Texts that destroy ""scientific" materialism

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boda
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Re: Texts that destroy ""scientific" materialism

Post by boda »

Malcolm wrote:
boda wrote:
Wayfarer wrote:... the point about the modern scientific materialism of the sort preached by Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Hawkings, is that they want to put science in the place of religion. It has been described as the 'religion of scientism'.
Anything that offers purpose and meaning can take the place of religion, so yes of course science could adequately fill that role. What you don't seem to appreciate is that atheists such as Dawkins are essentially opposed to the irrationality that can result from the inability to separate "hard facts," as Bikkhu Bodhi puts it, from other spheres of value. They are opposed to 'drinking the Kool-Aid', to put it more colloquially, and yet your point seems to suggest that they are merely drinking a different brand of sugar water. If that is your point point then you are fundementally mistaken.
They are most definitely drinking a brand of sugar water.
No, not in the way the term suggests, which is essentially a lack of ability. The inability to separate or compartmentalize types of values, basically, such as the broad distinction between religious values and scientific values.

It is utterly ridiculous, for example, to suggest that someone like Dawkins would drink cyanide, or fly a jetliner into a building of civilians, at the request of a fellow scientist, merely out of deference to their authority.

The scientific community is not immune fallacies of authority of course, but they are regarded as mistakes or bad science, and not viewed as a virtue of faith.
boda
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Re: Texts that destroy ""scientific" materialism

Post by boda »

Wayfarer wrote:By definition, scientific empiricism will only consider data from the sensory domain (a.k.a. domain of nama-rupa), and quantitative analysis thereof, and mathematical theories which can be shown to account for the observed phenomena. That's it. But it's not even 'materialism' any more...
It's not necessarily materialism to begin with. It doesn't matter if a scientists believes in philosophical materialism or not, they can only measure what is measurable. That's it indeed.
boda
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Re: Texts that destroy ""scientific" materialism

Post by boda »

monktastic wrote:
boda wrote:
Wayfarer wrote:... the point about the modern scientific materialism of the sort preached by Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Hawkings, is that they want to put science in the place of religion. It has been described as the 'religion of scientism'.
Anything that offers purpose and meaning can take the place of religion, so yes of course science could adequately fill that role. What you don't seem to appreciate is that atheists such as Dawkins are essentially opposed to the irrationality that can result from the inability to separate "hard facts," as Bikkhu Bodhi puts it, from other spheres of value. They are opposed to 'drinking the Kool-Aid', to put it more colloquially, and yet your point seems to suggest that they are merely drinking a different brand of sugar water. If that is your point point then you are fundementally mistaken.
Dawkins & co are certainly espousing a metaphysics without recognizing the assumptions that underlie it, and why they're not actually givens. This is a particular brand of Kool Aid (the "materiality is all and everything" brand), and it stems from being unable to recognize the sheer stuff of mind. It's why guys like Dennett and Graziano can, with straight faces, deny that there's such a phenomenon as conscious experience at all.
From a very brief google search just now that appears to be a false claim, that Dennett denies the phenomenon of conscious experience. Perhaps you could substantiate that claim.
boda
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Re: Texts that destroy ""scientific" materialism

Post by boda »

monktastic wrote:Hypothesis: in any given dream, mind will try to explain its own felt existence in terms of the contents of that dream. In this dream, those contents just happen to be matter and energy. To the extent it insists on doing this, it is drinking Kool Aid. If only it would just look back in the other direction, from whence it came....
To the extent it lacks the ability to make any other approach, it's drinking the Kool-Aid.
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treehuggingoctopus
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Re: Texts that destroy ""scientific" materialism

Post by treehuggingoctopus »

boda wrote:From a very brief google search just now that appears to be a false claim, that Dennett denies the phenomenon of conscious experience. Perhaps you could substantiate that claim.
Take it up with Searle:
I think we all really have conscious states. To remind everyone of this fact I asked my readers to perform the small experiment of pinching the left forearm with the right hand to produce a small pain. The pain has a certain sort of qualitative feeling to it, and such qualitative feelings are typical of the various sorts of conscious events that form the content of our waking and dreaming lives. To make explicit the differences between conscious events and, for example, mountains and molecules, I said consciousness has a first-person or subjective ontology. By that I mean that conscious states only exist when experienced by a subject and they exist only from the first-person point of view of that subject.
Such events are the data which a theory of consciousness is supposed to explain. In my account of consciousness I start with the data; Dennett denies the existence of the data. To put it as clearly as I can: in his book, Consciousness Explained, Dennett denies the existence of consciousness. He continues to use the word, but he means something different by it. For him, it refers only to third-person phenomena, not to the first-person conscious feelings and experiences we all have. For Dennett there is no difference between us humans and complex zombies who lack any inner feelings, because we are all just complex zombies.
The rest here:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/12 ... -exchange/
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Notre gratitude est infinie.
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monktastic
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Re: Texts that destroy ""scientific" materialism

Post by monktastic »

boda wrote:
monktastic wrote:Hypothesis: in any given dream, mind will try to explain its own felt existence in terms of the contents of that dream. In this dream, those contents just happen to be matter and energy. To the extent it insists on doing this, it is drinking Kool Aid. If only it would just look back in the other direction, from whence it came....
To the extent it lacks the ability to make any other approach, it's drinking the Kool-Aid.
Insisting that a certain approach is the only possible one -- full stop -- is functionally equivalent to lacking the ability to make any other approach. My own reading of Dawkins, Dennett, and Graziano in particular puts them in this camp.
This undistracted state of ordinary mind
Is the meditation.
One will understand it in due course.

--Gampopa
Malcolm
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Re: Texts that destroy ""scientific" materialism

Post by Malcolm »

boda wrote:
From a very brief google search just now that appears to be a false claim, that Dennett denies the phenomenon of conscious experience. Perhaps you could substantiate that claim.
`We're all zombies. Nobody is conscious' (Dennett 1991, p. 406)
Dawkins, Dennet, et all, believe that the universe and everything in its functionally inert and nonsentient.
boda
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Re: Texts that destroy ""scientific" materialism

Post by boda »

monktastic wrote:
boda wrote:
monktastic wrote:Hypothesis: in any given dream, mind will try to explain its own felt existence in terms of the contents of that dream. In this dream, those contents just happen to be matter and energy. To the extent it insists on doing this, it is drinking Kool Aid. If only it would just look back in the other direction, from whence it came....
To the extent it lacks the ability to make any other approach, it's drinking the Kool-Aid.
Insisting that a certain approach is the only possible one -- full stop -- is functionally equivalent to lacking the ability to make any other approach. My own reading of Dawkins, Dennett, and Graziano in particular puts them in this camp.
Dawkins for one, being a scientist, explicitly refers to his ideas on the subject as theory, and even goes so far as stating that he's not 100% sure that God doesn't exists. So by your own criteria, such as it is, he doesn't fall into the drinking the Kool-Aid camp.

Science doesn't make "full stop" claims. If it does it's not science. Religion makes full stop claims. It has to make full stop claims.
boda
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Re: Texts that destroy ""scientific" materialism

Post by boda »

Malcolm wrote:
boda wrote:
From a very brief google search just now that appears to be a false claim, that Dennett denies the phenomenon of conscious experience. Perhaps you could substantiate that claim.
`We're all zombies. Nobody is conscious' (Dennett 1991, p. 406)
Dawkins, Dennet, et all, believe that the universe and everything in its functionally inert and nonsentient.
In a footnote Dennett states: "It would be an act of desperate intellectual dishonesty to quote this assertion out of context!" :tongue:
boda
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Re: Texts that destroy ""scientific" materialism

Post by boda »

treehuggingoctopus wrote:
boda wrote:From a very brief google search just now that appears to be a false claim, that Dennett denies the phenomenon of conscious experience. Perhaps you could substantiate that claim.
Take it up with Searle:
I think we all really have conscious states. To remind everyone of this fact I asked my readers to perform the small experiment of pinching the left forearm with the right hand to produce a small pain. The pain has a certain sort of qualitative feeling to it, and such qualitative feelings are typical of the various sorts of conscious events that form the content of our waking and dreaming lives. To make explicit the differences between conscious events and, for example, mountains and molecules, I said consciousness has a first-person or subjective ontology. By that I mean that conscious states only exist when experienced by a subject and they exist only from the first-person point of view of that subject.
Such events are the data which a theory of consciousness is supposed to explain. In my account of consciousness I start with the data; Dennett denies the existence of the data. To put it as clearly as I can: in his book, Consciousness Explained, Dennett denies the existence of consciousness. He continues to use the word, but he means something different by it. For him, it refers only to third-person phenomena, not to the first-person conscious feelings and experiences we all have. For Dennett there is no difference between us humans and complex zombies who lack any inner feelings, because we are all just complex zombies.
The rest here:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/12 ... -exchange/
I don't believe Searle will respond. And wouldn't Dennett be a better candidate? Anyway, the wiki article includes a portion where Searle asserts: "where consciousness is concerned, the existence of the appearance is the reality." This in response to Dennett's claim that subjective consciousness is illusion, I believe. It makes me think of the waves you can see in the distance over a hot landscape. Are they real or illusions?
Last edited by boda on Thu Jul 07, 2016 8:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Malcolm
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Re: Texts that destroy ""scientific" materialism

Post by Malcolm »

boda wrote:
Malcolm wrote:
boda wrote:
From a very brief google search just now that appears to be a false claim, that Dennett denies the phenomenon of conscious experience. Perhaps you could substantiate that claim.
`We're all zombies. Nobody is conscious' (Dennett 1991, p. 406)
Dawkins, Dennet, et all, believe that the universe and everything in its functionally inert and nonsentient.
In a footnote Dennett states: "It would be an act of desperate intellectual dishonesty to quote this assertion out of context!" :tongue:
He absolutely denies there is subjective experience.
"To put it as clearly as I can: in his book, Consciousness Explained, Dennett denies the existence of consciousness. He continues to use the word, but he means something different by it. For him, it refers only to third-person phenomena, not to the first-person conscious feelings and experiences we all have.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/12 ... -exchange/
boda
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Re: Texts that destroy ""scientific" materialism

Post by boda »

Malcolm wrote:He [Dennett] absolutely denies there is subjective experience.
Am I real or an illusion?
Malcolm
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Re: Texts that destroy ""scientific" materialism

Post by Malcolm »

boda wrote:
Malcolm wrote:He [Dennett] absolutely denies there is subjective experience.
Am I real or an illusion?
Only you can answer that question for yourself.
boda
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Re: Texts that destroy ""scientific" materialism

Post by boda »

Malcolm wrote:
boda wrote:
Malcolm wrote:He [Dennett] absolutely denies there is subjective experience.
Am I real or an illusion?
Only you can answer that question for yourself.
What difference does it make?

Dennett has subjective experiences. What difference does it matter if he describes them as real or illusion? Indeed it would seem more Buddhist if he described them as illusion, which he apparently does.
Malcolm
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Re: Texts that destroy ""scientific" materialism

Post by Malcolm »

boda wrote:
Malcolm wrote:
boda wrote:
Am I real or an illusion?
Only you can answer that question for yourself.
What difference does it make?

Dennett has subjective experiences. What difference does it matter if he describes them as real or illusion? Indeed it would seem more Buddhist if he described them as illusion, which he apparently does.
He accounts for them by recourse to a purely mechanical model of physical events, which are not themselves illusory, but are physical and irreducible facts.
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dzogchungpa
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Re: Texts that destroy ""scientific" materialism

Post by dzogchungpa »

boda wrote:Religion makes full stop claims. It has to make full stop claims.
Is this a full stop claim?
There is not only nothingness because there is always, and always can manifest. - Thinley Norbu Rinpoche
boda
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Re: Texts that destroy ""scientific" materialism

Post by boda »

Malcolm wrote:
boda wrote:
Malcolm wrote:
Only you can answer that question for yourself.
What difference does it make?

Dennett has subjective experiences. What difference does it matter if he describes them as real or illusion? Indeed it would seem more Buddhist if he described them as illusion, which he apparently does.
He accounts for them by recourse to a purely mechanical model of physical events, which are not themselves illusory, but are physical and irreducible facts.
So what's wrong with that? And who are you to judge anyway, you can't even tell if I'm real or an illusion.
boda
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Re: Texts that destroy ""scientific" materialism

Post by boda »

dzogchungpa wrote:
boda wrote:Religion makes full stop claims. It has to make full stop claims.
Is this a full stop claim?
No, actually, but I haven't seen anything to convince me otherwise.
Malcolm
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Re: Texts that destroy ""scientific" materialism

Post by Malcolm »

boda wrote:
Malcolm wrote:
boda wrote:
What difference does it make?

Dennett has subjective experiences. What difference does it matter if he describes them as real or illusion? Indeed it would seem more Buddhist if he described them as illusion, which he apparently does.
He accounts for them by recourse to a purely mechanical model of physical events, which are not themselves illusory, but are physical and irreducible facts.
So what's wrong with that?
There is nothing "wrong" with it, apart from that fact that is a wrong view (mithya-dṛṣṭiḥ).
boda
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Re: Texts that destroy ""scientific" materialism

Post by boda »

Malcolm wrote:
boda wrote:
Malcolm wrote:
He accounts for them by recourse to a purely mechanical model of physical events, which are not themselves illusory, but are physical and irreducible facts.
So what's wrong with that?
There is nothing "wrong" with it, apart from that fact that is a wrong view (mithya-dṛṣṭiḥ).
How do you know it's wrong? Again, you don't even know if I'm real or an illusion.
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