GENIUS FORUMS

Trevor, thank you for that clear response. Are you familiar with the buddhist 'Two Truths'? Sounds like your monist defintion resembles one of them, usually known in english as 'absolute truth'. But then there is relative truth which simply put admits multiplicity/differences/particularities into th...

Trevor wrote: "Your views are part of contemporary culture. You seem more willing to critique the scientific community than the source of your views. I'd sooner criticize contemporary Buddhism than contemporary science, since contemporary science cannot be as easily pinned down to one specific ...

Iolaus: thank you for the TV analogy. I meant to bring it in myself since I think it is the best one going. Like any analogy it is not complete, but still it works very well. The fact that when you break the set you can no longer receive signals does not mean that the set is the source of the signal...

Kevin wrote: "You are using fallacious reasoning. Take the seat I am sitting on for example. Now if I removed everything that was causing it to be a seat, it would no longer be a seat. However, a seat it is and a seat it remains. Likewise with the brain being the seat of consciousness. If you t...

"For instance, rather than immediately disproving his claim that water is the seat of consciousness.." I did not claim this. Rather I used water in the same way as you used the brain. You said that if you did X and Y to the brain, personality was effected Z-ly, thus proving it was the main...

Iolaus wrote: "It ought to be obvious by now that it is our senses which keep us in this exact spot within a much larger reality. ..... Yes, in truth the words spiritual and material have no referent. Their only meaning is for the purpose of differentiating from the other, and it is a false dif...

Trevor: good post - on the whole, i.e. apart from unnecessary ad hominems. I see no reason why in a forum there should be any pressure for everyone to agree; rather its great value is in being able to see a topic viewed differently; there are many facets to truth and delusion. So you have your view ...

Clyde wrote: "Re-incarnation is literally “to become flesh again”. This is a living universe which has brought forth life and peopled this planet, and reality has become you and me and all of us. Re-incarnation is what the universe does; we don’t. " Nice one! I would also add - becau...

"If your belief were true, then a person who had a heart transplant would lose all their long-term memories. " Just as I seem to be too dense to get your points and when ask for elaboration or qualification get stolid replies like 'I already explained this' etc., so also you ignore my repl...

Kevin, are you having fun?

I go a little bit further with water. ( could do fire or air but no matter). If we adopt the conventional (materialistic) view, we can say that water weights x per litre, contains H20 molecular structures and so forth. But as I pointed out earlier, water has qualities. Forget about certain poetic on...

I must be entering Australian samadhi or something... I just noticed: I have Australian-directed Moulin Rouge playing in the background. Baz rocks! Trevor wrote: "Anyway, even were we to tap into a consciousness-field through the brain rather than create consciousness from the brain, it's still...

IN response to K's question above: Because the cremation for someone of that type traditionally happens 47 days after initial physical death. At some point there probably will be some evidence since there are some small groups working to 'document' the effects of buddhist practice in scientific term...

Dan: I am delighted that my 'back-shift' schedules allows me the priviledge to discuss things on a forum with you 'down-unders'. Who says technology is all bad?!! Actually, I think all this brain business came up in the context of observations about certain materialistic assumptions about reality be...

Dan: it was my teacher who died in 1987. The same thing has happened to others, sometimes monitored by nurses for a little while, but in this case by two individuals (one a doctor) who waited for the heat to dissipate until it was time to go onto the next stage, i.e. cremation which happened 40 some...

Trevor wrote: "My argument was not for complete exclusion of everything else, but only that the brain is the most important feature. Changing the brain directly changes the mind in a way that changing the hand does not. " I could also argue that changing the hand changes the mind in a way ...

Philosophaster wrote: "Every bit of evidence we have indicates that certain regions of the brain control certain parts of consciousness." That is a sweeping statement, and - apart from being falsifiable obviously since there is bound to be conflicting evidence - going too far. For example ...

Carl G: thanks for that one..

tharpa, if you can show me one iota of proof that the seat of consciousness is in any one part or location of the physical body more than any other part I answered this already. Sever your corpus collosum. Undergo brain surgery. Suffer a stroke. Have a brain tumour. Suffer from schizophrenia. Add o...

Kevin wrote: "Cause and effect is the whole of reincarnation, not merely an aspect of it. " Can you please explain your position on this clearly and completely and if possible without defining it negatively, i.e. it is not what idiots like tharpa think etc. What is your view on this and wh...

This is from a 16th century text on Mahamudra by Tagpo Tashi Namgyal. It is a long, rather exhaustive text which I have not read for almost twenty years, but it remains a great favorite nevertheless since it includes many quotations from older textual sources. The part that I recalled in terms of th...

"The mind must be either physical or explained as a necessary component of an ontology. The only other option is magic. " No, that is not the only other option. But based on a false materialist premise, it seems that way. Magic is basically a judgment on anything outside the parameters of ...

tharpa, I know that was for Kevin, but this comment struck me as so ridiculous I can't hold my tongue. Nowadays that rut is believing that people are simply physical mechanisms, that there is no such thing as mind really beyond it being something produced by the rubbing together of physical (i.e. b...

Admitting I cannot fathom something has nothing to do with doubt or question. I could also have said: 'I have no idea what water or air are really, but so what?' In that case I don't know why you would be interested in understanding anything at all. Perhaps you aren't. Not being enlightened, you do...

"Water is caused to exist, and any action by water will cause events to occur." You could say that about anything. It doesn't address anything specific about water. Generalities will only go so far, and that is not very far at all. Certainly your answer doesn't begin to fathom 'water' at a...