Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
Human, Buddha or . . .
lobster
Crusty Veteran
in Philosophy
There seem to be two major ways that the enlightened mind emerges.
One is the non interference with the process of arising. This is the approach of Zen and Dzogchen.
The other is the stimulation, simulation and enactment of the enlightened state. To be found in the 8 fold path and Tantric Buddhism.
Will this process ever be automated by science? Would that ever be a legitimate goal?
My understanding is the brain can be 'rewired', we have great neuroplasticity. Even quite conflicted and obscuring pathways can be improved. The Buddhist and mystic paths, offer us more than a being at the whim of neurons, memories and attachments. Each of us has the potential to be awake. In a sense our destinies can be more than genetics and karma. Will the singularity offer us a new sense of humanity? What sort of model will we choose?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
One is the non interference with the process of arising. This is the approach of Zen and Dzogchen.
The other is the stimulation, simulation and enactment of the enlightened state. To be found in the 8 fold path and Tantric Buddhism.
Will this process ever be automated by science? Would that ever be a legitimate goal?
My understanding is the brain can be 'rewired', we have great neuroplasticity. Even quite conflicted and obscuring pathways can be improved. The Buddhist and mystic paths, offer us more than a being at the whim of neurons, memories and attachments. Each of us has the potential to be awake. In a sense our destinies can be more than genetics and karma. Will the singularity offer us a new sense of humanity? What sort of model will we choose?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
2
Comments
Scientists are starting to map and develop a mechanistic comprehension of consciousness, independent of archaic soul or incarnating 'evolutionary' theories. The video deals very much with the scientific approach mentioned here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
If the spiritual "process" were to be automated by science... I'm not sure what to think of that. I guess if it helped bring peace and harmony to the world at large, that would be great. Maybe it's just my ego/attachments, but it seems like it's "cheating" to just pay to get "rewired" and become enlightened or whatever when so many people sat so hard to even get a shred of satori experience.
And, despite suggestions otherwise, I feel that it could just make inequalities worse. Who would be able to afford the benefits of a dramatic advancement in nanotechnology and artificial intelligence?
Still, thanks again for the link it truly was an interesting find
Our 'destinies' is a tough one... it is our observation that provides significance to any particular occurance.
Nor, even at the risk of disagreeing with some very respected old Masters, is meditative mind state enlightenment.
Neuroscientists play around with the "form" part of the skandhas. Change the form (physical brain and chemistry) and you change the way our minds work. Psychiatrists also play around with our perceptions and Psychologists and Therapists attempt to work with our consciousness. They can help us change the way our minds think, but they cannot produce a single moment of enlightenment. The MRI scanner can now see the various parts of the brain active when meditating. Figure out how to stimulate those externally, and you've created the sensation of meditating. Congratulations. Now what?
This always reminds me of how research scientists created a computer capable of beating the human mind at chess, and people started talking about how much smarter it was than people because it was skilled at a single game with defined rules. Then another set of scientists built a huge computer capable of winning at a trivia game show, and people talked about how the ability to remember facts showed we were getting somewhere.
Being able to move pieces on a chessboard doesn't mean you enjoy the challenge of playing another skilled chessmaster. You're just moving pieces on a board because that's what you do. Being able to access an entire dictionary and recite a library of books doesn't mean you can write one original thought. You're just a glorified spellchecker.
The human mind used to be pictured as a whole group of little people with their own different jobs, like a stage play going on in our heads. That's where the little good angel and bad devil on our shoulders came from. Then we thought of it as a series of gears like any machine, when that was the level of our technology. We still talk of the "gears turning in our heads". Then we discovered electricity and the light bulb went on over our heads. Then the computer arrived and suddenly our minds were little computers processing data.
And every one of these metaphors is woefully inadequate. So what's next?
Modern scientific consciousness studies, neurophysiology etc. is nowhere on any of this, and as for the AI people, generally they still think that consciousness is an entirely computational phenomenon, which leaves them a lot of catching up to do. The approach scientists generally take to this looks frighteningly naive and is obviously not productive.
I gave up my subscription to the Journal of Consciousness Studies after three years because nothing ever changed. Round and round in circles it goes. My own researches led me straight as an arrow to Buddhism, which is a more scientific approach than that taken by all those 'dispassionate' scientists who assume that the Buddhist solution to the proplem of consiousness is wrong without bothering to find out what it is.
Sorry. Ranting again. Modern 'scientific' consciousness studies is a joke and it annoys the hell out of me.
Perhaps . . .
http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html
Is this neuroscientist enlightened? Deluded? Rewired?
There's a Chinese version of everything. And when I say a "Chinese" version, I literally mean a "Chinese version". They have their own Facebook (called RenRen) that uses the same color scheme (blue and white), same technology and template, etc.
Imagine everything available in the west, put it through Google translator, and viola. The Great "Fire"wall of China.
Instead of Youtube, we have Youku, for example. Virtually the same website. Anything registered on the government list as banned comes up as "404 error" when you try to type it in, as if it never existed.
They try to monitor everything that comes in and out of any of the country's networks. There are ways around it of course (getting a VPN), for example, but those are illegal.
No problem. It's my honor.