I'm confused by yogacara's argument against mind having material organ

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rskir
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I'm confused by yogacara's argument against mind having material organ

Post by rskir »

cheng wei shi lun's argument against mind having bodily organs is: if the Heart can be the body organ of mind (sixth consciousness), then mind can only understand the Present (like the eye can only see what it sees Now) and cannot recall the past , or thinking about the future, so the indriya of mind is manas rather than the heart (or brain), but modern science has discovered organs related to memory such as the hippocampus, Even if the brain receives the information from the five senses and generate a mind/Vijñāna, I don't think it conflicts with Buddhist teachings. , what do you think?
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Tao
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Re: I'm confused by yogacara's argument against mind having material organ

Post by Tao »

>Even if the brain receives the information from the five senses and generate a mind/Vijñāna, I don't think it conflicts with Buddhist teachings. , what do you think?

I dont think it does either.

But the problem is how? how can matter (I asume you talk about physical five senses) generate mind/qualia? We dont have any clue at all about it... so it maybe or maybe not. It's not obvious... just a belief from materialism.
rskir
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Re: I'm confused by yogacara's argument against mind having material organ

Post by rskir »

Tao wrote: Wed Aug 17, 2022 7:32 am >Even if the brain receives the information from the five senses and generate a mind/Vijñāna, I don't think it conflicts with Buddhist teachings. , what do you think?

I dont think it does either.

But the problem is how? how can matter (I asume you talk about physical five senses) generate mind/qualia? We dont have any clue at all about it... so it maybe or maybe not. It's not obvious... just a belief from materialism.
Tao wrote: Wed Aug 17, 2022 7:32 am >Even if the brain receives the information from the five senses and generate a mind/Vijñāna, I don't think it conflicts with Buddhist teachings. , what do you think?

I dont think it does either.

But the problem is how? how can matter (I asume you talk about physical five senses) generate mind/qualia? We dont have any clue at all about it... so it maybe or maybe not. It's not obvious... just a belief from materialism.
As far as I know the buddhist teaching that the root(organ) contact with rupa to Raise Vijnāna, I don't think it's materialism
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FromTheEarth
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Re: I'm confused by yogacara's argument against mind having material organ

Post by FromTheEarth »

I wonder if you could kindly pin down the specific paragraphs so that the discussion could be more textually based.

My initial hunch is that the whole debate is based on a perceptual model of consciousness/mental activities. I said this mainly because you mentioned "like the eye can only see what it sees Now." So here is how I understand the argument based on what you said:
The five sensory organs only have contact with the presently perceived/perceivable physical reality. If one were to think that (1) the sixth consciousness must also have an organ, and (2) the organ is physical—just as the five sensory organs—then one may infer that the organ for the six consciousness must be similar to the other five organs in key aspects. But any physical organ is confined to the present, as we find in the case of the five sensory organs. Therefore, any past/future-directed mental activities are impossible. But this is absurd. Something must go wrong in the assumptions.

If this is a fair characterization of the argument, I suppose one can make different things out of it:
(1) First, one can deny the perceptual model of (the sixth) consciousness. This may be painful to the Yogacara orthodoxy, but such a denial does not lead to the denial of the central claims of Yogacara. Even if the above argument is a bad one (based on a wrong model of the mind) and fails to establish the existence of a distinct, sixth, immaterial organ, one may still find alternative arguments in support of the central claims of Yogacara (consciousness-only, etc.).
(2) Second, one may reject the above argument by embracing alternative definitions of memory and deliberation. Notably, one may reject the idea that to memorize is to somehow mentally access the past itself (likewise, to deliberate about the future is not to somehow mentally access the future). That is, one may argue that to memorize or to deliberate is nothing but to engage the presently stored and accessed information.
I think this is more consistent with the contemporary view. The eye only sees what is now. The brain only engages what is presently accessible to it. But we do not need some further immaterial organ to account for memory or deliberation about the future. Because both activities are, in fact, confined to the present. Though we often think we are accessing the past or the future in memorizing or deliberating, we are not.
To think this way also does not commit you to the falsity of the central Yogacara claims, either (or even the reality of an immaterial manas). But it gives you a way to reject the above argument, and to accommodate some of our more up-to-date understanding of these matters.

(2) is different from (1). Here, one may accept that to think, memorize, or deliberate is still like (quasi-)perceiving something (say, imageries of past events). But to do so does not involve anything that is beyond the present.

(3) More interestingly, one may read the above argument as counter to the perceptual model of how the sixth consciousness works. If the sixth consciousness works exactly as the first five, then it must have a physical organ and the organ must work just as the five sensory organs do. But you then run into the troubles (memory, etc.). So we should reject the view that the sixth consciousness works exactly as the first five. If it were to have an organ, that organ must be drastically different from the five sensory organs.
Now, it is doubtful that the ancient Buddhists had the idea of a physical organ capable of holding complex informational states (or that we should expect them to do so). So here we seem to find a jump. From that the sixth organ must be different from the first five, one infer, without further justification, that the difference lies in their (im)materiality. This would read as an illegit argumentative move for us, but it seemed reasonable in the ancient context.
And, here, we can supply further arguments to fill in the missing gap (following the contemporary pan-psychists) by arguing that the any physical entities are not sufficient for supplying us with the first personal phenomenal consciousness. Although there is a gap, it can be filled in.
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