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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Oct 31, 2017 - 06:06am PT
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Is Buddhism true?
The most fundamental supposition of Buddhism is that emotional attachment to specific experiences leads to suffering due to the reality that we can’t completely control externalaities. Is that true? Yeah.
Is kindness a useful practice? Yeah, refer to the model of egoistic altruism per Selye.
Conscious frontal cortex association and limbic system responses to “positive” emotions such as gratitude condition the reticular activating system (RAS) to filter sensory data for external phenomena that reinforce/support the conditioning. The same is true for people that are “blue.” Eyore suffers from his focus on what sucks and resultant RAS filtering.
This is the reason why 100 people in the same place and same time will have slightly to wildly different accounts for what just happened. Each individual filters their experience through the reticular activating system based upon frontal cortex and limbic system conditioning.
The lower the filtration by the reticular activating system, the more complete the awareness of external phenomena.
So, yeah, Buddhism is true in that the neurology above is true.
After that it gets fuzzy.
To get more of a picture about these ideas refer to some blog posts of mine that include references to the literature -
The Neurology of Gratitude
https://www.drforce.com/2016/09/01/neurology-gratitude/
Creating Joy
https://www.drforce.com/2016/09/14/creating-joy/
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Oct 31, 2017 - 09:12am PT
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re: meaning and purpose
It does seem we've entered the beginning stages of a (evolutionary) phase where game-playing and taking up sides AND WINNING in sociopolitics - often over the most silly and insignificant things - is going to serve as a primary go-to activity for sourcing meaning and purpose in our lives.
At least for many billions.
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The illiberal foolishness of these far left students is very disappointing. This is a prescription for loss (eg, 2020).
http://quillette.com/2017/10/29/get-bus-get-shouting-free-speech-rutgers/
re: "intersectionality"
Terms: (1) intersectionality (2) intersectional left (3) intersectional politics (4) intersectionalists
"It’s not just that many intersectional activists seem to have no capacity for nuance; they fear and hate it, because they hate anything with the potential to complicate their narrative."
Mark Lilla often speaks to the ideal of citizenship, the value and obligations thereof.
Even if you're just a little bit into culture and politics, it's important to pay some attention to what the far left is up to - concepts (eg, safe space, triggers, intersectionality), beliefs and actions wise.
What's happened to the leadership in many of our U.S. colleges and universities?
Sarah Haider is a hero. Mark Lilla is a spot on sociopolitical "intellectual". They deserve to be heard.
As a classical liberal, it's becoming ever harder to identify with the left.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Oct 31, 2017 - 09:39am PT
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“Facts?! Facts?! Don’t tell me about facts!”
Pop Quiz QT: What millenia-old institution failed in its leadership century after century to address this attitude?
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“Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure.” -Reinhold Niebuhr
Reinhold Niebuhr... the greatest Protestant theologian in America since Jonathan Edwards?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhold_Niebuhr
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WBraun
climber
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Oct 31, 2017 - 09:45am PT
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Is Buddhism true?
NO as in indirectly.
Because Buddha preached against himself for the very purpose of deceiving the living entity to keep it from further committing damaging karma to itself.
In other words, Buddha philosophy was ultimately atheistic.
Without doing that the living entity would further slide into the damaging control of gross materialism for the living is NOT ever material.
For Buddha to preach against himself creates incompleteness as for the fact that ahimsa (nonviolence) is only one sided.
He had to do it this way as the fools would not stop their nonsense otherwise.
Only God (this incarnation of Buddha) can perfectly trick the living entity towards the right way.
Once successful Buddha returned as Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and drove Buddhism out of India by his superior famous debates to the impersonalists of that time.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Oct 31, 2017 - 11:14am PT
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As a classical liberal, it's becoming ever harder to identify with the left.
That's because "the left" is currently displaying all the inward and outward signs of morbidity as the reigning paradigm of politics and culture for 50 years. Society is moving on.
The inward sign is represented in the quote above.
I've always considered contemporary liberalism in the West as being primarily a creature of the baby boomer generation. So much of politics and culture is generational. This is why I often refer to this last period in political history ( especially the Obama years) as " the senior power phase of baby boomer leftism."
Does this mean that good ol' fashioned conservatism will dominate? Probably not. But its core philosophy will endure-- as long as that philosophy remains wedded to the Constitution and the concept of limited government constrained by an overarching law of the land faithfully guarded and carried out.
The Constitution is our only real bulwark against tyranny.
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WBraun
climber
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Oct 31, 2017 - 11:19am PT
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The Constitution is our only real bulwark against tyranny.
It's already been ripped to shreds in the last 20 years by these criminals in DC .....
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Oct 31, 2017 - 11:22am PT
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It's already been ripped to shreds in the last 20 years by these criminals in DC .....
Perhaps. But they've also been spectacularly unsuccessful.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Oct 31, 2017 - 12:27pm PT
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The Islamic World Doesn't Need a Reformation
Why a Muslim John Locke would be much more useful than a Muslim Martin Luther
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/muslim-reformation/544343/
"...if the Muslim world of today resembles any period in Christian history, it is not the pre-Reformation but rather the post-Reformation era. The latter was a time when not just Catholics and Protestants but also different varieties of the latter were at each other’s throats, self-righteously claiming to be the true believers while condemning others as heretics. It was a time of religious wars and the suppression of theological minorities."
It really matters, therefore, whether the state promotes a tolerant or a bigoted interpretation of Islam. It really matters, for example, when the Saudi monarchy, which for decades has promoted Wahhabism, vows to promote “moderate Islam,” as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman recently did, giving some hope for the future. It is especially significant that this call for moderation implies not just fighting terrorism, but also liberalizing society by curbing the “religion police,” empowering women, and being “open to the world and all religions.”
re: reform vs reformation
"The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug." -Mark Twain
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Oct 31, 2017 - 05:13pm PT
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HFCS: It really matters, therefore, whether the state promotes a tolerant or a bigoted interpretation of Islam.
I’ll demure. What might equally matter is how an individual responds to their own individualization away from, or in agreement with, the collective. Are you a man or a mouse?
If you want to say that the state dictates or strongly influences how people think and exist in it, then you are a socialist and institutionalist. On the other hand, if you believe that people can and do think for themselves, then there is no excuse for what and where people find themselves.
It’s not about words. It’s about being. The difference between the two is an indescribable chasm, maybe even an abyss between different realities or worlds.
Be well.
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Oct 31, 2017 - 05:34pm PT
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Attention as a process of selection, perception as a process of representation, and phenomenal experience as the resulting process of perception being modulated by a dedicated consciousness mechanism.
http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC3247680
Is there still science on this thread?
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Oct 31, 2017 - 08:23pm PT
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And the final paragraph.
Consciousness may never arise—be it in babies, toddlers, children or adults—because it may always be there to begin with. For all we know, what arises is merely a metacognitive configuration of preexisting consciousness. If so, consciousness may be fundamental in nature—an inherent aspect of every mental process, not a property constituted or somehow generated by particular physical arrangements of the brain. Claims, grounded in subjective reports of experience, of progress toward reducing consciousness to brain physiology may have little—if anything—to do with consciousness proper, but with mechanisms of metacognition instead.
Sounds like something Largo would say.
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i-b-goB
Social climber
Wise Acres
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Oct 31, 2017 - 08:31pm PT
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Feeling good like you should!
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Oct 31, 2017 - 09:58pm PT
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My sense of it is your belief is that we only have the impression of a subjective world, but what it REALLY is, is the objective world, or output of the same. We only "think" we have a subjective life, "reality" itself being physical.
you have the sense, it is a subjective impression, and so it is true to you, who am I to say that your point-of-view vis-a-vis my point of view might be erroneous.
After all, I don't control your perception of me, only you do, and it is your only reality.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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For anyone considering Robert Wright's Why Buddhism is True, the single star reviewer comments at amazon are rather interesting, entertaining, insightful...
https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/1439195455/ref=acr_search_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&showViewpoints=0
For example,
"Secular Buddhists endeavor to reduce all aspects of the mind to the mechanistic activities of matter, and thus deny the existence of the spiritual or transcendental aspects of the Buddha's teaching. Their main motivation is the false belief that they are somehow making Buddhism more compliant with science by doing so." -Burnt Norton
Here's Etiam (under a comments section under a reviewer), writing with the certainty of some posters here...
"the idea of a "modular mind" dominated evolutionary psychology. That idea has died out, and we have evolved past it. Even Robert Wright noted that his idea of mind modules is that their function overlaps and they are tightly coupled with other modules. But the whole idea of a module is something with a unique function that is only loosely coupled with other modules to form a complex whole. So that modular model cannot work for the mind. Robert Wright notes that no one uses the modular mind model anymore, yet he still does in this book..."
Such a mess.
"Mind modules" - based, i.e., grounded, in evolved brain architecture of course - are alive and well.... Etiam.
Could Etiam be... MikeL? Consider...
"Another thing Robert Wright gets very wrong is the idea that natural selection creates anything. Like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, he is almost religiously ecstatic when he talks about natural selection, calling it "our creator" in various ways throughout the book. But natural selection is a process of destruction, not creation. Natural selection selects between variations, causing the worse variation to die out. Something has to create the variations, and that something (whatever it is) is the creative process. Not natural selection." -Etiam
lol
Michelangelo the creator? Michelangelo the destroyer? :)
Rather insightful, from one "Peter Falk"...
"Bouncing to another tradition is easier than a full examination of our own heritage - good and bad."
...
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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HFCS:
Why did you choose to present 8% of the reviews (which were negative) than the rest, which were overwhelmingly positive? I question your reporting ability.
As for those 8%, they seem reasonable. (All the reviews seem reasonable.)
Buddhism can be another mind trap. Any effort with an '-ism behind it seems assuredly so.
What's spontaneously engaging?
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Buddhism can be another mind trap
I like that.
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Thinking can be a mind trap.
Never believe everything you think.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Thinking can be a mind trap. Never believe everything you think.
What if you 'think' you're experiencing empty awareness or no-thingness?
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