[Advaita-l] The Foundations of Adhyāsa - 5.2 (The Siddhānta: The Self is not the Body) (Part II)

[Raghav Kumar Dwivedula]

Namaste Kartik ji
Firstly thank you for starting this thread on a very interesting and
important question.

And then your elaborate presentation of The Argument and it's
counter-arguments are quite lucid and understandable.

I had read David Chalmers presentation of the hard problem of
consciousness. But it was nice to reread an excellent recap of all these
ideas and many more ideas given by you.

You neatly expressed the important point that a third party analysis of my
sense perceptual process does not include the basic datum of my experience
viz., my own immediate perceptual experience.

Another point is that even a detailed neural mapping of perception is
totally dependent on a conscious subject giving inputs about what he is
experiencing.

A Scientist who is observing a person's MRI - "What do you experience now ?"

Subject -"I am recollecting some old memories ."

Scientist - "Ok, this is how the brain responds to the experience of
recollecting old memories"

(The scientist has to ask the subject to find out what is happening. He has
no way of figuring out from the MRI itself as to what the "original"
subject  is experiencing when some areas of the brain are found to be more
active etc. He can now perhaps generalize this to other subjects. But the
original subject's perceptual inputs remain materialistically irreducible.)

The irreducible existence of raw perceptual data is a huge problem for the
materialists and neural mappers.

One tangential point I read somewhere which is indirectly connected to the
topic goes as follows. The experiences and visions of various Devatas by
mahatmas like Sri Ramakrishna or Sri Abhinava Vidyatirtha svAminaH cannot
be reduced to just imagination or hallucination. By consensus amongst
traditional scholars, such experiences are valid and they are not merely
subjective hallucinations.

If a purely reductionist view of perception is taken and all emotions like
love etc., are reduced to changes in the concentrations of some
neurotransmitters and endorphins in the brain then there remains no
internal mandate vouching for the validity of even the scientists'
perceptual data.

In other words, we can dismiss the materialist's experiences and
conclusions too by saying that the neurotransmitters in the materialist's
mind fabricate for him the perceptions of this world of matter. The
scientist's experience of his scientific world is as much a chemically
mediated experience as a junkie's. Who is to vouch for its validity, since
it's just a product of the brain chemicals being in certain concentrations
and configurations? And for a Mahatma whose doors of perception are
cleansed without use of substances like peyote etc., he may very well have
iShTa devatA samprayogaH - communion with higher celestial beings - as in
the case of Sri Ramakrishna etc.

The only way out is to recognise a larger  tradition (like the Vedic
tradition) of sane people (GYAni-s etc.) who assign validity to various
perceptions and they are known to accept experiences like  ishTa devatA
samprayogaH and brahmAkAra vRtti GYAnam (ignoring for the moment the larger
point of its sva-samvedyatvam) as valid in the case of one who has been
through the prerequisites of mind purification etc. Such a tradition
assigns the lowest degree of reality to most (but not all) drug-induced
experiences.

 Carl Sagan mistakenly claims that the "experience" of Brahman is like the
trance produced by a mind altering drug.  Ignoring for the moment the fact
that Brahman is not a trance experience, it still begs the question stated
earlier - who is to say the perceptions of the scientist too are not just a
chemically mediated subjective hallucination?

Om
Raghav







On Tue 30 Oct, 2018, 6:01 AM S Jayanarayanan via Advaita-l, <
advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org> wrote:

>  Since I do not observe any response indicating a full understanding of
> The Argument that was posted,
> I'll try to elucidate further in this post.
>
> Taking up one line of reasoning from an earlier posting of the series:
>
> > It may also be a good exercise to check if the following second
> observation can be explained by appealing
> > to material entities alone, in the case of a person with defective
> vision:
> >
> >   Observation #2:  “Two overlapping 100-foot tall buildings are being
> seen.”
> >   (Note: there is still only one 100-foot tall building in front.)
> >
> > This Observation #2 is evidently an apparition of sorts caused by
> imperfect vision. In any third-person description
> > of the material reality, the first-person Vision of “Overlapping images
> of two 100-foot tall buildings” will never
> > appear at all.
> >
>
> In the above example, we have the following two judgments:
>
> Judgment X = First-person Perception:
>   "Two *OVERLAPPING* 100-foot tall buildings are being seen."
>
> Judgment Y = Third-person description of material reality:
>   "There is a 100-foot tall building. There is a man (with defective eyes)
> standing across it.
>   Light falls on the building and reaches the man's eyes. There are two
> images on each of the
>   eyes' retinas. Signals from the retinas are transmitted to the brain,
> where they are processed."
>
>
> Now, the case against Materialism is due to this conflict:
>
>   Judgment X ≠ Judgment Y.
>
> Why? Because the "two *OVERLAPPING* buildings" that appear in Judgment X
> are NEVER DESCRIBED in Judgment Y.
> This shows that a description of reality using only material entities is
> INCOMPLETE at best, since it doesn't
> fully explain First-person Perception!
>
> Now, there is exactly one way to defend Materialism in spite of the above
> argument:
>
>   First-person Perception is invalid.
>
> This is seriously problematic even for the materialist - because the
> existence of material entities themselves
> are known only via First-person Perception (pratyaksha)! Even scientists
> use their own Perception - Seeing,
> Hearing, Touching, etc. to arrive at conclusions.
>
> I will leave it at this.
>
> Cheers,
> Kartik
>
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