The argument really is not about whether or not the brain relates with mental and other functions, simply that is not the 'seat of consciousness'. Again, I recall the TV analogy: if you break the set you might conclude that the set was producing the image since clearly you can no longer watch the movie. This is a perfectly reasonable, logical and seemingly incontravertible position. Except that it's wrong. The set is not the source of the movie. At all. Even though its processes are necessary in order to perceive it and without such processes no movie can be seen at all. Without certain organs and functions, we cannot live. However my contention is that consciousness is not produced in the body alone, there will be no 'mentron' discovered just as there will be no 'graviton'. Mind and awareness are a combination of a translocal, non-physical 'field' of sorts along with individuated 'physical' (the TV set analogy) existence/being, which is also why when you break TV set A, this does not mean that TV set B in another room stops broadcasting the movie.
To explore your analogy of the television, if our bodies are receivers (television sets), then the universe is the program and the receiver is embedded in the message.
The TV is an attractive analogy, after all it is one that suits our age. 100 years ago it would not have been an available explanation. It does firmly place the source of counscousness in the external though. I'm not sure why we humans recoil so much at the idea that consciousness is an intrinisic quality of matter that given suitable circumstances will express itself. We are more like computers than TVs (again, an analogy that suits the present).
I left the original comment in though am modifying my original comment to the effect that computers are more like us, or at least models of part of our brain.
Last edited by reedsch on Wed Dec 27, 2006 3:05 am, edited 1 time in total.
- There is no evidence for the idea that our minds originate from somewhere else. So it currently has the status of wishful thinking.
- It is based on a false duality between consciousness and matter. It is basically saying that consciousness is like a stream of light which originates from a distance source (presumably magical or divine, just to make our egos feel even better about whole thing) and then is reflected through our heads, through our eyes and out into the environment, casting its light on whatever is around us.
For some reason, the trees and stones don't come from the magical source, only the light does. So it's biased against matter - and, at the same time, biased towards the human ego. No surprises there.
The analogy (and the concept it illustrates) seems designed mainly to give passive, submissive people with a flakey mentality a sense of permanency and allow them to stave off the knowledge that they will soon be extinguished.
WOW! You certainly have taken the analogy in ways I hadn’t imagined or intended. I view body and mind as two aspects of a single source with neither body nor mind in a preeminent position. The use of the terms body and mind are utilitarian, not essential. I don’t know how you arrive at the notion that the analogy suggests an eternal self-entity, but I hold no such view.
As far as I'm aware, the analogy is meant to convey the idea that when the body dies the mind will continue on, because its source isn't located within the body. The body is like a passive receiver of the mind generated from elsewhere. In Tharpa's case at least, the aim is to try and feel secure in the face of impermanency.
