I am in no doubt that there is only one reality, and it exists with or without being perceived. For this reason perception colours reality rather than changes it. Different perceptions (not different realities) are the root cause of all misunderstandings.
Category: philosophy
I love Kant, the later Wittgenstein, Derrida, post structualism, postmodernism and the philosophy of language.
When does a soul get created?
As a Buddhist, I do not believe in souls. Talk to most people – Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs and even Buddhists – and they talk as though something survives after death. Such is the power and attraction of the concept of the soul.
Out of curiosity, I asked an American Muslim when is the soul created. He said, “at the moment of conception”. And thereafter it remains either in Heaven or Hell (and also Purgatory if you are Roman Catholic). So the mystery, it seems to me, is that the eternal soul did not start off as eternal but was created out of the grace of God or gods (of which again in Buddhism are concepts).
The problem here is that we have no evidence for these, only that of the textual sources, and not any independent or direct proof of souls and gods as such. Apart from being told by someone else, namely the sacred texts and by those who believe in word of the sacred texts, there is no other proof. Buddhism’s claim that everything is impermanent can be verified by observation. While we cannot observe everything, the weight of non-contrary evidence is substantial. Inferential logic tells us that the soul is perhaps one of these “things” which stands counter to impermanence even though no one can show us any evidence for its existence.
This alone should sound off alarm bells in your head.
While I do not have a problem with the concept of the soul, I do have problem with the belief in the existence of a soul. But at the same time, it is normal to think and believe that such a thing exists. This is something humans do very well, and perhaps defines us from other animals. But it is also natural that some for the human species (Buddhists) to “see through” it, that is, to understand the nature of it.
So it is baffling that in this day and age, where our understanding of the natural physical world has progressed this far, to be still caught in the grips of such an illusion. Powerful indeed is this illusion, passed on from generation to generation through speech and action.
Souls are not created. The concept of a soul is. The concept is perpetuated by its continued reinforcement. The root is therefore in the nature of words and not in the nature of the thing.
Sensation and perception
There needs to be a differentiation between sensation and perception. Sensation is purely sense data, and perception is processed data. Sensation can one of five (there are more) basic sense data from the eye, ear, nose, skin and tongue, in the form of sight, sound, smell, touch and taste. Perception is the processed from these five senses as well as from the mental data (thought and concepts).
A video camera and its connected monitor is like sensation. The video camera thinks nothing of the signal coming through its system, only to pass it down a wire to a monitor to be displayed. Certain limitations are placed upon the data through how it is displayed on the monitor but nothing more.
A processing unit attached to the monitor then can analyse, organise and categorise the data in the form of light that is formed as a representation of the external world. A video/monitor unit is useless without the processing unit. And the processing unit is useless without some kind of data.
In this way, the video/monitor unit is the experiential component while the processing unit is the rational component of the transcendental idealist model.
On the id, superego and ego
There are conditions and your reaction to these conditions. The conditions are 1) what you want to do, 2) what your society wants you to do, and 3) what you decide to do and do in response to your desires and society. Freud called your desires id, societal pressures superego and your decisions ego. There should a balance for all of these. Otherwise there are problems.
Another way to put this is that the id is the internal world, the superego the external world, and the ego view and interaction of the internal and external worlds.
Where idealism fails
If the mind (ideal world) supervenes the body (physical world) then there would be no need for the physical world whatsoever. That is, at any moment we can forego the physical and continue to exist in ideas.
The fact that we loathe to “let go” of this world must mean that we do not fully believe that such a world exists. And if we do it is has nothing to do this world, for no effect (paranormal or otherwise) upon it has ever been observed without questions being asked. There is nothing certain about the ideal world.
one, forty-two
everything real
has a positive
equal value
called existence
un-equivalence
is our choice
our preference
our bias
our privileging
of a thing
over others
be it god
the self
the soul
or whatnot
that
is the nature
of me
a human being
E=mc²
think about it –
energy
is matter
is space
is time
while god
maybe 0
the world
is an integer
and nietzsche
may have
proclaimed
“god is dead”
but to me
“god is ‘nothing’
& the world is
everything”
from the world
came god and gods,
not the other way
as we might believe
Physicalism, not atheism
I don’t like atheism.
I don’t like atheism because it drags God, god or gods in the conversation as if they exist. It assumes first that there is a god or gods then proceeds with the argument to deny it. Atheism is the trap that theists have set for the unsuspecting.
The better approach is physicalism. Conclude that everything is physical, then to proceed to see what is a god or gods means we can deal with it like the fiction that it is. The concept of god is then seen as ordinary like Harry Potter and purple unicorns. The verbalisation or iteration of these do not make them real. Physicalism allows us the possibility to deal with concepts.
The editorial error that became “metaphysics”
Did you know that the term “metaphysics” came about through an error by an editor? Not only that, but the entire project of trying to find the nature and origin of being and the universe is based upon this error.
The “meta” in metaphysical had meant “after” or “beyond”, which led it to be interpreted as meaning “beyond the physical world”. No such meaning was there, however, because the editor had only wanted to denote use the term to mean the chapter after the chapter on ‘physics’. So Western Civilisation has been chasing after God and the soul for over two-thousand years because of an error.
Consciousness is mundane
There is nothing special about consciousness. It is only the consciousness which wants to think so. In this sense I agree with Object-Oriented Ontologists.
But what I do not agree with OOO is that to think it is necessary (read: special) to be free (like a rock is) from subjectivity and objectivity.
I have found it gratifying to come to terms with my humanness and celebrate existence – without being anthropologically arrogant – as only a human being can.
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