On Feb 11, 2010, at 12:59:52 AM, "Khoo Hock Aun" <[email protected]> wrote: The potential development of a cognitive faculty that apprehends non-sensuous phenomena may overcome such a bias. In his monograph “Why the West Has No Science of Consciousness: A Buddhist View” Alan Wallace writes: “The primary instrument that all scientists have used to make any type of observation is the human mind. Does this instrument provide us only with its own artifacts, without any access to any objective reality existing independently of the mind? Or if the mind provides us with information about the objective world, does it distort it in the process? …… the scientific study of the mind in the West was delayed for three centuries after the inception of the Scientific Revolution, which is tantamount to using an instrument for three hundred years before subjecting it to scientific scrutiny. What kind of scientific worldview has emerged as a result of this profound oversight and the enormous disparity of our understanding of the mind and the rest of the natural world?”
Hi Khoo, Thank you for your post. While I have many questions and opinions (imagine that), I would like to tackle the so called scientific study of the mind. I have some background in science, since I have used it to support my family for many years; I went to graduate school for 8 years in the disciplines of neuropharmacology and biophysics. In a sense, we are asking to understand understanding. This may be kind of like trying to see ones eyes. I am not saying anything new with that. We fully understand the minds working by paying attention to what it creates, not through objective dissection and labeling. This creation however is difficult to objectify scientifically because we would have to use tools outside of the mind. A dismissal of these innate human rules for analysis is perhaps one way in which Buddhism claims enlightenment. There is nothing new about scientific thinking, and the Scientific Revolution simply made it a discipline of economics. I would propose that rational thinking is scientific in general, and the so called instruments of science are just extensions of the way our minds work. The worldview that has emerged is one where science points the way to Truth. It labels and categorizes, explains and predicts. We believe that scientific methods bring "understanding", that is, we feel comfortable with this analogy of Reality. This is akin to a carpenter claiming that the only truth is that which he can hit with a hammer. Now, science works through hindsight. Things are not known until analyzed and corroborated with what is accepted data. Such a retrospective view of reality shuts out much of what is known already within. It denies reality (almost in a tyrannical way) to those things which do not fall to its method of analysis. Indeed, it is this limitation of science which results in the slow progress of understanding. I have proposed in other posts, that a belief in science IS a religion due to the unquestionable faith in its dogma and creation of reality. It may be a very good religion, but it is such just the same, by definition. Our methods for shaping the world are a result of the underlying biological units responsible for the mind. As such, they create a reality which is founded on such physical properties. In many ways, the mind creates itself. We have a very narrow sensory perspective of that which is around us. Our visual field is confined to wavelengths of 400 to 800 nm, our acoustic senses are equally limited. That which we touch and feel is severely limited by the underlying mechanism of sensation. Indeed, our three dimensional perspective could be considered limited. Current scientific methods, and abstract thinking, as you say, extends the limits of that perception, but are always subject to physical limitations. Now, hopefully I have posted a rational metaphor of our perception. Yet, it really carries no weight in words. Where the weight comes in is in the transfer, through such rationality, to senses which are outside rationality. Rationality is simply a bridge for communication. This was in essence, imo, part of the spiritual awakening (and I am not talking religion) that Phaedrus tries to impart. These are all analogies of an underling reality of Quality. If intellectual discourse provides cohesion between the underlying humanness of being, then it has a purpose. But it is not an end in itself. It is only a small percentage of our experience, and should not constrain our being. Cheers, Mark Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
