Many philosophers and scientists have some truly bizarre beliefs. The denial of consciousness (as we understand this term) is the most bizarre. Indeed, I don't really understand what the consciousness deniers are really saying. That they literally never have any conscious experiences? No visual experiences, no thoughts, no pains, no yearnings etc? And if they don't mean this, what do they mean? It's worse than saying an experience is literally identical to a series of neurons firing... although that is utterly bizarre enough.
And I think stuff like the denial of mental causation; that there is no persisting self (not even from one minute to the next); that colours, sounds and smells don't exist out there; that there are ultimately only subatomic particles and their interactions that make up absolutely everything... I think all that is utterly bizarre too, although not quite reaching the absurdity of denying one's own conscious experiences.
But suppose I'm wrong about everything, that reality is really like what some of these people believe. Well.. I don't think I can possibly be wrong about my own consciousness, but what if I am wrong about everything else? Well . .if I am, then I am. I have tried to understand and grasp things, it's the best I can do.
But I do try to understand where people are coming from. Why on earth do they believe the bizarre things they do? It seems clear to me that it is our modern western culture that is the source of all these bizarre beliefs. There seems to be this infatuation with physics and a misinterpretation of what it's telling us.
To be honest, I think it's all largely groupthink. I think to a large extent they are just repeating each other, maybe they're concerned about their reputations and careers to want to rock the boat too much. And when others are continually expressing a certain view of the world, that surely has a powerful effect on one's own beliefs?
I don't think any of us knows anything really ...well, apart from the fact we are conscious! We are just cast adrift into this world. We do not know what we are, where we come from, where we are going, what the world is, and why it has the nature it has, and whether our existence has any type of meaning or purpose. We are lost in a huge chasm of unfathomable mystery, and so we just soldier on.
1 comment:
" . . . that there is no persisting self"
According to Buddhist philosophy, there is in fact no persisting self. As I interpret it, there is a continuing consciousness in any one life, but this is continually metamorphosing into a different form under the continuing press of time and events, so that any individual consciousness, or self, is vastly changed at age seventy from what it was at, say, ten. This seems plausible enough.
Buddhism also posits a series of (consecutive?) lives, but it seems to say that only some sort of bundle of karmic consequences persist from life to life. I'm not exactly clear how this is properly defined. My thinking is that some kind of continuous conscious experience must link these lives, but all the books I've read seem to cast some doubt on this. The main principle behind all the above is the principle of 'impermanence' - i.e. nothing stays the same, change is the only confirmable principle in the world.
The Buddha himself would very likely say that such questions about consciousness are irrelevant to achieving the aim of Buddhism - liberation from the cycle of birth and death. That's probably not a very interesting answer to non-Buddhists.
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