"evidence that consciousness continues after clinical death"

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PadmaVonSamba
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Re: "evidence that consciousness continues after clinical death"

Post by PadmaVonSamba »

Ardha wrote: Sun Mar 14, 2021 9:21 pm Except it is the brain, you say the brain doesn't know but it does do the knowing and the remembering. There is plenty of evidence to substantiate this. Awareness as far as I know is similar to power for an electrical appliance.
well, we’ll see.
I think that there is only scientific evidence that information is stored in the brain, and that processes involving chemical reactions to sensory input occur in the brain. A good analogy would be a video recorder. The video recorder isn’t aware of what it is recording. It might have the ability to respond to light and distance with automatic exposure and autofocus. It may have face recognition software. But it doesn’t “know” anything.

Buddhist theory doesn’t dispute the role of the physical brain insofar as providing that which is experienced.
The argument is simply that whatever is experienced is not the experiencer. If the brain were the experiencer, it would experience things as a brain, wouldn’t it? Your experience would be that of the brain itself, perched as it were, inside of a dark room on top of a skeleton that is wearing a meat suit.
But awareness does not occur before the physical body or after it, it's merely a product of such a thing.
Buddhist theory would argue that it is only the interaction of awareness with objects of awareness that occurs.

Awareness itself doesn’t “occur”, meaning that it is not something that either arises nor subsides. It’s like space in that respect. The only thing that arises and subsides is awareness’s interaction with objects of awareness, in the same way that space is the same regardless of whether it is either left empty or filled up with clutter.

And in the same analogy, just as space is neither expanded nor diminished by being filled or left empty, awareness itself is not altered by whether the objects of awareness are many or few, where they are imaginary hallucinations or ‘actual’ things, whether dreams, memories, abstract theories, etc.

Yes, it is true that the physical brain is required for the interaction of awareness and its objects to occur. But to determine that the physical brain produces awareness, awareness itself would have to have specific characteristics, just as the sound coming from a musical instrument has specific characteristics.

The problem with that is, any characteristic that can be identified is thus an object of awareness, and therefore cannot be the awareness that is aware of it.
In other words, the moment that you say “this thing here, produced by the brain, is awareness”, it ceases to be awareness, because it is something you are aware of. And if you are aware of it, then it isn’t awareness. It’s not what is observing. It is what is being observed.

This might be a “catch-22” or some kind of slight-of-hand logic trick. Or, it might be a profound level of 3,000 year old Indian philosophy that 21st century material science is only barely catching up to. Take your pick!

I think, perhaps, what scientists refer to as awareness is not what Buddhism refers to as awareness.
EMPTIFUL.
An inward outlook produces outward insight.
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