Meaning of 'Consciousness is One.

[Guest guest]

Hello Benjamin,

Scotched by lightening I was absent for a few days. Thanks for your reply

but please don't think that you must respond to this as well which is

merely a few random thoughts throuwn out. But do have a look sometime at

the Sankara piece I lifted.

 

Arguing against the reality of the material world is a theoretical position

and like all theories it should be put to the test. Does it gather

together all phenomena in a coherent way and is it adequate to the

complexity of what is experienced. It should also like any good theory

have a predictive capacity, in this case - does it create any new

phenomena or draw out the significance of some fact which that which it

supplants as a theory overlook? If the simpler theory that the world is

indeed real is more adequate to the complexity of mental life then by

Ockham's razor it should be retained. This indeed was Berkeley's dilemma.

He saw that there was more value added by the mind to bare data. Sankara

has the same idea which he expresses as 'Therefore an object and its

knowledge differ'. Advaita allows for an internal world of intellect and

an external world. (see following post) If everything is internal then the

language that we normally use is turned into 'seemings'. In that internal

world how is one seeming 'I see a pillar' to be differentiated from 'I seem

to see a pillar' or 'I seem to be seeming to see a pillar'. In Advaita

all these observations could be used intelligibly in real situations. In a

purely internal world what marks could distinguish one from the other. How

can you tell between a seeming real and a real seeming? They are just

arisings in consciousness. The sage's puzzlement as to whether he was a

man dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man is a

real consequence of the idealist position. Berkeley was forced to posit

God as the guarantor of abstract ideas. The Buddhists have the vertiginous

categories of the skandhas to supply what their epistemology cannot. There

is an ad hoc aspect to all of this and a sense that it is no more than a

simple code based on the commonly accepted public world. For external write

seems to be external, for illusory write seems to be a seeming real. It

seems so obviously to be an elaboration of ordinary experience and be

derivitive of it that by Ockham's razor it must fall. It adds nothing but

only spawns a host of ad hocisms (skandhas, Berkeley's God) to shore up a

teetering tower.

 

Advaita covers the distinction between the seeming and the real and indeed

makes it central to its system. Is there a phenomenon that it points to or

virtually creates (not as an artefact)? Deep Sleep is that phenomenon.

Best Wishes, Michael

 

 

 

 

 

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