Now that you all had the benefit of Garfield's visit to our seminar and of his lively exposition of the scope of his paper (and the nature of the controversy) what do you make of his stance on the nature of awareness/consciousness?
Thursday, March 26, 2009
To be, or not to be...reflexive; that is the question
In his response to Paul William's detailed study of the debate about the reflexive nature of awareness in Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy Garfield, while taking the non-reflexive stance, concludes the following:
"Mipham and Williams...take it for granted that the mind is self-revealing; that we know our own minds in a special, direct way; that we cannot be in error about the nature of our own minds or cognitive activity. While this might be common sense, it is all wrong, and Tsong khapa’s great genius is that he saw this and so saw the importance of this issue. If we were to have immediate, veridical knowledge of our own minds, that would amount to having, in Tsong khapa’s terms, a Buddha’s access to the mind; in more familiar terms, to having direct, non-concept- or theory-dependent access to our own cognitive processes. If we were to have a special kind of access to our own mental processes and were to know others’ indirectly, this would be to abandon the publicity and conventional character of the concepts through which we know ourselves, and hence to saddle ourselves with an insuperable problem of other minds, and an insuperable problem about how we ever develop those concepts in the first place. If we were always to be correct about our own cognitive activities, in Tsong khapa’s terms, meditation and cultivation would be pointless; in our own, cognitive science would be complete."
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“take it for granted that the mind is self-revealing; that we know our own minds in a special, direct way; that we cannot be in error about the nature of our own minds or cognitive activity. While this might be common sense, it is all wrong, and Tsong khapa’s great genius is that he saw this and so saw the importance of this issue. If we were to have immediate, veridical knowledge of our own minds, that would amount to having, in Tsong khapa’s terms, a Buddha’s access to the mind; in more familiar terms, to having direct, non-concept- or theory-dependent access to our own cognitive processes”(Mipham and Williams). I agree with Garfield if we did know our own minds, then we would have this “Buddha like” mind and be fully aware of what is going on inside of our minds. However, we do not know how our minds work all the time. The neural process that goes on in our mind have intentions but we do not think this neuron go here and there. The neurons just fire where they are supposed to go and if they do not, then this may lead to depression or other various disorders. If we could know our brains "vertically", then we could possibly find cures for multiple personlity disorders, depression, and brain damages, I would think?
ReplyDeleteI think nicole makes a good point. We do not know certain aspects of our minds by nature of the fact that we are limited by the concepts and theories created to try to explain them. We are spacio-temporal beings and the only way to gain access to the deepest inner workings of our minds would be to remove ourselves from these limitations. That is, however, impossible because noumena, by definition cannot be attained by humans. I believe that we do have a certain degree of reflexive awareness, but there are certain things that we will never know about our own minds because we are finite beings and our understanding is limited by time and space.
ReplyDeleteI applaud Garfield for his efforts to reconcile Tibetan philosophy with continental philosophy. However... it seems to me that this distinction between 'conventional' and 'ultimate' is some sort of metaphysical trick. It seems like the only real means to say... oh, of course it seems like we have reflexive awareness... but too
ReplyDeletebad we don't. I can't think of any real reason to support that we
'ultimately' don't. I understand that the argument suggests we would have no room for growth if we already knew all of our thoughts as they were occurring. But I still can't help but feel that this concept of 'ultimate' is more like propaganda for the entire Tibetan worldview. What use does it have for me as a westerner, other than trying to have me doubt what I perceive immediately, conventionally if you will. Hasn't most of Western philosophy already moved away from this skepticism? If there is one aspect of my cognition that I should doubt, why not doubt all of it? Why not go back to Descartes and say, oh no... there really IS an evil demon playing tricks on me. This isn't a pancake I'm eating and it doesn't taste buttery and delicious, and there isn't really a what it's like to be a glutton. Consciousness CAN'T be a misleading guide to reality MOST of the time. You can even make the argument that evolution has selected for it to be as accurate as possible for navigating the world, or else we wouldn't be here.
[ But in all seriousness, this pancake really is delicious =) ]
I agree with Nicole when she says that "The neural process that goes on in our mind have intentions but we do not think this neuron go here and there. The neurons just fire where they are supposed to go and if they do not, then this may lead to depression or other various disorders." We don't know our brains in that regard. I'm not sitting here, consciously telling my legs to be crossed or my neck to be held up. Yet, they are doing just that. I think that it must be possible to somehow access the parts of our brains that control everything, even our neural movements, yet we are unable to tap into that. Perhaps that's why we all need to try out mediation like Coseru is always suggesting... maybe it's the only way.
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