"The section on cognitive science includes a very stimulating paper by the neuropsychologist David Galin. He engages thoroughly with Buddhist ideas on self, being cheerfully prepared to challenge them without being dismissive. It is well worth breasting the current of his sociological jargon for the sake of several gem-like insights on the human mind. How do we deal with the complexity of experience? Well, we 'seek and find, or project, a simplifying pattern to approximate every complex field ... by lumping (ignoring some distinctions as negligible) and by splitting (ignoring some relations as negligible). Both ... create discreet entities useful for manipulating, predicting and controlling ... [but] may impose ad hoc boundaries on what are actually densely interconnected systems and then grant autonomous existence to the segments' (p. 108). Even the contents of our own consciousness have to be dealt with in this way, resulting in our array of fragmented self-concepts, and we just put up with the anomalies that arise. Buddhism, he explains, agrees that discovering entities is conventionally indispensable, but attachment and aggression arise through reifying them, which violates the principle that all things are interdependent, and all entities are conditional approximations."
http://www.westernbuddhistreview.com/vol4/buddhism_and_science.html ___ 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/md/archives.html
