vicdan wrote:Diebert van Rhijn wrote:I never read anything Buddhist before I discovered similar things the texts are dealing with by other means. So I'm not a very good advocate I'm afraid.
Then why bring it up in the first place? Why bring it up unless you can actually draw upon it to formulate arguments?
Well, I brought it up as response to your remark about the
physiology of David's passionless sage. Since his description sounded pure Buddhist. Why would I want to discuss Buddhism with you? I want to discuss the passions with you and your view on the possibility of being without desire and/or emotion. So I thought you were going to say something about the physiology of the Buddhist ideal and you got hung up on the first noble truth instead without giving much of an argument either.
OK, how about you name some buddhists who advocate crime, war, and unhealthy living? You know, just to balance it out.
Didn't you list some evil zen buddhists a while back? But still, you assume here that advocating is emotion driven. But that is a presumption you bring with you, not me.
That's your own belief.
Indeed. You are free to challenge it with buddhist arguments and evidence, but you have conspicuously failed to do this so far.
Buddhist
evidence? LOL. That's not the way it works and probably why you're not interested in Buddhism for your research. How can a teaching that is all about "directly experiencing" supply evidence and arguments in academic sense? The only thing you could do as criticism is for example explain why a human being cannot live without desire or passion.
And that's exactly what I was asking all along! It's not dependent on the topic of Buddhism, you see, they might only provide anecdotal evidence or subjective claims for the onlooker. A passionless person, if he would exist, would certainly have no reason to prove his own existence to you?
How would you propose to measure significance of philosophical systems that contain notions on morality, meaning and existence? Not by their success I hope!
Success is actually a pretty good metric, when properly applied; but let's set success aside for the moment. How about sound argument and empirical grounding? You could start by showing how buddhist thinking is a particularly accurate and predictively powerful analysis of the human condition. That would certainly make it
significant.
Why would I argue for that? I'm not a Buddhist and don't care for 95% of 'buddhist thinking', whatever that exactly is, and never claimed differently. On
the topic of being passionless, yes, Buddhist texts make sense. Not to you, okay. So then again, what analysis do you have that would turn this ideal of losing desire and passion in an impossibility (remember:
your suggestion it might be some physiological thing).
There are very many other experiments 'hinting' at self being non-monolithic. AFAIK, by now, that self is not a monolithic cognitive process but a network of relatively independent agents (in computational sense) and processes, is pretty much a truism.
Yes, as the Buddhists already say for many centuries, without all the extravert science: the mind is inseparable from experience, the body and the world.
The only people who proclaim 'there is no inherent self!' as if it were some grand revelation, are scientific illiterates. And if those people furthermore disdain science while making such proclamations, one can solidly conclude that they are religious fanatics vested in their dogma and ignoring the epistemic approaches not matching that dogma.
Who are you talking about? Possibly you're the one who is ages behind on what wise people of all times already discovered in their own mind, nothing grand really, too simple for most folks who introduce complexity where none is needed and remove it were the subtle should begin.
Federer may be an awesome tennis player, but that's all he is (well, that, and fucking hot). He is not a good archer, he is not a good artillery commander, he is not a good astronaut, etc. And let's not even start on other aspects of basic physics which our hypothetical physicist can handle as easily as ballistics, if not more so.
Federer knows that and doesn't care. He
is the game, not the linesman.
