(no subject)
Shit's going down in Interfaith house. Good for distraction, and I have all sorts of thoughts, but no time! Thankfully, none of the issues at stake are ones that I'm particularly emotionally invested in (are there issues that I'm emotionally invested in?), so I can laugh at it easily.
Similarly, I got the expected payoff from my Indian Lit class today. According to the interpretation of the professor, virtually all of the major Indian strains of thought include an idea of an Eternal Consciousness, or some sort of soul that is also the totality of everything.
The reason why this is interesting is because the particular characterization of the soul expressed in, say, the Bhagavad-Ghita, is not as mental as the normal Western conception. What I mean is, among the things that are supposed to die with the body are: sense experience, intellect (decision-making processes), any sort of personal identity; essentially, most of the mind. All that's left is "consciousness"--described as a silent witness to everything else.
This is a much more robust conception of the soul than a more mental one, in the sense that we can't empirically take away its explanatory power. So while the idea of the individual soul that floats over to the afterlife, or the mainstream Indian conception of the "subtle body," that holds a lot of memory and thought and transmigrates from gross body to gross body, are made unlikely when we can see those mental faculties affected by brain damage, consciousness itself is hard to measure.
Not that this isn't in itself problematic. I mean, to what extent do we really have a consciousness that is apart from our mental processes in action? I guess we could test this running MRI's on yogis--figure out what collection of neurotransmitters, or lack of them, are correlated with the state of Enlightenment. Then we could bottle it.
But if that sort of absolute consciousness really were just another brain state, there would be no reason to declare that the Universal Soul, or attribute to it any of the rockin' properties that get attributed to it.
On the other hand, positing some sort of consciousness without mental processes helps with some of my questions about the mind. "What is it like to be a bat?" That's easy. What is it like to be a rock? Or a solar system?
(if there is some sort of mapping of mental states onto physical states, is that a bijective map? What is the mental corresponding item of non-brains?)
I need to take a good philosophy of mind course. When is that guy getting off sabbatical?
Oh, also, I wanted to note: Creation myths as the creation of consciousness/mental states, coming out of some sort of solipsism, rather than creation of physical world. In Vedas, nothingness/eternal soul creates and enters a barrier of light and becomes an embryo the creation of diverse objects within that light. In Genesis, God and void -> God and darkness and light -> God and everything else. Similar (God -> Light -> World), but subtleties in that Vedic image of soul as universe, with, probably, no mental states, whereas God is individuated, has identity from the start. None of this escaping mental states business--always observer what has been reduced to (or maybe started as) void. How different are the two, really? One starts in unity, the other as binary?
Fuck. I have a cog sci exam on Thursday and I am not ready at all. Too bad I'm dipping my toes into this Interfaith battle over personalities and sexism and passionately held ideologies with ontological problems. I guess this is FUN, though. I mean, I wish I had time for it--everybody elevating themselves to such places!
Am I staying in Interfaith? Don't get me started on housing--because I'd have to overcome some cognitive dissonance and end up confused.
Similarly, I got the expected payoff from my Indian Lit class today. According to the interpretation of the professor, virtually all of the major Indian strains of thought include an idea of an Eternal Consciousness, or some sort of soul that is also the totality of everything.
The reason why this is interesting is because the particular characterization of the soul expressed in, say, the Bhagavad-Ghita, is not as mental as the normal Western conception. What I mean is, among the things that are supposed to die with the body are: sense experience, intellect (decision-making processes), any sort of personal identity; essentially, most of the mind. All that's left is "consciousness"--described as a silent witness to everything else.
This is a much more robust conception of the soul than a more mental one, in the sense that we can't empirically take away its explanatory power. So while the idea of the individual soul that floats over to the afterlife, or the mainstream Indian conception of the "subtle body," that holds a lot of memory and thought and transmigrates from gross body to gross body, are made unlikely when we can see those mental faculties affected by brain damage, consciousness itself is hard to measure.
Not that this isn't in itself problematic. I mean, to what extent do we really have a consciousness that is apart from our mental processes in action? I guess we could test this running MRI's on yogis--figure out what collection of neurotransmitters, or lack of them, are correlated with the state of Enlightenment. Then we could bottle it.
But if that sort of absolute consciousness really were just another brain state, there would be no reason to declare that the Universal Soul, or attribute to it any of the rockin' properties that get attributed to it.
On the other hand, positing some sort of consciousness without mental processes helps with some of my questions about the mind. "What is it like to be a bat?" That's easy. What is it like to be a rock? Or a solar system?
(if there is some sort of mapping of mental states onto physical states, is that a bijective map? What is the mental corresponding item of non-brains?)
I need to take a good philosophy of mind course. When is that guy getting off sabbatical?
Oh, also, I wanted to note: Creation myths as the creation of consciousness/mental states, coming out of some sort of solipsism, rather than creation of physical world. In Vedas, nothingness/eternal soul creates and enters a barrier of light and becomes an embryo the creation of diverse objects within that light. In Genesis, God and void -> God and darkness and light -> God and everything else. Similar (God -> Light -> World), but subtleties in that Vedic image of soul as universe, with, probably, no mental states, whereas God is individuated, has identity from the start. None of this escaping mental states business--always observer what has been reduced to (or maybe started as) void. How different are the two, really? One starts in unity, the other as binary?
Fuck. I have a cog sci exam on Thursday and I am not ready at all. Too bad I'm dipping my toes into this Interfaith battle over personalities and sexism and passionately held ideologies with ontological problems. I guess this is FUN, though. I mean, I wish I had time for it--everybody elevating themselves to such places!
Am I staying in Interfaith? Don't get me started on housing--because I'd have to overcome some cognitive dissonance and end up confused.