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

[S Jayanarayanan]

Raghav Kumar Dwivedula raghavkumar00 at gmail.com wrote:
 
> Namaste Kartik ji
 
Namaste.
 
> 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.
> 
 
Thank you very much for identifying the central point of The Argument! It is
heartening to read a précis of what I've been striving to convey from a
list member.
 
> 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.
> 
 
Excellent presentation of an actual example delineating the difference between
First-person Perception and Third-person description!
 
I was beginning to wonder if this series was being misunderstood and/or dismissed,
hence your writing feels like a breath of fresh air. Really appreciate it.
 
> 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?
> 
 
You've raised some good questions above. Not sure how exactly to answer them
at this time.
 
> Om
> Raghav
> 
 
Regards,
Kartik