Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia;  Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.

The British Buddha?

   Post 71. January 29, 2019

  Deist versus Buddhist Enlightenment

   Reality is Illusory, but it’s all we’ve got

 David Hume never claimed to be a Deist. However, the Encyclopedia of Philosophy surmised : “There remain three positions open to Hume: atheist naturalism, skeptical agnosticism, or some form of deism.”1 However, Alison Gopnik discovered that the famous skeptic had been exposed to Buddhist ideas while writing his Treatise On Human Nature. He was more interested in undermining traditional Western religious theologies, than in returning to the ancient Greek idealistic notions of deity. But the 17th century Enlightenment movement known as “Deism” has been compared to various oriental belief systems and practices, including Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism. Although not strictly atheistic, none of these were focused on a fearsome king-like god, or on theological doctrines.

Buddhism, especially, had some strange notions of body & mind that seem to be similar to my own information-based worldview, as well as to Platonism and Stoicism. I’ll discuss some of those parallels, as presented in Gopnik’s article, in the quotes and comments below.

1. Self vs Soul : “In his Treatise, Hume rejected the traditional religious and philosophical accounts of human nature. Instead, he took Newton as a model and announced a new science of the mind, based on observation and experiment. That new science led him to radical new conclusions. He argued that there was no soul, no coherent self, no “I.””
   I too have rejected the ancient notion of a ghostly Soul, miraculously implanted in the human body at conception, or quickening, or whatever. But I think modern science has provided a new way to think of the mental construct we call the experiential “Self”. This conceptual “I” is not a thing apart from the body, but a symbolic representation of the body2. It’s not real, but ideal, or more specifically, imaginary. And yet its structure consists of the same "stuff" as everything in the universe : Information.

2. Illusion or Conception : “In my own scientific papers I’d argued, like Hume, that the coherent self is an illusion. My research had convinced me that our selves are something we construct, not something we discover. I had found that when we are children, we don’t connect the “I” of the present to the “I” of the past and the future. We learn to be who we are.”
  The Hindu/Buddhist notion of Maya (magic or illusion) is similar to my own understanding of the alternative Real/Ideal ways of knowing the world. Empirical Science is supposed to deal only with what's real, meaning physical. And most humans approach the world as-if the images in your mind directly emulate what is actually out there. Idealists, such as Plato, Kant & Berkeley saw through the veil of appearances, noting that the phenomenal world we think we see & touch is a construct of our brains, as they interpret abstract sensations into meaningful images. More recently, quirky Quantum Theory pulled the rug out from under our pragmatic realism, by revealing the uncanny statistical underpinnings of macro reality. Nevertheless, we tend to ignore the smoke & mirrors of Nature, and pay attention to the foreground phenomena that hold our interest.
   The Self is indeed an evolving symbol of who-we-have-learned-to-be by experience, not an eternal persona. But the Generic Information from which it is constructed is timeless and potent with possibilities that we may choose from.  

Post 71 continued . . . click Next

1. David Hume religion : https://www.iep.utm.edu/hume-rel/

2. Self :
   A self-referencing symbol constructed by the brain to represent the body in its interactions with the outside world. It’s no more spooky than any other mental image that we use to represent objects that are significant to us. It functions like an avatar in a computer game world.
   When Hume and Buddha deny the existence of a Self or “I”, they are referring to a ghost that is separate from the body. They couldn’t even hold a conversation without some kind of self-concept. Like all concepts, it is an information pattern that conjures up a specific meaning in the mind.

David Hume, Buddha
and a search for the Eastern roots of the Western Enlightenment

by Alison Gopnik (2015)
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/       

Alison Gopnik is an American professor of developmental psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.