Some doubts regarding rebirth

[PadmaVonSamba]

If some assert mind is an emergent property of matter, this is the annihilationist view for the simple fact that when that material basis ceases, that mind is annihilated. Likewise a permanent consciousness is utterly divorced from a material basis, since matter is obviously impermanent, and this is the eternalist view. They are not seeing how things are.

Well put.

Furthermore, if consciousness were produced by matter (let’s say cells, since we are talking about living beings), since those cells die off, one would need to explain how the consciousness moves from the dead cell to a new, living cell. Even if it were theorized that consciousness is passed through osmosis, cell division, there’s no appreciable difference between asserting that and asserting rebirth in the Buddhist sense, not to mention the fact that since there are millions of cells dying and new ones forming all of the time, why wouldn’t a being thus be constantly plagued by millions of simultaneous consciousnesses? And why wouldn’t any cell or atom in possession of consciousness identify as a cell or atom? Why wouldn’t the billions of cells in the human body see themselves collectively as a very large gathering rather than as a single human being, since they themselves could only go by their own subjective experiences? And if one rejects the gathering scenario, and proposes that all the cells collectively create one consciousness, then why would a being not lose part of their consciousness by losing an arm or leg, or simply by bleeding? When you poop, would you be pooping out dead consciousness?

Lastly, how can matter produce something which is not matter? Even the sound produced by a musical instrument is only ‘sound’ because the mind interprets vibrating air molecules as ‘sound’. It’s the mind which converts physical matter into personal experience, and not the other way around.

[LolCat]

If some assert mind is an emergent property of matter, this is the annihilationist view for the simple fact that when that material basis ceases, that mind is annihilated. Likewise a permanent consciousness is utterly divorced from a material basis, since matter is obviously impermanent, and this is the eternalist view. They are not seeing how things are.

Well put.

Furthermore, if consciousness were produced by matter (let’s say cells, since we are talking about living beings), since those cells die off, one would need to explain how the consciousness moves from the dead cell to a new, living cell. Even if it were theorized that consciousness is passed through osmosis, cell division, there’s no appreciable difference between asserting that and asserting rebirth in the Buddhist sense, not to mention the fact that since there are millions of cells dying and new ones forming all of the time, why wouldn’t a being thus be constantly plagued by millions of simultaneous consciousnesses? And why wouldn’t any cell or atom in possession of consciousness identify as a cell or atom? Why wouldn’t the billions of cells in the human body see themselves collectively as a very large gathering rather than as a single human being, since they themselves could only go by their own subjective experiences? And if one rejects the gathering scenario, and proposes that all the cells collectively create one consciousness, then why would a being not lose part of their consciousness by losing an arm or leg, or simply by bleeding? When you poop, would you be pooping out dead consciousness?

Lastly, how can matter produce something which is not matter? Even the sound produced by a musical instrument is only ‘sound’ because the mind interprets vibrating air molecules as ‘sound’. It’s the mind which converts physical matter into personal experience, and not the other way around.

What is meant by mind here, and how does it interact matter? Not trying to argue a different point, I am just trying to understand better.

[PadmaVonSamba]

What is meant by mind here, and how does it interact matter? Not trying to argue a different point, I am just trying to understand better.

If someone says ‘I don’t mind’ that means it’s okay. That’s good.
If someone says ‘I don’t matter’ it means they are depressed. That’s not so good.

[Malcolm]

What is meant by mind here, and how does it interact matter? Not trying to argue a different point, I am just trying to understand better.

A mind is a series of moments of clarity and knowing. That’s it. It doesn’t need to be anything more.

It interacts with matter through the five physical sense organs.

[undefineable]

These conversations always seem to carry on at crossed purposes. Something a lot of people miss is that when consciousness and awareness are being discussed independently of any notion of souls or spirits, the whole question of what grounds such basic things is, or should be, moot to begin with - The central subject of that discussion is your own experience of consciousness/awareness **and nothing else**. Asking where it comes from, be it souls, brains, or whatever else, is missing the point if you're just trying to look at it. Granted, it isn't the easiest thing to look closely at the experience of looking closely, but the clarification and appreciation of consciousness or awareness is generally a by-product of meditation, rather than its object, aim, or (still less) an 'end in itself'.

So you can say that consciousness, awareness, conscious awareness, or whatever other form of words you might make is all just electrical signals, astral bodies, figments of God's omnipotent imagination, the Tathagatagarbha, or anything else anyone ever thought of in relation to the nature of the mind, but that only tells people what processes you believe support the phenomenon. It doesn't say anything about what it is in itself - what it feels like, and how it pieces together. The bare, self-confirming presence of first-person experience is not a 'theory of awareness', and doesn't need one - at this stage at least.

In objection to such a minimalist, empirical approach, you might say that you can only be conscious of something in particular, rather than simply conscious, and that therefore all awareness is purely computational. This goes back to the earlier discussion about the potential computation of consciousness or rebirth - By definition, the actual beholding of a series of object consciousness states (as opposed to whatever might characterise the experience of those states) cannot be computed. Some sort of computation, broadly defined, may be (and of course is) a necessary cause and condition for becoming aware of something, but the faculty of awareness itself obviously isn't made up of the elements that get 'computed' into the supply of inner objects that occupy its awareness. It's not a comp-lex thing - If you appreciate this and also accept that what people call the self *is* too complex to survive death, it becomes easier to see the plausibility of a more discontinuous form of rebirth.

[undefineable]

But as for an opinion, awareness and awareness-of as illusory experience generated on the basis of evolutionary advantage seems fine to me.

That's the thing with opinions - Everyone who takes ideas seriously, along with most who don't, has some emotional need to reach some particular conclusion, and grasps at the barest sign of a hint that points in the direction of an opinion they might want to hold. Even when this hint is contradicted by another hint that only appears later on, but points in the opposite direction to the first one, this human need for closure, even a sense of certainty, only tightens its grip.

Much as I may be as guilty, on occasion, as anyone else of maligning the physicalist position as congenitally blind (which is hardly likely to win converts in this individualist era), not only are other positions still just opinions, but also, there's a case to be made that "weaker physicalist" positions (at least) are often dismissed unfairly - since it's only full-on materialism that denies outright the existence of conscious awareness as conscious awareness. {And of course there are those thinkers who go further and deny any reality to conscious awareness - although it's tempting to wonder if they're being completely genuine or trying to "strike a pose"...}

So in relation to the "weaker" of those positions that appear to place consciousness on a pedestal , a 'nothing special' position (in relation to consciousness) might sometimes amount to little more than a way of dismissing them as merely pedantic.

Yes, it's fair to call 'category error' (or Animism - as Padma pointed out earlier) if someone claims that consciousness IS an electrical process or somesuch, just as (conversely) it would be fair to do the same if someone else claimed (for example) that music is simply an emotional experience that just happens to occur in response to certain sounds. But simply claiming that x originates directly from y, where the exact relationship is not immediately obvious beyond 'where there is obviously y there is always x', seems more slap-dash than outright wrong. Which might be expected if you don't feel there's anything "special" going on.

Taking the obvious example of 'weaker pedestal positions', orthodox Buddhist stances on consciousness do not go as far as to claim that a substrate of the same category ('soul') is needed to allow for its presence. So if a Buddhist or non-Buddhist accepts that conscious awareness (or even subconscious awareness - about which Buddhists will often debate..) is self-evident, *without* positing a support structure of a related nature that necessarily underlies that awareness (which in any case invites infinite regress), then the question of how such awareness is supported (whether as an 'emergent property' of the brain, as the divinely ordained expression of a soul, or as something more like a free-floating radio signal tied to something subtler, etc. etc.) is only truly essential to the question of whether anything of us survives death.

Even in this respect, you might suggest (if you wanted to get really speculative/'prapanca') that an awareness-extruding brain somehow uploads its old awareness (along with 'karmic traces') to a "subtle body" (which of course is part of an old Indian conception still found in Tibetan Buddhism) at death - converting the whole thing in some way into some kind of quantum-type information that is then relayed to one of whichever new zygotes are compatible enough to attract it... Thankfully, Buddhism as a whole doesn't tie adherents down to unfalsifiable theorising of this kind - although maybe it's worth a thought for the purposes of the discussion..

I have my own biases though - I'm not trying to reconcile opposing views or anything so naïve. I'd love to think I could get away, post-mortem, with the stuff I've done to myself (really trying to avoid using another word beginning with 's' here - but don't wanna be judgemental or mess up my progress with the fourth precept XD ...). But even without any grasp at all of Buddhist insights (of which I'm fast losing what little I might once have had), that would sound a lot like wishful thinking - at least to me.

One remaining question is whether Buddhism itself treats consciousness or awareness as 'anything special'. Some Buddhists do and some don't, it usually seems, but since the Buddhadharma as a whole focuses so much on its concerns (craving etc.) as well as its nature ('nature of mind' and so on), it's probably fair to say that taking the whole 'experiential' thing seriously is normally seen as a good motivator - at least to begin with in most cases.

[LolCat]

What is meant by mind here, and how does it interact matter? Not trying to argue a different point, I am just trying to understand better.

A mind is a series of moments of clarity and knowing. That’s it. It doesn’t need to be anything more.

It interacts with matter through the five physical sense organs.

Thank you for the explanation!

[PadmaVonSamba]

One of the very clever points that is made by the advaida-vedanta-ists is that anything that you can point to about consciousness, any experience or feeling or perception, isn’t consciousness, it’s an object of consciousness.

And whether one subscribes to that school or not (and most Buddhists do not), this is exactly why consciousness/awareness doesn’t fall into any of the usual analytical categories. It can be discussed hypothetically or theoretically (and as a topic of discussion it is an object) but what differentiates it is that while everything else may be observed, consciousness can only be the observer.

And while whatever is observed may need beginning and ending points, the “observer” consciousness does not. This isn’t just some dogmatic “because god says so” statement. If one really contemplates this and doesn’t just toss it around one’s thoughts for 45 seconds, the validity of that statement will become obvious.

When people assert that consciousness arises from physical matter, they can only scramble to find examples by pointing to objects of consciousness such as sensations and thoughts, which do depend on matter and brain activity and so on, but they cannot point to consciousness itself, because consciousness is the pointer.

I think another obstacle to understanding awareness/consciousness is the idea that it has to belong to someone, and this is akin to the lingering belief in atman or a self. In this view, there is a self first, from which consciousness arises, like a baby opening it’s eyes and seeing for the first time. But really, things are the other way around. The experience of a ‘self’ arises from awareness and its contact with objects of awareness. It’s not the being who creates the mind, but the mind which creates the being.

[muni]

The experience of a ‘self’ arises from awareness and its contact with objects of awareness. It’s not the being who creates the mind, but the mind which creates the being.

Gratitude, Padma.