-defined metaphysical substance, not subject to the known laws of physics, interacts with the atoms of our brains in ways that have thus far eluded every controlled experience ever performed in the history of science, or, people hallucinate when they're nearly dead."
And yet some people, presently the majority of Buddhists, think option one sounds better. The idea that our special experiences might not be precious insights into the nature of reality, but something far more mundane does not appeal to the religious. And this is understandable.
If I say that the light I "saw" and the voice I "heard" were a manifestation of White Tārā (to use an example from my own life) then I get a certain amount of kudos from my peers. Visions are seen as important confirmations of religious faith and articles of that faith. The vision is vouchsafed to the devotee who is pure of heart, so those who have visions are held in high regard. If I am embedded in a religious context then my vision reinforces my status in the group and my own faith in the tenets of the group. On the other hand if I deny the validity of the vision I am placing myself in opposition to the will of the group which will make them hostile to me. Either the group will try to coerce me into compliance or it will shun me (at worst kill me). There is a small chance that I will influence the will of the group to change its view. In reality, my best hope is to provide ammo for more charismatic group members who have a better chance of swaying the collective will, by refining and extending the arguments we rely on to get a decision. Which is what I see myself doing.
Even some people who are well versed in the laws of physics (at least one colleague of mine has a Cambridge degree in physics) belief in an afterlife. Perhaps because the social cost of not believing is so high? Perhaps because an unfair universe seems unbearable? Perhaps they are just confused? I don't really know. Certainly most people have only the vaguest grasp of science and can hardly be expected to base their beliefs on an understanding of physics. A patent example of this was a recent BBC radio documentary featuring novelist and "Professor of Contemporary Thought" at Brunel University, Will Self: Self orbits CERN. Self is famously well versed in the English language and specialises in use of obscure and archaic words. He has a huge vocabulary. But he is so hopelessly lost when confronted by the scientists involved in the CERN project that he confesses that he does not believe that they can be doing what they say they are. He literally does not believe in the Large Hadron Collider. If one of Britain's leading intellectuals is so hopelessly lost, then what hope for the average person?
Honouring the Experience
One of the qualities which has marked our Thomas Metzinger for me is the inclusiveness of his vision (something Sena Carroll lacks). Metzinger has said that a theory of consciousness which did not account for out-of-body experiences is just not interesting. The scientific study of consciousness is still relatively young. When James Crick joined the Salk Institute in 1976, less than forty years ago, the field was just getting started and was hardly taken seriously. It is understandable that scientists would want to start with the basics, to try to understand the generalities. Perhaps they can be forgiven for putting the mystical and the weird to one side to begin with. On the other hand secularists are often a bit dismissive of unusual experiences, though I think this is slowly changing. Studies of meditators meditating are currently quite popular, and the surge in interest in using mindfulness techniques for health and wellbeing are helping to fuel this. It may not last, but I think the frontiers of human experience are likely to become more interesting to scientists as they bed down the basics. Scientists like Olaf Blanke are studying the once inaccessible out-of-body experiences and can now routinely induce them in subjects. What they learn extends our understanding of the mind.
Even when challenging the interpretation of such experiences, it's important to acknowledge that for the person having the experience it can be very significant. In seeking a different explanation we might inevitably create tensions. Demystifying or de-romanticising experience is likely to be painful for the mystic or romantic. We do need to be sensitive to this. Attacking someone's beliefs with no regard for how that person feels is unethical. I know that other essays I've written on this subject have upset people. I don't aim to upset anyone, I aim to convey my understanding of what's going on (though I am susceptible to various human flaws).
In seeking to understand we can draw two kinds of conclusions: what knowledge tells us about the world, and what it tells us about the mind. We already know that it's possible to fool the mind. Just look at optical illusions, let alone hallucinations. We need to allow for this in our calculations. It may be that a certain type of experience, say oceanic boundary loss, cannot be interpreted literally. We are not literally one with the universe. We do not leave our body during an out-of-body experience. However, that kind of experience can legitimately change the way we relate to the world, and especially to the people in it. The feeling of being 'one with everything' can break down artificial barriers between people. Imagine if we all had the experience and could all relate to the other more easily and positively? It's an optimistic vision. It inspired a lot of people in the 1960s even if their route in was via LSD. Altered states of consciousness alert us to new possibilities. They remind us that the brain is flexible. Such experiences are inherently interesting, even if we don't buy into ancient explanations of them.
It ought to be possible to hold both the underlying explanation and the philosophical conclusions. And if there is some tension, then it is likely to be a creative tension. That said I know many Buddhists would like to cast me out of the Buddhist community for even expressing these views. One of the most senior members of the Triratna Order is insistent that one cannot be a Buddhist if one does not believe in rebirth (fortunately others are more of my mind). This is a widespread view. But if the afterlife is not true, then Buddhists have no choice but to change their minds and their spiel. It's difficult to admit we got it wrong after so many centuries, but if we truly believe that everything changes, then embracing this change ought to be possible.
The Afterlife is a False Consolation
The afterlife most familiar to most scientists in the West is Abrahamic: one dies and goes to heaven to meet God and live forever (only infidels go to hell). Carroll inveighs against this version of the afterlife. However the points he makes are relevant to the Buddhist afterlife. We sometimes forget that the appropriate comparison is not heaven = saṃsāra, but heaven = nirvāṇa (a point that was clearly not lost on the early Buddhists who used this comparison on a number of occasions). The main point is that there cannot be a perfect state of being in reality. Perfection denies the physics of life which is all about change. Perfection is a state of zero change and thus perfection is the opposite of life. Perfection requires an alternate reality, i.e. heaven or nirvāṇa, but nothing could live in that reality.
Perfection is not even a desirable state. In fact living forever would be unbearable, even if our every whim were granted, because getting what we desire is never ultimately satisfying (desire simply shifts to a new object). The Upaniṣads and early Buddhist texts highlight an alternative idea to satisfying all desires, which is to be perfectly free of desire. But this is not possible for the living either, and can only find completion in death. Sean Carroll goes further and warns against fetishing happiness. When we make happiness our goal we tend to end up on the hedonic treadmill. This is because we associated happiness with pleasure or satisfying desires. And desires, as above, can never be ultimately satisfied.
In other words this godless, reductionist, materialist has adduced two of the main points of Buddhism as important principles for living, and presents them without any supernatural superstructure. It shows that we can be moral, and even wise, without the burden of traditional religious beliefs.
The end of the afterlife is a bitter pill for Buddhists, because it means that our traditional narratives of karma and rebirth are over. If I say "Karma is dead" it is of the same order as Nietzsche's pronouncement "God is dead". Without the afterlife, karma cannot ensure the fairness of the universe. Many people come to Buddhism because of an experience of unfairness (illness, death, divorce, etc). And they are attracted to the idea that things balance out. But unfortunately we have to let this idea go. And experience suggests that Buddhists can be quite hostile to this suggestion.
The end of the Myth of the Afterlife is a beautiful moment for humans. We are growing up. We are finally seeing things as they really are. We have to deal with things now. We are responsible for what is happening. It means the onus is on humans to both reward and punish more assiduously, and to think very carefully about what constitutes good and evil, because the universe is not going to square things up after death. The universe is ordered, but it is not a moral order. It means that if we want to have meaningful lives we have to put the meaning into life ourselves; and not expect to find it in death.
It's a new world.
~~oOo~~
25 March 2015
"At the root of the muddle [about consciousness] lies an inability to overcome the Very Large Mistake so clearly identified by Eddington and others in the 1920s—not to mention the lovely Irishman John Toland in 1704, Anthony Collins in 1707, Hume in 1739, Priestley in 1777–8, and many others. The mistake is to think we know enough about the nature of physical reality to have any good reason to think that consciousness can’t be physical. It seems to be stamped so deeply in us, by our everyday experience of matter as lumpen stuff, that not even appreciation of the extraordinary facts of current physics can weaken its hold." - Galen Strawson. 'The consciousness myth (revised).' The Times Literary Supplement 27 February 2015 (no. 5839 pp. 14–15)
posted by Jayarava Attwood at 11:18 on 23-Jan-2015
63 Comments
Close this window Jump to comment formHi Jayarava,
Since you keep referring to Metzinger “vision” here again, I'd like you to clarify the two key concepts that you use above, namely: “mind” and “consciousness” considering the distinction made by Metzinger in this conversation. I mean, the distinction between thinking or rationality and consciousness, or as he says, using philosophy of mind lingo, “between intentional content and phenomenal content”. What particularly interest me in this context is his further suggestion that “rationality is probably to a large extent something above brains. It’s a group phenomenon.” So I hope you know what I'm driving at: one can use terms like “mind” or “consciousness” meaning also “rationality” and “thinking” and this simply subverts the idea of “mind” being the brain.
I am completely on your side regarding the irreversible disintegration of our individual brain/body systems after death, there is no question about that. What is I think interesting for us still being alive is this distinction between phenomenal and intentional consciousness, which seems to define to what extant we differ from other conscious beings on this planet. Contrary to other animals which seem to live totally immersed or caught in their transparent reality models (or as Brassier says “in darkness”) we, humans, do have access to other mode of consciousness, namely opaque intentional content, as conceptual thinking, which enables us, for example, to collectively create scientific theories which allow us to pierce though our “epistemic closure” - that evolutionary mechanism of survival.
Friday, January 23, 2015
Well, I referred to Metzinger's inclusion of unusual experiences in what is interesting about mental activity. I also referenced his observation about how some experiences seem to confirm a Dualist worldview, and his view that any discussion like this has an ethical dimension. I think these three points are relevant and important. I repeat them to remind myself to take them into consideration I suppose.
It's probably fair to say that I use terminology related to the mind loosely - but then so does *everyone* else. Most terms are defined differently by different people. Many arguments hinge on semantics. If you asked me directly what I thought consciousness is, I'd be just as likely to say that it is a legacy concept with no parallel in Buddhist literature. Some time ago I tried to stop using the word, but clearly it's crept back into my vocab. I've argued that at any point where we want to translate a traditional Buddhist term as "mind" that "mental activity" is almost always a better translation; that there is no word that accurately translates as consciousness; and that Pāli lacks the metaphor: the mind is a container. I think the epistemological limits outline in early Buddhist texts are still relevant. I mainly try to orient my thinking along these lines. Though I do drift, especially when trying to explain someone else's view.
Actually I don't see what you're driving at when you say that any of these ideas subvert the idea of the mind being the brain or as I say that the mind is the body, or to refine it further that mental activity is a function of a particular type of embodiment. I'm not sure how arguing that consciousness works in different ways, different modes, says anything at all relevant to Sean Carroll's argument, let alone anything that might subvert it. It doesn't take us beyond physics. There is no gap to squeeze anything extra into the equation. If there are different modes of mental activity, then they are also down to arrangements of atoms. Unless you are able to redefine physics? And if you are they I'll happily endorse you to the Nobel Committee.
Friday, January 23, 2015
Dear Jayarava,
Many thanks for this essay. I have reading your essays about the afterlife, rebirth and karma with great interest. After reading this latest essay one question (in three parts) comes to my mind.
Do you believe that the Buddha taught karma and rebirth?
If not (and assuming that he reached the same conclusions about the afterlife reflected in your essay), do you believe that he taught about avoiding the extremes of nihilism and eternalism?
And if so, how do you interpret his warning?
The rationale behind my question is that I am assuming that your conclusions support the idea of nihilism (and this is another question in itself: does it do that?), thus making nihilism central to Buddhism and making that warning misleading. In other words, wouldn't it have been more appropriate for the Buddha to say, "guys get the idea of an afterlife off your heads" from the beginning and so avoid centuries of fruitless speculation about karma?
And while we're at it, if the Buddha saw or thought all this and didn't say anything, doesn't that make his teaching into another means of social control (let's get people to behave by promising the certainty of punishment) with a sprinkling of (certainly effective) positive psychological exercises in the context of a certain life style?
Reading what I've just written in stark black and white might come across as combative or something. Please let me tell you that there's nothing further from the truth, my mind is genuinely open and I can't wait to read your answers! This is gripping stuff.
Many thanks for all the effort you are pouring into striving for clarity.
César.
Friday, January 23, 2015
Hi César
I think there can be no doubt that if the early Buddhist texts represent the Buddha's teaching that he accepted the twin ideas of karma and rebirth. They occur throughout the Canon and are integral to the other teachings.
My conclusions are different, but then I have access to very different sources of knowledge than the Buddha did. In his day the Buddha probably would have concluded that my view was a form of ucchedavāda or annihilationism (which is not nihilism btw). But if he knew what we know now, he'd have changed his mind.
I have argued that if we approach the afterlife from the Buddhist point of view we wouldn't be thinking in terms of being reborn.
Certainly the Buddha's teaching is a form of social control. All forms of societies require controls. All known societies have them. The Buddha certainly taught an idea form of society in the Vinaya, a kind of Utopia which the monks constantly failed to live up to, and thus more and more rules had to be made. We are social primates. We naturally live in groups and such groups naturally need agreed upon codes of behaviour in order to function well. Our groupishness is what makes us strong as a species. Many of our best features evolved alongside group living; they enabled larger more successful groups.
You don't come across as combative. These are good questions. Important questions. I am arguing for a break with Buddhist tradition. Breaks with tradition are commonplace in Buddhism. Of course this break I'm arguing for is major. This is why I've spent so much time mapping out just what belief in karma and rebirth entails - in fact I have several more essays on this subject before that chapter is finished. We need to be clear about what it means to say we believe in these things, and I find few people really are clued up.
As you say it is gripping. I find it utterly fascinating and most of my time is dedicated to following up all the threads. All the recent blogs are going towards a book on the subject. Hopefully finished this year.
All the best
Jayarava
Friday, January 23, 2015
Dear Jayarava,
The two statements below are yours, first one from an answer to a correspondent on
Thinking Like a Buddhist about Karma & Rebirth, the second one on your answer to me, above:
"The thing is that to claim something is true when you don't certainly know from your own experience that it is true counts as a lie in Buddhist ethics."
"I think there can be no doubt that if the early Buddhist texts represent the Buddha's teaching that he accepted the twin ideas of karma and rebirth."
This issue seems important to me, how do you reconcile both statements? I have problems with the idea that the Buddha accepted the common beliefs of his time without direct knowledge of the issues. Several possibilities come to my mind:
The Pali Canon puts words in the mouth of the Buddha that he didn't utter,
The Buddha is fictitious,
The Buddha talked about things he didn't know about, for reasons we can only speculate about, or
Enlightenment enables people to know there is rebirth and karma (and here we seem to be in the realm of the miraculous).
What do you think?
Saturday, January 24, 2015
Perhaps the problem lies in thinking of the Buddha as a god with omniscience - knowledge of everything? He himself claims only to know what is relevant to liberation. There were many beliefs that the Buddha did not directly challenge, while at the same time as pointing believers to Buddhist practices. It's not necessary to have perfect knowledge in order to practice is another important lesson from the suttas.
> The Pali Canon puts words in the mouth of the Buddha that he didn't utter,
It is certain that this is true. However there's every possibility that some of the words were his. The practices are of the type that can be tested by anyone who wishes to try them.
> The Buddha is fictitious,
Again it seems certain to me that the stories about the Buddha are mostly made up - even his name is made up. But fictitious characters are none the less potent for being so. Hamlet conveys some of life's deepest truths in his speeches, but he never existed. So what?
> The Buddha talked about things he didn't know about, for reasons we can only speculate about, or
There is no evidence for this. Indeed he is portrayed as quite scrupulous about this.
> Enlightenment enables people to know there is rebirth and karma (and here we seem to be in the realm of the miraculous).
No one I know that has a substantial experience of insight has ever had an insight with this content directly. Some of them interpret their experiences in these terms, but not with absolute certainty. And they all want to believe, so we have to carefully examine exactly what they say.
We cannot reconcile the tradition with modernity. The tradition is clearly wrong on some counts: it's wrong about human physiology, for example; about the process of conception; about the nature of matter. Any number of things. Where the tradition is wrong beyond any reasonable doubt we just have to move on. We have the practices and they are still relevant. If we practice we have particular kinds of experience that can inform how we choose to live and that can transform the way we understand ourselves as beings having experiences. Isn't that enough?
Saturday, January 24, 2015
I would highly recommend Evan Thompson's book "Waking, Dreaming, Being". He argues against Metzinger's (his friend) neural nihilism
take on the self. It is a clear and insightful look at consciousness from both cognitive science and Indian as well as Western philosophy.
Sunday, January 25, 2015
I would highly recommend that people don't make this kind of passive comment. I'm not interested in book recommendations as I'll probably never read all the books I own, let alone all the books I want to read. Assume that I have all the books I can possibly read and more.
As an anonymous internet person your bare recommendation carries almost no weight. It's just your opinion and we have no objective criteria on which to judge it. And believe me you would not want to read what some commenters recommend.
If you're going to comment then take the time to say something definite and on-topic. Metzinger is of minor interest here compared to Sean Carroll. I mention Metzinger in three specific contexts (listed in a comment above). So what does this other book have to say about those specific areas? Anything relevant? At least give us some headlines!
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Ugh. Read the NYT review of this book by Thompson. It sounds awful. The misconceptions stand out even in the review.
"Thompson argues that these contemplative practices are relentlessly empirical. "
No. They. Are. Not! Not even close. Not even within a million miles of empirical. And to then discuss the abhidharma is a joke. Only a true believer could assert that the abhidharma represents anything other than the wild metaphysical speculations of people out of touch with their experience. No one with an ounce of objectivity could make this mistake. He's simply repeating the myths of the Abhidharmikas. I've spent the last few months studying various sections of Sarvastivāda and Theravāda Abhidharma relevant to the afterlife and there is no hint of connection to experience in them. One might at a stretch imply it, but that is being generous. It's all post hoc rationalisation based in systems of religious speculation.
So cancel that recommendation and don't waste your time on yet another deluded apologist for Buddhist woowoo. How do authors get away with this rubbish? How do readers get taken in by this stuff? Because those who have religious beliefs seek confirmation everywhere and ignore any counterfactual information.
Sunday, January 25, 2015
You say "Millions and millions of experiments, from detailed observations of our solar system down to the manipulation of single atoms, have failed to find any behavior of atoms that cannot already be explained." Well... can you explain the behavior called Life?? Life is the empirical prof that disproof all that you say. In this millions of millions of experiments we never saw life emerging from chaotic atoms. Something in the scientific standard model is missing, something fundamental. And how can you explain the interference of consciousness in the double slit experiment and others... I think your point of view is to much adjusted to the reductive nineteenth century dumb materialism paradigm. Someone who just now about science don't even know about science at all, try to study epistemology as philosophy for instance, and acquire some more information about the philosophical problems of quantum physics perhaps. Here are some random links to make you think a little bit further: http://themindunleashed.org/2014/03/10-scientific-studies-prove-consciousness-can-alter-physical-world.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=What_Is_Life%3F&_%28Schr%C3%B6dinger%29=
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
http://www.krishnapath.org/quantum-physics-came-from-the-vedas-schrodinger-einstein-and-tesla-were-all-vedantists/
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Hi Jayarava
This is superb. I have lots of Buddhist friends who I admire deeply, but whenever anyone starts wheeling in ideas from the philosophy of physics to back up their religious views, there's an 'oh no, here we go' and my heart sinks a little, expecting rationalisations that would make a physicist's toes curl. It takes something special to pull this off.
I hope it's received well, and doesn't cause too much distress - there's no requirement for anyone else to accept these kinds of idea if they are not minded to. But it's good to see contributions to the discussion of this quality, for anyone who is up for being challenged.
Pursuing all the threads, as you say, is time-consuming and requires a level of familiarity with some very complex ideas and a willingness to let go of some very attractive stories - it isn't everyone's cup of tea. For me, it's a thing of joy to encounter those whose cup of tea it is.
Best wishes
Bob
Sunday, January 25, 2015
@Agrios. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because we have not yet seen something identical to life as we know it emerge from simple chemistry yet, does not mean that we require a new hypothesis. A new hypothesis would be required if you or anyone could prove that life cannot possibly emerge from simple chemistry. So far no one has done this either. So your logic is flawed.
You ignore the considerable progress made towards understanding abiogenesis. The starting conditions for life have yet to be found, but there is no reasonable doubt that they will eventually be found. Several systems of spontaneously self-replicating molecules have already been discovered, not least one which involves RNA molecules. What is deceptive is how very complex the simplest lifeforms are. We're still getting the hang of this, and learning more all the time.
What aspect of life, apart from it's initial starting conditions, are you saying cannot possibly explained by known physics and chemistry?
"Consciousness", a very doubtful legacy concept, has nothing to do with the double slit experiment. This particular fallacy persists because non-physicists do not understand the so-called Observer Effect. I have dealt with this fallacy in an essay called Buddhism and the Observer Effect in Quantum Mechanics. in the double slit experiment "the observer" is the screen which particles hit. Once we understand what physicists mean by "an observer", i.e. that it has nothing whatever to do with "consciousness", then the fallacy collapses along with a good proportion of the nonsense associated with quantum mechanics. I can imagine no better demonstration of the old adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
You write: "I think your point of view is to much adjusted to the reductive nineteenth century dumb materialism paradigm."
Clearly if my point of view is to endorse Quantum Field Theory then I have very little in common with 19th century science. QFT was developed in the 1950s - 1970s so you are simply and objectively wrong on this score. Your own views on science, by contrast, really do seem to be Victorian. Funny how often people with a wrong view accuse me of having that same wrong view.
The first link you list is fallacious. Mental activity can effect matter precisely because the mind is the brain. If it was not, then it could not effect matter (the argument for this is spelled out in the essay you're commenting on). No other possibility is plausible. The last of your links is just bonkers. The other links are seemingly random links to Wikipedia which must be taken with a grain of salt. A list of links to random websites do not constitute an argument. Please don't waste our time.
A poor effort. You'll have to do very much better to get a passing grade from me.
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Hi Bob,
Thanks so much for the positive feedback. Much appreciated. Yes, physics is tricky. I studied it at university, though majored in chemistry. Many Buddhists seem to struggle with the science, though are often keen to co-opt it to confirm their beliefs, even when it patently contradicts their beliefs.
All the best
Jayarava
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Hi, Jayarava. Thank you in particular for your commentary towards the end of this piece on the importance of recognizing that experiences are compelling to those who have them. Antagonism does not help open minds to possibilities either not previously considered, or considered and rejected because of understandably human emotional responses.
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Dear Jayarava,
> We have the practices and they are still relevant. If we practice we have particular kinds of experience that can inform how we choose to live and that can transform the way we understand ourselves as beings having experiences. Isn't that enough?
Yes, it certainly's enough for me, as speculation has always seemed to me a dangerous path, when applied to the so called "ultimate questions".
Perhaps my problem is that the more I observe the processes that form my experience, the less inclined I am to call myself a Buddhist. I'm taking Buddhism in this context as meaning the doctrines and practices offered by the groups I'm aware of in the UK.
Practically all of my practice has been in the context of what used to be the FWBO (feel free to delete the parts of this post that mention groups if you think it isn't appropriate) and, just to give you an example, I never quite got to be able to accept the idea of saddhana practices because it seems to me that in them there's a call to use the imagination which runs counter to the development of insight, as exposed in the Canon. For crying out loud, one of my problems is that my imagination keeps on tripping me up! The last thing I need is to make it the basis of my
meditation, why visualise figures that cannot be experienced in the world? It seems to me as if relying on that Tantric type of imagery one is having to develop a type of faith that I cannot reconcile with Pali Canon Buddhism. It also feels like at some point the artists were given the keys to the meditation classroom.
So, I started to question that and the Puja, and this and the other, until I started to feel more and more like I'd become part of a religious group (that being the farthest thing from my intentions when I first went), in which not enough challenge was being voiced.
This is quite a long preamble and doesn't seem in my mind to lead to any clear question other than, what to do about a Sangha if you think like me?
Sunday, January 25, 2015
You say ""Consciousness", a very doubtful legacy concept, has nothing to do with the double slit experiment. This particular fallacy persists because non-physicists do not understand the so-called Observer Effect. I have dealt with this fallacy in an essay called Buddhism and the Observer Effect in Quantum Mechanics. in the double slit experiment "the observer" is the screen which particles hit. Once we understand what physicists mean by "an observer", i.e. that it has nothing whatever to do with "consciousness", then the fallacy collapses along with a good proportion of the nonsense associated with quantum mechanics. I can imagine no better demonstration of the old adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing." Bravo now you will receive the Nobel of Physics because you solved the problem of the many interpretations of quantum mechanics. So I suppose all the problem is solved by a laconic -"the observer" is the screen which particles hit - can you explain a little bit more because I never saw that perspective before. Yes the "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" I agree, but the recent history of science is the history of "Give me a miracle and a explain rest", Give-me the miracle of life and i will explain everything else but not that, give me the miracle of big bang, the appearance of everything from nothing and I explain the rest. This is a little bit like the science of the gaps. In the case of so called Several systems of spontaneously self-replicating molecules that have already been discovered, don't make me laugh, there is a huge abyss of distance between that highly misinterpreted molecules and a simple RNA molecule. Well i think your position is simply absurd, is the same has someone that go to another planet an discover a car and go on denying the hypothesis that someone conscious made it, and attribute the presence of that car to the random effect of erosion. With the difference that a simple DNA molecule is astoundingly more complex then a car. This is one of the many dogmas of mechanical materialism that for me are just a form of superstition. But because for you I'm not passing grade of your omniscence, I will suht up and leave you alone this new church of basic scientism. Amen!
Sunday, January 25, 2015
@Ted "Antagonism does not help open minds to possibilities either not previously considered, or considered and rejected because of understandably human emotional responses."
Yes. My purpose is not to antagonise people. I started this project because I was interested in the truth. All my life I've been like "what the hell is going on?".
Sunday, January 25, 2015
@Cesar
Somewhere on my harddrive I have an essay by Suvajra on the 8 opportunities for insight in a sādhana practice. It seems to me that you don't have all the information on sādhana to make a judgement. Anyway not all Dharmacārins do a visualisation. Pūja, like all practices, is about cultivating an experience. I've liken it to Joseph Campbell's idea of the Hero's Journey. Taking that journey in ritualised form is a great idea I think.
Sunday, January 25, 2015
@Agrios. "I will suht up [sic] and leave you alone this new church of basic scientism. Amen!"
Good. If you can't play nicely then by all means don't play at all. You're not engaging with the argument you're just calling me names. Once you start doing that you lost the argument as far as I'm concerned. And the thing is that petulant name calling does nothing at all to dent my enthusiasm for the theory. It just makes me think, off topic, that you are an unpleasant, inarticulate person with a poor intellect. And since I moderate comments, I always get the last word with people like you. Amen. :-)
Sunday, January 25, 2015
"Even when challenging the interpretation of such experiences, it's important to acknowledge that for the person having the experience it can be very significant."
I'm going to say this "just for the record", and I almost hope you'll just ignore my having said it. (If my past history in commenting on these pages is any indicator, I will no doubt be discussing something that wasn't your point anyway, in which case you should, please, ignore me.)
You no doubt recall that it is my firm belief that the Buddha didn't believe in rebirth, and wasn't expecting those of us who don't have such a belief to adopt it just because we are his followers. If this is true -- and I am reasonably certain that it is -- that's important, but not anywhere near as important as what it is a part of, which is a system that is simultaneously compatible with the growing knowledge brought to us by the various sciences, *and* endorses a great deal of tolerance towards believers in all types of Cosmic Orders, as long as what they are doing is not harmful to others.
The Buddha's agnosticism, as I understand it, is based on a firm embrace of the concept you mentioned: "I don't know." It takes a great deal of grace to fully accept that we don't know, and to go beyond just accepting what we don't know to allowing others to believe as they do in large part because -- as you say in the quote above -- the experiences a person has are very significant to them. But if we can have that sort of grace, it allows us to offer it to others, and that's where the tolerance comes in.
What I see is that the greatest example history has offered us of someone who has had a worldview that both made room for any changes in human understanding of "reality" (aka "the laws of nature") and at the same time accomplished the difficult task of offering grace to those who can't, because of their past experiences, accept our increasing knowledge of the way the universe works -- is the Buddha. This is no mean feat, but this is what he did: in accepting how little he knew, he allowed that maybe -- just maybe -- the other guy might have gotten it right. Maybe the Cosmic order is Karma and Rebirth and the World of Form. Maybe it is Atman and Brahman, and the Formless World. He was so able to see that either one of these could be the way things are that he could describe how *his* moral system and insights would work within those systems as well -- with only modest adjustments in a few definitions of things, of course. Talk about your "inclusiveness of vision."
The reason this is important -- the reason I bring it up, put my finger on this page to mark it -- is because I am afraid that something so important to the reduction of dukkha (indeed, to world peace) will be lost if we take a stance that gets in the face of believers, saying "There ain't no afterlife." There goes tolerance, there goes grace. "Only this is right, everything else is wrong," is, as the Buddha said many times, not the way to go about living our lives.
(1 of 3... sorry, wordy as usual)
Monday, January 26, 2015
It takes a lot of grace, on the non-believer's part, on the part of the materialist, to take a stance in which we acknowledge that there *could* be things going on that are beyond our present level of scientific skill to detect. But to me, this is the effect of what the Buddha repeatedly says: pay attention to what we can see for ourselves, and work with *that*, stick with *that*, and don't invest in anything else -- not only don't invest in belief in that which we cannot see, but don't invest in non-belief in it, either. That's all I have to do, and it allows others to have their beliefs without pressure or added strife.
What I can see for myself is that when someone's beliefs lead them to behave badly; then I can talk about the bad behavior, because that's what's clearly visible -- stick to that, focus on that; it's what the Buddha did and I tend to agree with his example, that if anything is going to make the world a better place it is that focus on reducing suffering right here and now that will lead us to the best choices, and lead us, eventually, to the more accurate view of the world that enables everything to get better.
Even for a materialist, karma is not dead. All we need to do is pay attention to what the Buddha was saying about it, and stop interpreting it only in terms of its tie into rebirth. His discussions of rebirth and karma were fingers pointing at the moon, not the moon itself. If we look more deeply, he does not necessarily always say that each act gets its fruit . When he is talking about karma in great detail (instead of in brief) as in MN 136 (as I've argued on my blog) he says we can't really tell from an act what it's outcome will be, though afterward we can look back and see that an act that was going to have an outcome, did (sort of a "Duh!" moment there).
That so many of the texts can easily be read two ways is not an accident, it's skill-in-means, and invites us to look a little more deeply and compare what we see in our lives and in the world with what we hear the Buddha saying, and if we find a mismatch at one level, that doesn't necessarily mean "The Buddha was wrong" (about, for example, karma and rebirth), it might just mean that, in taking the easiest reading, the surface reading, we have not yet understood what he was trying to convey to those willing to do the work, the practice, and see if their lives match up. He encourages us not to take anyone's word, and it seems clear to me that he meant not even his. (2 of 3)
Monday, January 26, 2015
You say, in your comments to César, that you are arguing for a break with Buddhist tradition; I find it interesting that I am arguing for the same sort of break -- I find myself agreeing with all your conclusions about what the reality is that we have to deal with, about karma and rebirth being non-starters, about "the mind" involving the whole body, not just the brain (my practice has made that pretty evident to me, at least), and so on. I believe you and I are heading for pretty much identical ideas of what the practice is about in the modern world. But we do get there via very different routes -- you arrive there, it seems to me, by comparing what the Buddha said to what you see and finding him wrong, and I arrive there by comparing what I'm told the Buddha said to what I see in my life, and finding it wrong, and then looking at how he said what he said, and how it can be interpreted, and seeing how consistently it appears to be designed to be read two ways, how carefully crafted that is, and then looking at the larger context (much of it through Jurewicz work) and I still do conclude that he is saying what you seem to be saying he would say if he lived now. The only difference between you and me is that I see that he was saying it then -- it's just that 2,000 years of tradition has made us unwilling to interpret it that way.
"The practices are of the type that can be tested by anyone who wishes to try them."
And this is what I am saying: yes, this is true. And what you see, when you practice, is what the Buddha expected you to see: that you have no evidence for karma and rebirth working as a perfect, comforting, Cosmic Order. So the next step, after we realize that what we see doesn't match what he said, is *not* to start by throwing out everything he said that we think is wrong, but to first at least give an honest attempt at questioning whether we have really understood what he is saying.
Once I saw the structure of Dependent Arising as being based on the Vedic system of beliefs in the creation of Self, its perfection through rituals, and where those beliefs and rituals were supposed to lead -- once I saw that through that model he was describing something else entirely: our beliefs about self, our rituals that create self, and where those actually *do* lead -- it became totally clear just *how* all his talk about karma and rebirth is metaphorical: part of a huge, beautifully constructed, intricate model that allowed him to talk about the deep and difficult-to-see insight into human behavior, all the while offending no believers in the dominant system of his day -- all the while, actually, giving them helpful lessons couched in terms of that finger-pointing-at-the-moon, karma and rebirth. He lived what he preached -- he argued with no one, except on the grounds of their visible behavior and where it did or could lead. I believe that offering that sort of grace, of the "you may be right, the world may work the way you think it does" variety is not far wrong. Though it did get his dharma misunderstood. (3 of 3)
Monday, January 26, 2015
@Linda I got as far as your belief in something the Buddha did not believe. Having a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence is illogical. When there is considerable counterfactual evidence as well it seems quixotic. Good luck, but my money is on the windmills.
Monday, January 26, 2015
I'd be interested in reading Suvajra's paper if there is a link available.
Of course you're right in that I haven't got all the information and I thank you for the time you took answering my questions. I find it very useful to let out my half-cooked notions in front of people like you who've put a lot of thought and research into these issues; if one doesn't open up to the teachers, they won't be able to fathom the real depth of one's ignorance with total accuracy!
All the best.
Monday, January 26, 2015
@Cesar I'll see if I can dig out Suvajra's essay. He never published it, so I'd have to ask him if its OK to share it.
I'm happy to hear from you. You seem to be willing to grant that I might know what I'm talking about, but also to ask pertinent, searching questions that require some thought on my part. It's a nice combination :-)
Monday, January 26, 2015
I'd be interested in reading Suvajra's paper if there is a link available.
You're dead right in that I haven't got all the information and I thank you for the time you took answering my questions. I find it very useful to let out my half-cooked notions in front of people like you, who've put a lot of thought and research into these issues; if one doesn't open up to the teachers, they won't be able to fathom the real depth of one's ignorance with total accuracy!
All the best.
Monday, January 26, 2015
Dear Jayarava,
In my view, the very first of Carroll's propositions has been significantly weakened just these past couple of years.
Given the non-locality and non-determinism of quantum mechanics, I'd say that the recent discoveries of unambiguous room temperature quantum coherence in something as relatively primitive as plants deserves more pause than the hand-waving you present here:
> Because this is the state of knowledge, it reinforces proposition one. If there were another stuff out there, or in here, that could affect our brains, we would have found it by now. The mind cannot be a different kind of stuff or we'd have found that stuff. There is nowhere for the mind to hide. This kind of argument that something is hiding just beyond the detectors is what is known as a God of the Gaps argument. God, or the supernatural or whatever, is always just beyond the current state of our knowledge of the universe. But the picture of physics is so well worked out now, that there are no gaps big enough to fit the mind into it. If, for example, the mind turns out to be a product of quantum vibrations in micro-tubules in neurons, rather than the interaction of neurons themselves, it won't change the basic fact that the mind is the brain. And we understand the principles of quantum states too.
Isn't it the case that saying that we understand the principles of quantum states here is like saying we understand that the legs of the table don't just fall apart without knowing anything about the nuclear forces that hold it together?
A quick Wikipedia lookup yields atleast 30 different contested interpretations of quantum mechanics. With so little consensus on what lies underneath QM coupled with a potentially massive amount of QM effects occurring in the brain, substance monism remains a convenient ideology in my view.
Monday, January 26, 2015
@Chansik.
"In this one equation are summarised all the laws of physics necessary to understand the atoms in your brain [and body] at the energy, mass and length scales relevant to your everyday lives."
How is the equation shown in the article wrong, or what other formulation would you suggest could replace it?
How are scientists failing to predict the behaviour of atoms at the energy, mass and length scales relevant to our everyday lives? Do you have an example of such a failure?
I wait with interest to learn more.
Monday, January 26, 2015
@Jayarava:
> How is the equation shown in the article wrong, or what other formulation would you suggest could replace it?
I wouldn't dare suggest any addition or revision to the formula, but rather point out that the equation represents an amplitude. And so while the amplitude of a configuration change may remain constant, I'd imagine that there is room for play in the precise distribution of the amplitude across and/or within the variables in the quantum mechanics portion of the equation.
I'm essentially parroting the first reply found here
> How are scientists failing to predict the behaviour of atoms at the energy, mass and length scales relevant to our everyday lives? Do you have an example of such a failure?
To be blunt, nothing less than a deterministic model for neural activation is sorely amiss.
If quantum coherence does indeed hold in neuronal microtubules as evidenced in a March 2013 Japanese study, then the implications may be, if Penrose-Hameroff's newly revised Orch-OR would have it, that we've got billions of non-deterministic qubit computations occurring throughout our brains.
Here's their abstract from their March 2014 paper:
>The nature of consciousness, the mechanism by which it occurs in the brain, and its ultimate place in the universe are unknown. We proposed in the mid 1990's that consciousness depends on biologically ‘orchestrated’ coherent quantum processes in collections of microtubules within brain neurons, that these quantum processes correlate with, and regulate, neuronal synaptic and membrane activity, and that the continuous Schrödinger evolution of each such process terminates in accordance with the specific Diósi–Penrose (DP) scheme of ‘objective reduction’ (‘OR’) of the quantum state. This orchestrated OR activity (‘Orch OR’) is taken to result in moments of conscious awareness and/or choice. The DP form of OR is related to the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and space–time geometry, so Orch OR suggests that there is a connection between the brain's biomolecular processes and the basic structure of the universe. Here we review Orch OR in light of criticisms and developments in quantum biology, neuroscience, physics and cosmology. We also introduce a novel suggestion of ‘beat frequencies’ of faster microtubule vibrations as a possible source of the observed electro-encephalographic (‘EEG’) correlates of consciousness. We conclude that consciousness plays an intrinsic role in the universe.
Further down they present the state of the consciousness debate as follows:
(A) Science/Materialism, with consciousness having no distinctive role
(B) Dualism/Spirituality, with consciousness (etc.) being outside science
(C) Science, with consciousness as an essential ingredient of physical laws not yet fully understood
They're proposing (C), of course, where Sean Carroll's first proposal would fall under (A).
Monday, January 26, 2015
Jayarava, you may be interested in an upcoming interview (just recorded) with Massimo Pigliucci, we spend a little time on the values of constructive engagement.
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
@Chansik
It's funny. I live down the road from one of the labs where they've made real progress in quantum computing. And walking distance from the Cavendish Lab and other places where famous discoveries were made. Almost everyday I pass by the window where Wittgenstein threatened Karl Popper with a poker. And yet I know almost nothing about quantum mechanics.
My sense is that we're in the same boat here. You want there to be something wrong with Carroll's assertion that we understand the behaviour of atoms and yet you cannot quite put your finger on what it might be. Something abstract. Something tricksie.
It's quite obvious that we do not understand exactly how "consciousness" is created. We're not even sure what we mean by consciousness most of the time.
Now some scientists are in the business of speculating on consciousness and then they go looking for evidence for their theory. It's a time honoured method and has been very successful. But not finding evidence just means the theory is not accurate. As far as I am aware no one has yet convincingly come up with an a priori description of the phenomenon from first principles - consciousness is not obvious in the way that, say, the second law of thermodynamics is. There's no theory, so far, that says because of X then there must be something like consciousness. We have consciousness and we're looking for post hoc explanations. No worldview does better than this.
If one group of researches fail to predict something, that doesn't mean that all of physics falls down. Quantum mechanics makes any number of useful and accurate predictions. This is why, for example, the majority still cleave to Copenhagen. Because so far it is the most accurate interpretation. When someone comes up with a more consistently accurate theory, i.e. a theory which makes more accurate predictions, then most people will switch. Not all of course, because there's always room for improvement and some people are just contrary. Any new theory will most likely show us how the Copenhagen interpretation is special case of a more fundamental interpretation, so we will have made progress.
Your argument is that quantum mechanics, combined with the other theories mentioned above, fail to accurately describe the behaviour of atoms, but you cannot give us an example of this failure. The paper you reference isn't an example of a behaviour of atoms that cannot be explained with references to the known laws of physics. It's a critique of a particular kind of speculation, about some earlier speculation they made, in the light of new discoveries which are not evidence for their speculations, but which have caused them to modify their initial speculation. This kind of paper is not evidence based. They don't make predictions and look for evidence, they are trying to construct a complex narrative that is consistent with the known facts. That's an entirely different enterprise.
In the meantime no one is prevented from building a tunnelling electron microscope because the theory of quantum tunnelling is really quite accurate. In the meantime we can put billions of nanoscale transistors on a silicon chip, or make a super-conducting magnet, or do a PET scan because quantum mechanics accurately predicts the behaviour of atoms. Given the right equipment I can happily entangle photons and measure their quantum states, spin and so on. We're living just two years on from the discovery of the Higgs Boson based on a prediction that comes out of quantum mechanics. Doubts about the standard model are getting severely squeezed.
Despite the failure to explain consciousness, we understand the basic behaviour of atoms and we are sure, beyond reasonable doubt, that the constraints are these: 1. the mind is a function of the brain; 2. there are no new particles or forces that we need to consider in our theories of how the brain creates consciousness.
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
@chansik Nature news has an interesting story today. Sodium's explosive secrets revealed
Having decided that the standard explanation couldn't fully explain the explosive reaction of sodium in water these people made some better observations. Based on what they saw "Frank Uhlig carried out quantum-mechanical computer simulations of the process with clusters of just 19 sodium atoms" and discovered what was happening was a loss of electrons creating a coulomb effect in the metal and causing it to explode.
Another success for the quantum mechanics that you want us to believe doesn't work.
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
@Jayarava:
You seem to be making a strawman out of me. Allow me to explain.
> ...And yet I know almost nothing about quantum mechanics.
> My sense is that we're in the same boat here.
I do happily admit that the one quantum physics course I took for my undergrad is the only course I ever failed in my academic career as an engineer.
> You want there to be something wrong with Carroll's assertion that we understand the behaviour of atoms and yet you cannot quite put your finger on what it might be. Something abstract. Something tricksie.
So let's leave the equation, and Carroll's 2nd and 3rd assertions to stand.
What I'm suggesting is that there is plenty of room for consciousness to abide by known mathematical formalisms of quantum physics while still casting plenty of reasonable doubt on Carroll's first assertion.
Here's my understanding: My brain is made up of neurons connected at synapses of two types: axonal and dendritic. In the former, an action potential of a neuron triggers an action potential of the next neuron chemically and with a delay. In the latter, an action potential triggers an action potential of the next neuron without delay. The action potentials of groups of neurons connected dendritically combine to form measurable correlates of consciousness via EEG.
The discovery in the past few years is that networks of microtubules found throughout neuron bodies are capable of quantum coherence and are capable of quantum superpositional effects. These effects are effectively non-deterministic and may be responsible for modulating in substantive ways the action potentials of neurons.
Therefore, the conventional reductionist idea that prior mind states completely determine subsequent mind states is now a controversial one given that neuronal action potentials are found to be highly reliable correlates of consciousness.
Penrose's theory of Orchestrated Objective-Reduction (Orch-OR) goes even further, to the fringes I'd admit, in suggesting a mechanism by which quantum gravity (an as-yet-unresolved physics problem of the behaviour of the gravity caused by a single quantum) is intricately involved in observed quantum superpositional effects. He goes even further still in suggesting that the "Objective Reduction" of a particle from superposition is precisely what a quantum of consciousness is. He goes even further in suggesting that consciousness is a priori in this interaction between consciousness and quantum gravity and that therefore the "Objective Reduction" of a particle from superposition is "Orchestrated".
We can actually throw out Penrose's Orch-OR and still be left with a substantively non-deterministic brain. At which point, we're left wondering where the non-determinism comes from. To say that this non-determinism is wholly contained in the brain, in my view, borders on the non-sensical and is a conservative description of the state-of-the-art at best rather than a conclusion.
In my view, the further development of physical laws (ie quantum gravity) has relatively suddenly become crucial to understanding the mind. To Penrose-Hameroff's credit, their 20-year-old Orch-OR theory anticipated the room-temperature quantum coherence discovery of the past few years (they've proposed an experiment to test their theory to boot) so they have my attention, rather than Carroll.
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
@chansik
If you grant that no new forces or particles are required to explain the behaviour of atoms at the relevant energy, mass, and length variables then I don't get your objection.
"Therefore, the conventional reductionist idea that prior mind states completely determine subsequent mind states is now a controversial one given that neuronal action potentials are found to be highly reliable correlates of consciousness."
I don't see how this is relevant. It's not something I've ever asserted. It's not something I've ever seen asserted, and it's not something that Sean Carroll is asserting so far as I'm aware. So who is making a straw man argument here? Who even says it's "conventional". I've been thinking and reading about this stuff for decades and have yet to come across this "convention".
But worse, on face value such determinism is unsustainable even in classical physics, since the brain is not a closed system. So as far as this "conventional" idea is concerned it never entered my head because it's obviously stupid. So who are you arguing with? If you're mistaking me for a determinist then you are seriously barking up the wrong tree. You have not been paying attention!
Penrose is indulging in speculative metaphysics as far as I'm aware. The neuroscientists I do read (Damasio, Sacks, Ramachandran, Le Doux, Metzinger, Blanke, Churchland...) do not cite Penrose. These people are all empiricists mostly working from observable phenomena towards theory, though Blanke in particular going the other way these days. I'm also interested in the Big Blue brain modelling project and the nematode worm neuron mapping project and similar endeavours. I'm not particularly interested in the abstract speculative side of things. In any case Penrose et al are not proposing new fields, particles, or forces are they? They're arguing that some previously undocumented phenomena comes out of the existing fields, forces and particles but seen in a new way (that cannot be seen).
There is no doubt that quantum gravity is a desideratum, but gravity has almost no effect on how our minds work because at the energy, mass and length scales relevant to our bodies it's too weak to have any effect. For the electron and proton in an atom, the gravitational force is 39 orders of magnitude weaker than the electrical force. Arguing that gravity is relevant sounds like astrology.
Penrose et al may eventually accurately predict something relevant, but they haven't yet. And even in predicting something they have not proposed new fields, forces or particles - they propose to show that the current fields, forces and particles produce an interesting effects. Even if they are right, and we simply don't know, then they won't have disproven the argument above. They only have made it stronger by showing how the present theories might describe consciousness without adding any new fundamental physics - no new fields, particles or forces.
I can only conclude that you're blinded by this misattribution of a deterministic worldview to me and thus have not really understood what I'm getting at. It is demonstrably you, rather than me, that is having a strawman argument. In addition you do not appear to be arguing against any proposition that I have asserted, so I can only repeat myself. As far as I can see Penrose is working within the paradigm I've outlined, not outside of it. I actually say this in the essay.
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Still not sure on this one. As you said earlier - the absence of proof is not proof of absence. Not knowing of any mechanism does not preclude it - although I would agree that it limits where it could be hiding.
I have thought, for example, that there could well be unknown forces that interact between neutrinos - how would we ever know. To put it another way, how would a being living in a world of neutrinos ever learn about chemical bonds?
A more interesting line of enqiry to me (and I just thought about this on the way home) is anaesthetic - a chemical that can cause loss of consciousness either to part of the nervous system (a local) or to thw whole system. Even more fascinating is that subsequent to the chemical wearing off we regain a consciousness so similar to the one we had before that the illusion of continuity is complete for the patient and those that know them.
Is this like a computer on stand by - with the programs in RAM but no processing going on?
My own experience (and passing out is something I am good at, so I've had a bit) is that regaining consciousness is a strange process where the mind is booting up a system at a time, sound comes first, followed by proprioception, followed by touch, followed by sight. No idea where taste and smell come in. All of these come back bit by bit - starting with ringing in the ears for sound and white noise for sight.
Whatever the case - we can selectively turn consciousness off with chemicals - perhaps the closest we have got to separating the live brain from the perceptive experience.
What do you think?
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
@Jayarava:
I withdraw my determinism strawman — it's the easiest position to attack. You've certainly compelled me to do some more homework. :)
> If you grant that no new forces or particles are required to explain the behaviour of atoms at the relevant energy, mass, and length variables then I don't get your objection.
To be brief, substance monism is, as has been, a very weak position from which to make any conclusions that end in any kind of patronizing.
The Copenhagen interpretation is merely winning a popularity contest. Quantum mechanics is a formulation of observed behaviour, and an interpretation of those mechanics has nothing to do with the performance of those formulations. The varieties of interpretations are metaphysical speculations, the Copenhagen Interpretation included. The discovery of quantum vibrations in microtubules in 2013/2014 brings quantum metaphysics to the table to shed light on competing philosophies of mind.
Essentially, God's Gap has been widened and resides in the evolution and collapse of the W in Carroll's equation because "warm, wet and noisy" quantum coherence has been discovered to be possible.
> The neuroscientists I do read (Damasio, Sacks, Ramachandran, Le Doux, Metzinger, Blanke, Churchland...) do not cite Penrose. These people are all empiricists mostly working from observable phenomena towards theory, though Blanke in particular going the other way these days. I'm also interested in the Big Blue brain modelling project and the nematode worm neuron mapping project and similar endeavours.
Thank you very much for the references!
_/|\_
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
@Paul
"I have thought, for example, that there could well be unknown forces that interact between neutrinos - how would we ever know. To put it another way, how would a being living in a world of neutrinos ever learn about chemical bonds?"
Of course this appears to exactly the case with dark matter and dark energy. Only close observation of galaxies and clusters of galaxies make it obvious that there is more mass and a repulsive force operating.
But the thing is, and I seem to have to keep repeating this, if it has an effect at the energy, mass and length values relevant to everyday life, we can detect it (can can detect neutrinos and have some ideas about how to detect dark matter). If we can't detect it, then it has no appreciable effect.
Anaesthetics merely disrupt the chemistry of the brain. Nothing special there. Indeed the example of drugs that cross the brain/blood barrier affecting consciousness only reinforces the notion that the brain creates consciousness.
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
@Chansik
"The Copenhagen interpretation is merely winning a popularity contest."
Yes, because lasers, transistors, superconductors, tunnelling microscopes, and quantum computers are all just a complete fluke that we totally do not understand. You keep writing as though QM is a failed theory. It's one of the most successful theories ever. It accurately predicts the behaviour of matter on the nano scale and lower. How can you be so pessimistic just two years after the discovery of the Higgs Boson? You're basically setting aside the advances of the last 100 years, from the photo-electric effect to the Higgs, because why? Because of a new physical prediction from *the same theory* that is just now being observed. It doesn't invalidate the theory, it reinforces the accuracy of it.
"Essentially, God's Gap has been widened and resides in the evolution and collapse of the W in Carroll's equation because "warm, wet and noisy" quantum coherence has been discovered to be possible."
If you like. I don't see that it changes anything. Look at the macroscopic manifestations of coherence: lasers, superfluids and superconducting. Big advances, but no one is basing God of the Gaps arguments based on them. Indeed the opposite is true. As we explain phenomena we reduce the gap in which the unexplained lurks.
New phenomena widen the explanatory gap. Dark matter and dark energy did this. Suddenly we don't understand 96% of the universe. Once we find a way of explaining the two phenomena the gap closes. If indeed there are observations of quantum coherence effects then presumably we will explain these as quantum coherence in which case I don't see what is exercising you. We already have the theory to describe these and it falls out of the current theory. There is no explanatory gap that I can see, except for the imaginary causal relationship you are so excited about.
"The discovery of quantum vibrations in microtubules in 2013/2014 brings quantum metaphysics to the table to shed light on competing philosophies of mind."
Who cares? I say we don't need any new physics to explain the mind, and you say that we do. But then you demonstrate that the existing physics explains this new effect that has no demonstrable correlation with consciousness.
OK. This is now officially boring.
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
"@Linda I got as far as your belief in something the Buddha did not believe." You recognize this, don't you, as a favored strategy for continuation of a cognitive bias: shut down as soon as there is something you disagree with; don't listen to the whole argument -- call it a waste of time rather than risk an understanding different from the one you have invested so much in.
You imagine I'm tilting at windmills, but you've created the windmill -- I'm not even standing near it. The only windmill I keep tilting at is the hope that you'll one day see what I'm saying, without prejudice.
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Hi Jayarava,
I appreciate the effort and time it took to put this post together. Thanks for writing it.
> I started this project because I was interested in the truth. All my life I've been like "what the hell is going on?"
The above quote of yours describes extremely well the feeling and endeavor I am currently embarking on. Perhaps this is why I feel affinity for your writing. But I feel I am a bit behind both on digesting some of these concepts as well as personal experience in meditation and the states it may lead to. Which leads me to my question…
This may be a bit of a Devil’s Advocate exercise but I think it will help articulate what I feel is missing here for me:
When we boil it down, claims about karma or rebirth (as well as psychic powers?) are basically derived from what you call Private Experiences and what I refer to simply as (internal?) subjective experience that somehow come about from states achieved through various meditation practices. Correct so far?
Those who have experienced those states/experiences seem very convinced as you pointed out. But I am now encountering more folks who have had those but say that they are not certain these experiences are what they appear to be, but say that those experiences do happen and confirm that they are very convincing. I don’t know if you have experienced any of those (or any at all?) but I wonder if there are any of those experiences which you would consider accurate or legitimate despite being a subjective experience. For example, realizing No-Self or that the sense of self is an illusion. I know this is not a metaphysical claim per se but it is an example of one that without experiencing it directly can sound like complete nonsense, even if I can posit that it might be legit by intellectually thinking about it, I cannot imagine what it is like or the change in perspective it might bring about.
Sam Harris, who is not only a neuroscientist but what I call a super skeptic (not that either makes him an authority, I know), mentions in his book Waking Up that having experienced No Self it is now inescapably obvious to be the case that the sense of self is an illusion. He also goes on to say that nothing in meditation or states he achieved tells you anything metaphysical about the nature of the universe, but he also says he has not achieved cessation (which seems to be considered the first major realization/insight on the 4 paths to enlightenment, whatever that may be). So I do wonder if he will say anything different after having had the more “advanced” experiences or not.
My question I guess comes down to, do you consider any of the claims of insight that come from advanced meditators to be accurate, or have discovered them to be so to your own satisfaction after reaching a similar state of insight yourself and confirming personally the same insight? If so, what separates some claims from others? I understand that they can be right about one thing but wrong about another, but can we really comment on those claims without experiencing them privately ourselves (other than hypothesizing about them)?
At the end of the day, I am trying to figure out what is true and what is not from the multitude of claims I hear from all these teachers and “enlightened” people. It seems that almost the only way to even begin assessing them is to first have the supposed experience for myself. Empirical claims are easier, although not always easy, to try to dispute, but some are a lot more fuzzy and seem to imply a direct experience is required.
I hope I am making sense and that my question is clear. Thanks in advance.
Thursday, January 29, 2015
@Linda
I'm not "prejudiced" against what you are saying. I'm saying I find your argument unconvincing, largely because you are claiming certainty on the basis of uncertain evidence. And I'm in pretty good company as I understand the mood of the academy - very few people are convinced by your argument (no scholars who I know personally).
Of course you are far from the first person to claim to be able to discern some kind of "original" Buddhism in the Tripiṭaka. But history shows that such presumption has *always* been met with a certain amount of criticism and ultimately with rejection. Because there really is no evidence that can get us back to the Buddha. He's effectively a fictional character. If we don't know his *name*, we are hardly likely to know what he "believed". Your particular claim is less credible than many others. You in a small category of scholars headed up by Mrs Rhys Davids.
I was always taught to stick to the evidence. I'm all for speculating where there is evidence, my speculations have also been published, but one has to be clear that it is speculation and be tolerant of those who find it unconvincing. To become convinced by one's own speculations is usually the sign of a weak intellect. Can you, for example, point to a single positive endorsement of your view by another scholar? Have you even been cited by anyone? Is your idea being discussed in academic online fora? Or is it just you?
Attacking me personally because I have expressed scepticism just shows the kind of argument you are making.
Thursday, January 29, 2015
@Last Turtle
"At the end of the day, I am trying to figure out what is true and what is not from the multitude of claims I hear from all these teachers and “enlightened” people."
Yes. We seem to currently be in the same boat as the Kālāmas were many centuries ago. They posed the question for the same reason, but asked "how should we behave". And the Buddha said, "pay attention and trust your experience of how to behave". I.e. one can figure out how to get on with other people by trial and error.
As far as the advanced stuff goes, no I have no attainments in that area. I have little religious talent. But I have plenty of reason to believe that some kind of radical transformation is possible. I see no reason to doubt it. The arguments over exactly what the experience is like or how to conceptualise it seem academic to me.
If guru-X says the truth is that we have no self, then what you see is a load of petty disciples with no experience of their own, turning this into a dogma, going around preaching "there is no-self", and insisting that anyone who uses a first-person pronoun is an idiot. It's pathetic. A very small number of disciples will knuckle under and do the necessary work to have that same kind of experience. They are the ones to keep an eye on. And they all seem to say the same thing - "it takes practice".
"No-self" is clearly a metaphor because when you talk to these people they have some kind of orientation to the world that is centred on their body - someone is looking out from those eyes! Although much of what Gary Weber says is clearly bonkers (free will denial) he is quite eloquent on what he means by not having a self - it's a specific kind of experience. This interview is worth watching. But then so is the TED Talk by Jill Bolte Taylor.
But on whole the question of what is it like to be enlightened is a bit like a virgin pondering what sex is like. As we know sex is different every time. My most satisfying sexual experiences occurred many years after the first one. So enlightenment is not really one experience. We can all get a taste of what it's like through intensive meditation under good circumstances. Even a talentless meditator like me. Presumably one can cross a threshold where the range of experience no longer falls back to the kind of resting state that I wake up in each day. It's certainly an attractive notion and it seems to happen to many people.
...
Thursday, January 29, 2015
...
Those who are really, genuinely interested in the experience are already meditating for hours each day and have arranged their lives around the pursuit of this goal. The rest of us are just kinda curious, but not serious. Just as I'll never be a competitive athlete or a professional musician, but draw vicarious pleasure from watching the All Blacks thrash England at Rugby or listening to Dave Rawlings picking out some wild chromatic counterpoint on a Gillian Welsh record. To get to the peak, one just has to put in the hours and be single minded. Of course enlightenment might simply descend on us without warning or practice, as happened to Ramana Maharshi or even to Jill BT. But most of us are looking at putting in 10,000 hours of practice in as short a period as possible in order to have that experience.
I know I'll never do that, so I'm resigned to making a different kind of contribution to the life of my religious community. Hopefully a little intellectual clarity. Not much perhaps, but then I don't have much to offer. But if one knows that one is not climbing Everest, then obsessing about what the peak is like is a waste on time and energy. I'm a base camp assistant and I'm far better off focussing on making a good base camp. Course, being me, I have my own ideas about the best way to go about this, but I do what I think is right and try to take the consequences into account. I try not to be a petty disciple.
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Regards user chansik and his contention that the revised Penrose proposal that quantum coherence in microtubules in neurons is responsible for consciousness I'll cite an interesting reposte from the profession, but before I do that I want to draw attention to the basic problem.
chansik has agreed that Penrose does not propose new physics: no new fields, forces, or particles. Thus his basic proposal rests on a speculative metaphysical interpretation of the observation that vibrations occur in microtubules.
Microtubules are small structures made of two proteins, which contribute to the structural integrity of all cells. They are also involved in transportation of a variety of constituents within the cell. As the name suggests they are very small and tube shaped (just 12nm inner diameter). What happens in these microtubules has been partially correlated with the patterns of brain waves, but importantly, never positively correlated with any aspect of consciousness. It's possible that if we accept the idea that the brain is the mind (and hardly anyone in this forum accepts this) that something which is involved in brainwaves might be involved in consciousness. Although the arrow of causation may well point the other way as well. No plausible causal mechanism has been proposed for how this coherence might contribute to consciousness (at least this is what others in the profession say - I've been checking references today).
The larger problem however is one of scale. The effect, like all quantum effects, is mainly at the atomic scale. There is some correlation with the macro-scale effect of brain waves, but the causal relationship is unclear as yet. In other macro-scale coherence effects - such as lasers - there is no sign that the coherence is an information storage structure, it's just that by vibrating in time the atoms produce coherent light. If microtubules produce complex effects like consciousness then we'd expect to see parallels in lasers, such as information bearing laser substrates. We don't see this.
There is precisely zero evidence that information storage is involved. If there is no information storage involved then the afterlife--conceptualised as the persistence of information storage beyond the death of the brain--can not be predicated on this phenomena. candsik is just making this bit up.
Now to what the profession make of this idea. I will cite one response from a team which decisively disproved one of the testable hypotheses in the first iteration of the Penrose conjecture and who are thus thoroughly well versed in the practical implications.
"The original proposal thus contained a critical testable hypothesis. We tested this hypothesis and found two fatal shortcomings, resulting in it being withdrawn from Orch OR in this current review."
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Thursday, January 29, 2015
...
The paper is a direct comment on the one that chansik has been basing his comments on.
Jeffrey R. Reimersa, Laura K. McKemmishb, Ross H. McKenziec, Alan E. Markd, & Noel S. Hushe. (2014) The revised Penrose–Hameroff orchestrated objective-reduction proposal for human consciousness is not scientifically justified: Comment on “Consciousness in the universe: A review of the ‘Orch OR’ theory” by Hameroff and Penrose. Physics of Life Reviews. Volume 11, Issue 1, March 2014, Pages 101–103.
"No model of Orch OR can be treated seriously without the following:
(i) a precise description of the quantum states of the qubit,
(ii) a description of the mechanism through which the wavefunctions representing these states become entangled, including specification of the basis in which measurements of the qubit's properties are performed in situ, and
(iii) a means of achieving quantum coherence over the required time scale.
Hameroff and Penrose provide only a vague set of qubit possibilities".
This team of scientists conclude:
"The [latest version of the Penrose–Hameroff conjecture] is thus neither self-consistent or scientifically coherent and violates the basic tenants of good scientific practice. The specification of the quantum qubit should be the centrepiece of the proposal. All other aspects of the Orch OR proposal are only relevant in terms of how they affect the qubits. Without a viable qubit specification there is no connection between the proposal and the observations of Bandyopadhyay and others. Without a qubit there is no connection to postulated effects of quantum gravity. Without a qubit there is no testable hypothesis linking together the phenomena of quantum gravity, elementary biochemical function, and consciousness, and no basis on which “Orch OR theory” can be considered as a proposal worthy of further consideration." (emphasis added)
The trouble with a complex proposal like the Penrose Conjecture is that it's difficult for lay people to assess. And when we turn to the professionals they are deeply sceptical about the conjecture itself, but also about the methods of those proposing it.
The basic problem is that there is sign of a way of storing information in this view. There's no way for this effect to represent anything, any more than the beating atoms in a laser represent anything other than beating atoms. There no potential here to generate consciousness, and thus as far as we can say the mind is still generated by the neurons in the brain.
Of course new evidence may be forthcoming as Penrose & Hameroff claim to have made testable predictions. But the smart money at this stage would be on Reimersa et al disproving it. But even if it amounts to something more, it would not change the basic argument set out in my essay: The mind is the brain, the brain is made of atoms, we know how atoms work, and the second law of thermodynamics makes an afterlife untenable beyond any reasonable doubt - the quantum world provides no way to overcome the increase of entropy that happens at death destroying the information that constitutes a person. Given that there is no information storage potential in the Penrose-Hameroff conjecture the argument their model is in fact entirely irrelevant to the question of an afterlife.
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Interesting to read some of the discussion since I last commented. I'm not too familiar with the details of Hameroff & Penrose's ideas - mainly because I'm not aware of it being treated especially seriously by physicists, so I haven't given it the time - but I do have a little expertise in quantum mechanics and field theory.
The equation for "W" given by Carroll doesn't have any room for the kind of vagueness that Chansik is suggesting - it's pretty solid.
If we take out the [Dg} (which appears to represent a quantum theory of gravity that we don't actually have), and the square root of -g, and the part labelled "gravity", the equation we're left with describes the Standard Model of particle physics, which is extremely precisely defined and tested to all kinds of extreme.
The vast majority of experimental and theoretical physicists are privately and publicly fed up with the Standard Model, which is now about forty years old, because despite every imaginable crazy experiment, nobody has yet found the tiniest crack in it using experiments on Earth. And physicists naturally want there to be more to understand.
Also, there must be a particle physics (quantum) connection to astrophysical observations such as dark matter, dark energy and gravity itself. (But we know that none of this has anything to do with consciousness.) There are plenty of unanswered questions about the nature of the internal dynamics of hadrons such as protons and neutrons, and pieces we don't know exactly how to fit in, such as neutrino masses. (We know these have nothing to do with consciousness either.)
The parts we're left with describe either deterministic or random-probabilistic outcomes, which are independent of whichever interpretation of quantum mechanics you favour.
This is the reason there are so many interpretations. Quantum theory doesn't give us conceptual details of exactly what is happening under the bonnet in a way we can understand - it tells us what we can expect to observe if we start with a certain thing and do a certain thing to it. Interpretations are just stories that try to fill in the parts in between. They're important for philosophers, and they're important for the physics of 'quantum foundations' which hopes to find experimental ways to distinguish between different interpretations, and ultimately to lead us towards a better version. Right now, they're all just stories - ways of imagining what's happening - and they're all as good or as bad as each other.
The reason the Copenhagen Interpretation is popular is because it's by far the simplest story for people who are learning quantum theory for the first time. An explanation of Carroll's equation for "W" using the Copenhagen interpretation, however, would be very contrived - it would be far more natural to use the many worlds interpretation (which is also very popular). But the two stories are describing exactly the same causal relationships between observable phenomena.
If you have any particular questions about quantum physics or the Standard Model, feel free to try me. I'm no expert but I might be able to shed a little light on it.
Friday, January 30, 2015
Bob! Someone who actually knows something about quantum mechanics! Gasp.
I know that some scientists were disappointed when the Higgs was found, because it only provided more confirmation for the standard model. I also note that just this week another attempt to locate quantum gravity failed. And I should point out that Carroll is a vocal advocate of the many-worlds interpretation of QM. I suppose what may not be clear is just what difference the interpretations make. Many worlds is even more counter-intuitive than Copenhagen when in comes to the cat in the box!
My sense of this problem is that people struggle with changes of scale. We naturally think classically and on the scale of a human body. So everything gets interpreted as though it were classical and relevant big lumps of matter. And of course that does not work. On the whole one cannot simply shift back and forth between the sub-atomic world and the world of grams and metres; the scale change is around 30 orders of magnitude and that cannot be ignored.
However whichever interpretation of QM wins out, we still basically understand chemistry (which is what I studied) and entropy. Yes QM refines that picture, but as I repeatedly said to chansik (though he refused to listen) no new fields, forces or particles are required to apply QM to refine our understanding of chemistry. Nothing very spooky is happening in coherence, or lasers would be considerably more interesting!
Cheers
Jayarava
Friday, January 30, 2015
I've never been convinced that deciding among interpretations is even a sensible question. Quantum theory works perfectly well regardless of how we interpret it. Some questions are just the kind of things humans ask (e.g. which slit did the particle go through?) As you say, our intuitions are built for a different scale.
Yes, no new fields, forces or particles are required to refine our understanding of chemistry. The same can be said of ecology, climatology, biology, neurology. They all rely on the same fundamental understanding of thermodynamics, entropy, information, energy, to delineate what is possible from what is not.
If we were to claim that there's a kind of continuity of characteristics after death that can have some effect on physical matter at a later point in time, then this claim also has implications in terms of those laws.
It's up to us whether we want to take the details of those implications seriously. Most people don't, because it's easy to not be familiar with the laws, and it's easy to dismiss them or underestimate them. Being glib about what might be possible is understandably a lot more popular than setting about trying to understand what is already known and how it is known.
As far as I can make out, Carroll's - and your - arguments don't rely on any kind of prior materialistic outlook. They're based on empiricism. If all our observations are relentlessly consistent with a model, in every conceivable context, then adopting a view that goes against that consistency ought to be a big deal.
Friday, January 30, 2015
"If all our observations are relentlessly consistent with a model, in every conceivable context, then adopting a view that goes against that consistency ought to be a big deal."
Love it. Cheers!
Jayarava
Friday, January 30, 2015
To be honest Jayarava, I think you are over stating the case here. There have been so many points in scientific history where we think we have the answers and it turns out that we only have a clue to a small portion of it.
Drawing conclusions about consciousness from atoms is a little like drawing conclusions about a house from individual bricks, or about a person from their genome.
Complex phenomena emerge from simple phenomena and there are a range of effects that cannot as yet be predicted from the simpler forms.
As someone who knows how a computer works from Facebook videos down to transistors I am aware of how complex even man's meagre creations are and how complex matters get when talking about what effects what.
Saturday, January 31, 2015
Anaesthetics 'merely' disrupt the chemistry of the brain?
The point is that they do so in such a way that removes awareness without destroying what makes it happen. They are the subtle knife that slips between brain and awareness. If awareness is a product of the brain then they stop the brain producing the effect without changing the ability of the brain to produce it when the chemical leaves the system.
How is that not of relevance to a discussion about the nature of awareness and its relationship to the brain?
Saturday, January 31, 2015
@Paul.
Re: "To be honest Jayarava, I think you are over stating the case here."
And I'm not convinced that you have understood the case I am making. The discussion is about the persistence of life after death. The minimal case is that a living brain is required to manifest consciousness. A dead brain does not. I don't see anyone against this, however popular fictional zombies are. I need to prove nothing much beyond this and the remarkable accuracy and reliability of the models of physics and chemistry. Doesn't even matter that much to me if the relationship between model and reality is theoretically fuzzy. As long as the map gets me to my destination I'm not going to agonise over the map/territory problem. Having arrived, I've just traversed the territory.
Transferring what a living brain does (with it's 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections) to a single-cell fertilised embryo, even presuming we had a plausible mechanism for doing this (which we don't) is implausible - scale is important. So Buddhist rebirth cannot be the case. In order to transfer what the brain does to a non-material substance would mean that the whole world would look very different than it does - nothing would operate the way that we've seen it operating in millions of experiments. The laws of physics would all be demonstrably inaccurate at times. And since they are demonstrably accurate it is unreasonable to argue for any kind of substance dualism.
Now, if you can show that there is something I need to take into account in considering life after death, then by all means say what it is. I'm really not saying anything about the general points that you are objecting to.
Just to be clear, I'm not drawing conclusions about consciousness. I'm drawing conclusions about the likelihood of life after death. Consciousness remains a mystery. Life after death is no longer a mystery. Beyond any reasonable doubt it doesn't happen. Extraordinary evidence would be required to overturn this conclusion. Extraordinary enough to overturn the Laws of Thermodynamics which have withstood the most intense scrutiny and testing imaginable for a century and a half. There's a Nobel in it for anyone who can disprove thermodynamics.
What is the last thing that we had to change in physics at the relevant energy, mass and length scales? Maxwell's unification of electricity and magnetism in 1862? Can't think of anything after that. Relativity and quantum mechanics are largely irrelevant on this scale. Nothing that overrides thermodynamics that's for sure.
Re: How is that not of relevance to a discussion about the nature of awareness and its relationship to the brain?
Awareness is 100% correlated with a living, healthy brain. We can afford to wait for the causal mechanism to be worked out, because it's not relevant to the afterlife question: we're talking here about the persistence of information (ordered, low entropy states) after the organism's net entropy can no longer be held low by life processes. Life eats low entropy energy and excretes high entropy energy; and it uses the difference to create persistent, self-replicating, highly ordered structures. With the destruction of that order and the progression to a higher entropy state the information associated with those ordered structures is irretrievably lost. One cannot unscramble an egg. So, no afterlife.
We don't even need to know what awareness is or how it works. It would be nice to know which of the possible mechanisms it might be, but there's no possible mechanism that is going to add new possibilities for life after death.
The claim is bold. But rather understated I think.
Saturday, January 31, 2015
Thanks for extensive reply.
I’m getting a better picture of your approach to all of this. I’m happy that someone is doing the academic analysis on these things, although I have resolved to climb the mountain and see for myself. Perhaps if I get to an interesting vantage point I will come back to have a conversation. I hope to always have folks that will question any claims I make, especially the outlandish ones, to keep me in check and help me see I’m not deluding myself.
Thanks for jumping in on the conversation on reddit. I hope you don’t mind I posted it there. Reddit is a hit or miss when it comes to discussions but I’ve had some interesting chats and comments on some stuff before, so I always give it a try when I’m looking for additional perspective.
Keep doing what you are doing.
Sunday, February 01, 2015
@Lat Turtle
My main approach is actually historical these days. But I have loved science for 40 years now. My hope is that these essays will help to better define the path for those who wish to follow it. In the path metaphor I am a street sweeper. Reddit is indeed curious and doesn't really bring out the best in me, but do by all means post there. Like all writers I crave a wider audience :-)
Sunday, February 01, 2015
Hi again :)
I thought I'd share some clarifications (from a discussion on Facebook). I felt the need to try to be more careful than Sean Carroll in avoiding overstepping lines beyond which physics has no say.
Physics doesn't give us any kind of mandate to assert that there can't possibly be an afterlife, but it does provide a powerful argument that essentially rules out many common ideas about it, and the argument needn't rest on any kind of materialist premises.
The assertion that "the mind is the brain" isn't really necessary. It clearly isn't a scientific statement when put as baldly as that - but I think we can relax it and start with something more empirical:
Minds appear to be exclusively associated with physical organisms. (You don't really get them elsewhere, fanciful stories and ideology aside.)
We have laws of physics that distinguish the possible from the not possible for matter, fields, spacetime and their information content. They appear to be universally obeyed: no exceptions have been found, despite centuries of intense and inventive experimentation throughout the world. They apply to systems that we don't understand just as well as systems that we do. (Think about the information content of heredity from the perspective of scientists before the discovery of DNA.)
Empirical laws of matter don't require any model for consciousness at all. They're inductive, rather than deduced from axioms. Since the induction is based on the whole of humanity's history of the observation of matter, it's about as strong as it's possible for an inductive argument about matter to be.
(In contrast: the same laws of physics, along with many far more detailed ones, could also be deduced from a beautifully simple set of fundamental principles - the standard model and general relativity. This is the line of argument Carroll is focusing on. If you find Occam's Razor compelling, this adds more strength to the universality of the empirical laws. This type of argument *does* rely on a materialist/naturalist view of consciousness - but it is a different argument to the one I'm suggesting.)
The empirical fact is, we never see violations of the laws of physics by physical systems that we do understand, or by chaotic or other physical systems that we don't understand, or by anything achieved by the interaction of consciousness with matter.
The laws don't tell us what consciousness can or cannot do, or anything about consciousness directly at all - they tell us what matter can and cannot do, mediated by anything.
In particular, they tell us what kinds of influence are or are not possible between the actions we take and the observations we make of matter at a later time.
(cont'd below)
Tuesday, February 03, 2015
Humans have a strong tendency to want to believe that their consciousnesses (or the consciousnesses of some very special people) can affect matter in ways that defy the laws of physics. The internet is full of this stuff. If it were true, it would be very easy to set up the conditions in which straightforward observations could be made that could verify these claims. Is it understandable that we want to think consciousness is not bound by these laws? Of course. Have any claims ever stood up to scrutiny? No. Does it matter that we don't know how consciousness works or whether or not it's a material phenomenon? No.
It's also understandable that most people aren't too bothered about having ideas that violate laws of physics. Not knowing or caring much about the laws of physics is always the easiest way out!
Even if we do accept them, the laws of physics still don't rule out an afterlife. Here are two simple ways around them (the first might be relevant to some Christians):
1. If there is an afterlife that has no further effect on any part of the physical world at any later time, that does not violate the laws of physics.
2. If there is an afterlife that does affect the physical world at a later time in a completely random way, that does not violate the laws of physics either.
However...
If there is an afterlife that allows some characteristics of the deceased person to be transferred to the consciousness of another being in the physical world in a way that influences how that being interacts with physical matter, this *does* violate laws of physics.
The claim for this kind of afterlife is that the actions of one person in one life build up a store of structured information (as opposed to something purely random) that is passed to another being.
You might be wondering whether it's really ok to simply call this stuff 'information' if we have no idea what any of it is. The use of the term in physics is clear: if it can inform (give structure to) what happens next (to physical things), it's information.
There's one more way out of this, though, and I'd suggest this might be the most significant thing we can learn from this discussion.
Instead of the magic consciousness-mediated inter-life karma that breaks the laws of physics, we could focus on a socially- and environmentally-mediated type of karma that does not break any laws at all.
We know that the way we live our lives *does* affect the consciousnesses of those around us. It *does* affect the physical state of the world that we live in. These effects do persist after we are gone, they do influence the start in life that new consciousnesses will inherit, and the quality of their formative years. To accept this, there is no need to posit any new subtle or unsubtle cosmic laws of consciousness that have no basis outside of traditional stories or nice fantasies. There are straightforward and simple modes of operation for all these influences - we could shift our attention to those instead.
These influences don't simply carry traits from one life to any 'next' life. They're far less personal, and far more interesting, than that.
Tuesday, February 03, 2015
Dear Jayarava,
In answer to a correspondent in 2006 you wrot the following:
"You seem to be assuming that consciousness is a function of the brain. That is a very western materialist view of consciousness. It's not one I find very beautiful or useful. At the moment I'm more into exploring the idea that the physical brain emerges out of consciousness rather than the other way around. It's also more consistent with the Buddhist tradition."
I just want to check if I've got the wrong end of the stick here. I understand, after reading your most recent essays that you're now suggesting that consciousness really is both a function of the brain dependant on it. Am I right?
Sunday, February 08, 2015
@Cesar 2006 was a long time ago. Yes, I've changed my mind.
Sunday, February 08, 2015
The basic argument that "no subtle energy or subtle substance has been detected thus far, and therefore probably doesn't exist" is flawed--not just because experimental tools and hypotheses both constrain what they can conceivably disclose (and subtle energy research hasn't received a huge amount of funding so far), but also because the vast majority of cosmologists believe that 96% of the universe consists of exactly such subtle energy and subtle matter, thus far completely undetectable and unobservable except for gravitational effects (a notoriously weak and subtle force unto itself). Deno Kazanis has written about the subtle matter/energy and dark matter/energy correlations, and it warrants consideration (especially in light of Ian Stevenson's research on reincarnation, which wasn't mentioned here).
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
I never know whether to laugh or cry when I see elements of science reinterpreted in a superstitious framework to create pseudo-science. I usually do a bit of both.
There's nothing subtle about dark matter - it holds galaxies together and probably made galaxies possible in the early universe. While dark energy is forcing the observable universe to expand at an accelerating rate. The very fact that neither interact very strongly with normal matter or can easily be detected is the only clue we need to know how irrelevant they are to the human body.
Compare with the neutrino which also only weakly interacts with matter - millions pass through your body, at almost the speed of light, without interacting or even deviating in their path. They mostly continue on through the earth itself without stopping.
Because neutrinos interact only weakly with matter they can have almost no impact (literally or figuratively) on matter. They cannot change matter except for one in a billion and the effect is so small that our human senses could not notice it. And dark matter interacts even more weakly. Dark matter cannot influence matter on the scale of a human body - it passes through us as though we are not there. The smallest scale on which we can even notice the effect of dark matter is the galaxy. Dark energy is similar - only noticeable at all when one compares the relative motion of a large number of galaxies.
Since these forms of matter/energy don't have effects on the scale of a human body, they simply cannot be the subtle energy you are thinking of.
Besides which, as I have shown in earlier essays, the subtle "energy" is never referred to as "energy" by the ancients, but across the ancient world is referred to as "breath". There's nothing subtle about the breath either. The breath as the ancients conceive it is constantly and obviously present in the movements of the body - particularly the process of breathing itself.
Certainly gravity is the weakest of the four fundamental forces, but you can feel it all your life. Jump off a building and you'd certainly notice it (for a few seconds). Again there is nothing subtle about gravity.
I've debunked Ian Stevenson before now and don't feel the need to repeat myself on that branch of pseudo-science.
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
@Jayarava and All
~Namaste~
An Incredible and Credible blog, if you can get my meaning. :-)
I have read through about three quarters of this blog and have thoroughly enjoyed the insightful discourse. I thank all for contributing to discourse that does have significant 'deep' meaning; those who take the time to think and share. I have to one extent very congruent views to Jayarava within most as discussed here, especially within the science/'religion' overlays and conjectures, within a want to adhere to 'harder' science and 'thought' that can be substantiated. However, I have also moved within a fairly recent period to “Being Open”, if you will.
Though many might argue there is 'tangential movement' to the following, I first wish to assert it is the core that must be addressed before anything else has any True deeper meaning, within the depth of the core of the concepts being discussed herein, as well as the context - one primarily being a Buddhist context blog, within as well asking the 'deeper questions'.
I see a Gap, which seems to be everywhere, and I wish to perhaps have some movement to fill it, within what Is possible, of that which can be be derived to Be True, or not.
I respectfully apologize in advance for any who may think I have hijacked the thread/blog; and obviously anything to that which is allowed to 'exist' and in what form is in this thread is at the discretion of Jayarava. I am posting this as I admire the quality of the thought, content/context, and directionality that does exist herein. If this is to be removed, or moved somewhere else; or largely 'ignored', or even rebuffed, I am not 'One/one' to take any offense. ;-)
Some thoughts to ponder and questions to thinks about:
For those who so claim to have separated from Self, ie. No Self; I ask of you: Why are YOU still here?
For those who claim ('Mystical') Enlightenment, again a "Total Realization" of No Self, a total emergence of Being One, and the "Beauty"(Trueness/Realness); again, I ask of you similarly: Why do you still breathe?
Think more deeply within these than you might simply wish to think and dismiss, based on wording that may imply of course more than simply seems quickly evident or simplistic.
These are the real core questions of Buddhism, Human-Reality, and related. Of whether there is a 'soul', a 'soul' that is One, of what Attainment and Enlightenment “Is”/”Truly Is", and perhaps what it is not, or if such exists in a manner classical considered, if some concepts/philosophies/ideals/understandings of Enlightenment may in fact be "The(An) Illusion".
Consider as well, Buddha may not have been Enlightened in a manner attributed to 'Him'('him'), and may be more misunderstood than most who adhere most 'deeply' to Buddhist tenets and movements/ideas/ideals of Attainment. Consider even the potential that within some aspects that which is held most deeply can in itself be in one sense Illusion.
Monday, March 30, 2015
Of course therein begs again the question what is Enlightenment, is it (so) S/singular, what is its True Purpose, if any; what is the 'actual goal' within (our)existence, if any; what is liberation, what is freedom; what does it mean to be human; what does it mean to be 'SupraHuman' - does such exist of a True Nature? One can go on, but I think there are importance to these questions, as 'quasi-obscure' in a sense as they may as well seem posed. I do not see most anywhere really grasping at these meaningfully in any “SpirituoPhilosophical” context, within a reconciliation of that which is most central, core to 'the All/all' of It.
Consider the Enlightenment(enlightenment) of Jesus, how misunderstood he is within the Religion itself, and the teachings therein of Christianity, of that which is most formalized - of the interpretation(s). Buddhism is a religion, as well, of course, though many seems to miss that, as it can be far deeper on many levels within philosophical and scientific parallel(perhaps, at least at the current general scope of understanding/perception).
Are any who B/breathe among us no longer human, who still bear the DNA of a human?
Is A(any) Religion ever Right? What makes it Right? What makes it right and what makes it wrong? Embedded within all there are many, many aspects that are true, or even True; however, Is It ever True? Can A Religion or Philosophy ever be True, or meet some standard within an Ideal?(most all will say 'no' I assume). Is anything ever to be Absolute, or is it all just “Degrees/degrees”? What Is THE Standard to uphold, if such exists, to “Create” a (True) coherent (True) SpirituoPhilosophy?
Is the question "Is there life after death" actually even a valid question; within we have not defined what is life and what is death, what is actually meaningful, and much which relates within such scope?
What is consciousness, 'proto-consciousness', Omni-consciousness? Are they in some manner all the same thing, all Of the same thing? Are any of them real, more real, less real, and in just what way(meaningfully so)?
What really is TrueConsciousness? What really is TrueEnlightenment?
Are any of you reading this not human? Or more than human? Can anyone here point to someone who would seem to be human, but for all intents and purposes is not human, no longer human?
Is not Karma and Reincarnation not overtly obvious as a means congruent with (primordial)religion's nature to be used to control the action of humans, so overtly essential to the times in which such were created? Is it now overtly obvious that we are creatures contained of self, comprised of self-importance, 'Self'/self-preservation, and cannot free ourselves from a want to not exist as some form of self, or (within that) even of Self, and even wherein if we to 'wish'(D/desire) to?
Do we want TruePeace, or do we just think we want TruePeace? Within that do we just want an escape, but are too self-important to escape? Do we ever not want 'something' on some level -- Want “Something”?
I again ask, within this, who then would be *This* and still remain to breathe?
*What Is Of TrueImportance? Or is nothing(Nothing) of any importance, any TrueImportance?
Therein, Of (any)TrueRelevance? Is not everything R/relative, or within what does such become not Relative? Within what experience/meaning/relevance of 'one' who breathes is this not so?
(Again, within this, who then would be *This* and still remain to breathe?)
What Is TrueEnlightenment?
Lastly, I ask of you to think upon what is *True*
Monday, March 30, 2015
You nailed it: "My conclusions are different, but then I have access to very different sources of knowledge than the Buddha did. In his day the Buddha probably would have concluded that my view was a form of ucchedavāda or annihilationism (which is not nihilism btw). But if he knew what we know now, he'd have changed his mind."
I have read through some of your blogs and discussions in the comments space, and I am actually wondering in what sense you can refer to yourself as a Buddhist. The way I see it, any "-ist" is a follower of somebody else's thinking (with the exception of a pianist). You don't seem to be following anybody, least of all a much-mythologized, fictionalized and culturally-flavoured ancient person named Gautam Buddha. I doubt that you are even "following" a present-day philosopher or guru whose insights have an exponentially larger chance of being available to us without being distorted, over-interpreted and ossified by generations of reverent followers.
So, do you label yourself Buddhist in deference to your teachers of a certain school of thought, who provided you with a certain philosophical scaffolding? Is it like saying, "I have ancient bamboo scaffolding in my mind (and not steel) which enables me to climb, and therefore, I am a Bamboo-ist?"
Or are you labeling yourself Buddhist in order to maintain dialogue and connection with other enquirers/like-minded people who call themselves Buddhists, for good or not-good reasons?
If not for such reasons, please tell me why you continue to refer to yourself as a Buddhist, and not, say, a human being.
Just curious,
Krishnaraj Rao
krish.kkphoto@gmail.com
Monday, September 07, 2015