BG 175: The Buddhist Atheist | Buddhist Geeks

• BG 175: The Buddhist Atheist | Buddhist Geeks

  • karma is another matter all together. I find it quite unproblematic to state that when I die, the effects of my actions will continue in the world.
  • I simply see that after our death we have an enormous responsibility to ensure that the world we leave for others, be they our own children, be they our students, or so on, anybody, whoever, man, woman, animal. So I have no difficulty with the idea that after death my actions will continue to bear fruit. The only difference is that unlike some Buddhists, I don’t feel any need to be around when they mature.
  • Now, on a number of occasions, that he says as long as you are preoccupied with these big metaphysical questions, you won’t be attending sufficiently to the real task at hand, which is the question of suffering. Not just your own suffering, the suffering of others, the suffering of the world. And the Buddha’s teaching is, some would think that, has to be tested in terms of its therapeutic effectiveness. Not to be tested in terms as to whether it is an accurate description of reality or not.
  • I honestly don’t think the Buddha was interested in the nature of reality. The Buddha was interested in understanding suffering. In opening one’s heart and one’s mind to the suffering of the world.
  • we have a sense of the Buddha as someone who is very much concerned with how we optimize the quality of our life here and now.
  • In other words, the heart of the practice lies with how we are living from moment to moment in the actual world, with what we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, are the people, language, our own inner psychology, and the great challenges that face the human race as a whole.
  • dualism, I think, is quite at odds with what the Buddha had in mind. And I think it is also very difficult to square with how we actually understand the nature of the world in which we live. I don’t think there are two separate things, one material and one spiritual, that in some weird way, sort of co-exist. I feel that whatever the stuff of the universe is, it is of one nature.
  • I think an agnostic position is a very very healthy one to hold, and I think for myself agnosticism was like finding an enormous breathing space out of the constrictions of doctrine and dogma basically, that I was free now to admit what I didn’t know and to say, “I just don’t know,” without having to lock onto any particular view.
  • all belief is agnostic. In other words, we adopt these ideas, and yet we need to have the humility to recognize that although we believe in them, we don’t actually know. Now that, unfortunately, is one of the weaknesses of agnosticism because it is really, when it comes down to it, just a rather honest way of acknowledging the limitations of human knowledge.
  • I think it’s extremely unlikely that rebirth is going to happen. So unlikely, in fact, that it’s probably quite a good idea just to put that idea just out of circulation all together. In other words to say, “Frankly, I don’t believe there is rebirth.” Notice I’ve used the word believe. I don’t believe—I am not saying I don’t know, but I don’t believe there is rebirth. So when I say I don’t believe there is rebirth that is not actually denying the more basic point of agnosticism, which is I don’t really know whether there is really rebirth or not, but I don’t believe there is.
  • I call it ironic atheism. I think the Buddha was not a devout atheist. The Buddha simply did not have any time for the very concept or the language of God, and he dismissed it, really, as just yet another example of how human beings can dream up of all sorts of things, and he put it to one side.

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Is There A Conflict Between Science And Religion? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

• Is There A Conflict Between Science And Religion? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

  • Given quantum indeterminacy, at least according to Plantinga, we have no grounds for saying that miracles are impossible, even if we do have good grounds for thinking them highly unlikely.
  • Plantinga does have a stronger claim in mind though. He thinks that the truth of theism — which he explains thus: "the thought that there is such a person as God: a personal agent who has created the world and is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good" — gives science the foundation it needs. In the absence of such a benevolent source of meaning, why suppose there is enough regularity or order in the world for the world to be knowable by us at all?
  • his reasoning can be summed up this way: from a naturalistic point of view, we have every reason to doubt that our cognitive faculties are reliable. Therefore we can't seriously believe naturalism. For to believe it would be to have grounds for doubting the reliability of our own inclinations to believe it.
  • our cognitive faculties have evolved to maximize our fitness, not to represent the world accurately.
  • Rationality is not a lock-step set of rules and regulations stipulating what we may and may not think. It is, rather, the appreciation of the way in which our interests, knowledge, evidence, and concerns, our sense of "other things being equal," shape what is likely, what is pertinent, what is useful, and what matters.
  • We don't need God to be rational and reasonable. Indeed, we couldn't make sense of God, or anything else — we couldn't make sense of "making sense" — if we were not sensitive to reasons and to the difference between good explanations and bad ones. Nor could a scientific theory — the theory of evolution, for example — give us evidence that we were not rational. Rationality, in the relevant sense, is presupposed by the way we live, not something for which we need to argue.

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A Night in Arzamas - Jordan Smith - The American Interest Magazine

• A Night in Arzamas - Jordan Smith - The American Interest Magazine
  tags: philosophy religion
  • Is there any meaning in my life that will not be destroyed by my inevitably approaching death?
  • But in 1973, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker published The Denial of Death. In it, Becker argued that the fear of death “haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.” Man’s subconscious fear of death and desire to transcend its inevitability leads him to create or achieve something “heroic”, so that the immortality of that creation or act might redeem the mortality of its maker. Fear of death is universal, and denial of it is equally cross-cultural.
  • Nearly every individual secretly believes himself exempt from the rules of mortality that govern all living creatures.
  • Becker also echoes Tolstoy in his description of what he calls the paradox of existence: “the ever-present fear of death in the normal biological functioning of our instinct of self-preservation, as well as our utter obliviousness to this fear in our conscious life.” This is what Becker means by the denial of death.
  • Terror Management Theory (TMT)
  • Kubler-Ross’s On Death and Dying strikingly confirms the insights of Ivan Ilych. Tolstoy had in effect provided a fictional representation of the Kubler-Ross model, which was based on more than 200 patients with terminal illnesses similar to Ilych’s. Tolstoy “anticipat[es] freely and indirectly the revelations of the medical analyst”,
  • Stanford psychoanalyst Irvin Yalom, who in the late 1970s developed an approach known as existential psychotherapy. This method, based on the idea that individuals’ inner conflicts frequently occur due to confrontations with facts of existence,
  • The inevitability of death is only one of these conflicts in Yalom’s framework—the others being freedom and the burden of responsibility it confers, isolation, and meaninglessness
  • According to Yalom, humans develop a false sense of specialness as a defense against the certainty of death. “[D]eep, deep down, each of us believes, as does Ivan Ilych, that the rule of mortality applies to others but certainly not to ourselves.”
  • Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death (2008). There he argues that death anxiety is lessened by the sense that one has lived a full, meaningful life. Ilych “is dying so badly because he has lived so badly”, he writes (emphasis in original). Yalom argues that individuals usually require a climactic or irreversible experience to be awakened to the finitude of existence.
  • eading The Death of Ivan Ilych causes profound, somber reflection; the novelist Zadie Smith wrote, “Every time I read it, I find my world put under an intense, unforgiving microscope.”

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New Statesman - All machine and no ghost?

• New Statesman - All machine and no ghost?
  tags:  philosophy_of_consciousness
  • The eliminativist position attempts to dissolve the problem of explaining consciousness simply by declaring that there isn't any: there is no such thing - no seeing, hearing, thinking, and so on. There is just blank matter; the impression that we are conscious is an illusion.
  • More subtly, there are many who insist that consciousness just reduces to brain states - a pang of regret, say, is just a surge of chemicals across a synapse.
  • the brain processes held to constitute conscious experience consist of physical events that can exist in the absence of consciousness
  • Dualism may be of substances, properties, or even whole universes, but its thrust is that the conscious mind is a thing apart from, and irreducible to, anything that goes on in the body.
  • the idealist swooshes in: ladies and gentlemen, there is nothing but mind! There is no problem of interaction with matter because matter is mere illusion - we merely hallucinate brains. The universe is just one vast spirit, or perhaps a population of the same, consisting of nothing but free-floating consciousness, unencumbered and serene.
  • Perhaps all matter has its mental aspects or moments, its local injection of consciousness. Thus we have pan­psychism: even the lowliest of material things has a streak of sentience running through it, like veins in marble. Not just parcels of organic matter, such as lizards and worms, but also plants and bacteria and water molecules and even electrons.
  • Consciousness must have evolved from matter somehow but nothing we could contrive or imagine seemed to offer the faintest hope for explanation. Hence, it occurred to me that the problem might lie not in nature but in ourselves: we just don't have the faculties of comprehension that would enable us to remove the sense of mystery. Ontologically, matter and consciousness are woven intelligibly together but epistemologically we are precluded from seeing how.
  • Latterly, I have come to think that mystery is quite pervasive, even in the hardest of sciences. Physics is a hotbed of mystery: space, time, matter and motion - none of it is free of mysterious elements. The puzzles of quantum theory are just a symptom of this widespread lack of understanding (I discuss this in my latest book, Basic Structures of Reality). The human intellect grasps the natural world obliquely and glancingly, using mathematics to construct abstract representations of concrete phenomena, but what the ultimate nature of things really is remains obscure and hidden.
  • Palaeoanthropologists have taught us that the human brain gradually evolved from ancestral brains, particularly in concert with practical toolmaking, centring on the anatomy of the human hand. This history shaped and constrained the form of intelligence now housed in our skulls (as the lifestyle of other species form their set of cognitive skills). What chance is there that an intelligence geared to making stone tools and grounded in the contingent peculiarities of the human hand can aspire to uncover all the mysteries of the universe? Can omniscience spring from an opposable thumb? It seems unlikely, so why presume that the mysteries of consciousness will be revealed to a thumb-shaped brain like ours?
  • The "mysterianism" I advocate is really nothing more than the acknowledgment that human intelligence is a local, contingent, temporal, practical and expendable feature of life on earth - an incremental adaptation based on earlier forms of intelligence that no one would regard as faintly omniscient. The current state of the philosophy of mind, from my point of view, is just a reflection of one evolutionary time-slice of a particular bipedal species on a particular humid planet at this fleeting moment in cosmic history - as is everything else about the human animal. There is more ignorance in it than knowledge.

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