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BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:Jainism, a cousin religion of Buddhism, even refers to its prophets as Tirthinkara or "ford-makers" (Ford meaning a shallow part of the river you can wade through a la Oregon trail not the car) while Buddhism refers to non-Buddhists as tirthika (also means ford-maker but with more emphasis on trying to cross the river than actually crossing the river.) Well now I understand the Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha a whole lot better. Thank you.
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May 16, 2021 14:54
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appreciate the effort you put in here. this was interesting
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May 16, 2021 19:51
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i got into buddhism by having pretty nuanced views about the nature of truth, knowledge, consciousness and so on and reading some yogacara-influenced things and saying "oh yeah that's true, interesting, what else do they have to say?" anyway i went back to vasubandhu's thirty verses on consciousness-only and it's so good. vasubandhu rules. the translation was connely's in inside vasubandhu's yogacara and was quite good - the best i've read (but i dont read sanskrit/old chinese/tibetan so i can only comment on the readability and the fact that it didn't do anything really weird/heterodox/whatever in the translation). the commentary was pretty good too, def. worth reading if that's the sort of thing you're interested in also little jones has been sitting with me lately and it's awesome
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Jun 22, 2021 18:49
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So I was very excited to find this was just put up on Audible: The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika Figured I'd share this in case there are any other Buddhist or Buddhism-interested goons like me who need audiobooks. There is also this channel on YT where a guy with a very nice voice reads a lot of differnt Buddhist material. I found him while looking for readings of Pure Land amterial like sutras or Shinran's works https://www.youtube.com/c/acalaacala/playlists
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Jul 21, 2021 13:15
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I found out about a Drikung Kagyu center nearby. The head monk is doing regular zoom practice sessions. I've only been to a lay Soto Zen meditation group before, so I'm looking forward to dropping in virtually, and hopefully going in person at some point too. I really don't know a whole lot about Tibetan Buddhism (outside of Wikipedia dives) so I find it a little bit intimidating, but it also sounds pretty fascinating. Long-term, I want to find a sangha to belong to, so I can take refuge and formally take the bodhisattva's vow. I don't know if that's a simple goal or a far-off goal, to be honest.
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Jul 30, 2021 22:50
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Cephas posted:I found out about a Drikung Kagyu center nearby. The head monk is doing regular zoom practice sessions. I've only been to a lay Soto Zen meditation group before, so I'm looking forward to dropping in virtually, and hopefully going in person at some point too. Here is a question that came up in another space. Would it be possible to have rebirth as an artificial entity? In this specific context it was 'as a ship' which made me think 'well, maybe if it had like an AI computer, or something.' But perhaps there is writing on this somewhere. My own guess would be that it depends on how good AI ca actually get, although it also seems likely that animal-level existence is achievable.
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Aug 4, 2021 12:02
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At a certain level of realisation you can be reborn as anything you want as in entering a dream lucidly with a form you have chosen. I believe HHDL has joked before about wishing to be reborn as a meadow if he chooses not to be reborn as another Dalai Lama. It seems to me that if there is demonstrable evidence of an AI having a conscious mind (which seems rather unlikely to me as there is no consensus on a definition for consciousness or any way to measure it within the scientific community, perhaps because it isn’t physical) and not just really good at imitating certain behaviours, it would prove the materialist theory of the mind being an emergent property of the brain (or logic gates in this case) thereby disproving the foundation of the Buddhist worldview and one would rationally have to discard the notion of rebirth altogether.
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Aug 4, 2021 17:04
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zhar posted:At a certain level of realisation you can be reborn as anything you want as in entering a dream lucidly with a form you have chosen. I believe HHDL has joked before about wishing to be reborn as a meadow if he chooses not to be reborn as another Dalai Lama. An artificial intelligence would not seem to disprove the concept of suffering nor of rebirth... our brains all came from the expression of complex evolutionary genetic codes, but they had an origin, and they have an ending. One day, even if nothing untoward happens, there will be no members of the Earth species homo sapiens alive... but there would, I assume, still be people suffering and desiring. And the idea of a 'digital intelligence' seems to share a lot of traits with the description of the residents of the deva realms, from what I remember. Perhaps the ability to experience dukkha is a useful shorthand for consciousness?
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Aug 4, 2021 17:11
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yeah nessus is right. you gotta kokolorum that poo poo and assume that if it acts like a mind it's a mind. any argument you could make about "but what if it isn't REALLY conscious and is just pretending" also applies to humans (and anything else you wish). descartes was a gently caress about animal suffering - do not repeat his mistakes
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Aug 4, 2021 17:18
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I didn't say there aren't ways to tell if something is conscious, just that it seems unlikely to be possible to do so within the framework of scientific materialism if the mind isn't material. I'm not going to stop using my toaster if someone adds a sensor and a speaker that imitates screaming when it gets hot (I may cruelly break the speaker).Nessus posted:I figure that there could be pragmatic demonstrations. How do we know we aren't just really good at imitating certain behaviors? Why, my post history is proof! My consciousness is self-evident to me because I am conscious of it, if I wasn't, I would be unconscious and be unable to comprehend it even to that extent. Even on a purely solipsistic level this is obvious. Nessus posted:An artificial intelligence would not seem to disprove the concept of suffering nor of rebirth... our brains all came from the expression of complex evolutionary genetic codes, but they had an origin, and they have an ending. One day, even if nothing untoward happens, there will be no members of the Earth species homo sapiens alive... but there would, I assume, still be people suffering and desiring. And the idea of a 'digital intelligence' seems to share a lot of traits with the description of the residents of the deva realms, from what I remember. I'll be the first to admit I know fuckall about AI. I'm remembering these quotes: Thomas Huxley posted:How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the djinn when Aladdin rubbed his lamp Donald Hoffman posted:Now, Huxley knew that brain activity and conscious experiences are correlated, but he didn't know why. To the science of his day, it was a mystery. In the years since Huxley, science has learned a lot about brain activity, but the relationship between brain activity and conscious experiences is still a mystery. and I don't know if AI researchers are actually trying to reproduce concsiousness or merely imitate it, but if they are going for reproduction I would assume they're trying to do it via the manipulation of logic gates and hoping for a Djinn. If this works then doesn't that mean in principle the mind is caused by, and can be fully explained by physics? On what basis can you say that there is something that is reborn after a power cut, why wouldn't the mind that arose as a property of the electrical configuration be extinguished with the electricity? but speaking as an authority neither on AI or buddhism I could be barking up the wrong tree entirely lol Nessus posted:Perhaps the ability to experience dukkha is a useful shorthand for consciousness? is a buddha or arhat conscious?
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Aug 4, 2021 19:27
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I've been reading this thread for a while now and I'll just say that I find the discussions interesting (as a curious agnostic). Anyway, I hope this is the right place to ask for help identifying this picture I found in my mother's old stuff. It could possibly have belonged to her sister who is a practicing buddhist - I don't know which school exactly, but I think there might be a relation to Tibet. I can recognize the scenes with Buddha seated under the lotus tree and dying on his side in the lower left-hand corner, but I am less sure about the rest of it. Mostly I wonder if it is any particular kind of picture with a religious/practical purpose or more like a souvinir. Apologies for the fuzzyness. https://imgur.com/a/IluAiS4
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Aug 4, 2021 21:08
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it's a thangka (wiki it) and id bet that's shakyamuni in the middle based on an image search where he always seems to be holding that bowl thing and I can't see anything that would mark him as someone else. there are resources online to decoding the symbolism, paramemetics last post in the thread is about it as well and he might be able to help you out more but i don't know much about it. e: definitely shakyamuni, the two figures below him are his two chief disciples zhar fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Aug 4, 2021 |
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Aug 4, 2021 21:41
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zhar posted:and I don't know if AI researchers are actually trying to reproduce concsiousness or merely imitate it, but if they are going for reproduction I would assume they're trying to do it via the manipulation of logic gates and hoping for a Djinn. If this works then doesn't that mean in principle the mind is caused by, and can be fully explained by physics? On what basis can you say that there is something that is reborn after a power cut, why wouldn't the mind that arose as a property of the electrical configuration be extinguished with the electricity? There is also what seems like a sort of projective storytelling that at some point there will be enough arbitrary complexity in computers that they will become intelligent. This sometimes comes with a story about how once it can improve itself (how? irrelevant) it will become more and more intelligent due to the speed advantage electronic systems have over organic ones; and it will do this exponentially, rapidly going from "very bright" to "inconcievably intelligent." There is often a lot of concern about raising the AI so it will become that intelligent, and will also be friendly to humans. I don't know if this is even possible. I understand Moore's Law is starting to break down and we will reach a point in my own likely lifespan where improvements in computing will have to come from doing actual work in clever design and programming, rather than just making faster, smaller chips. However, it does seem plausible that we could eventually develop autonomous electronic 'intelligences' which are, at least, comparable to animals... bugs and such, almost certainly. On the philosophical topic, I don't see why it would. I've gone under general anesthetic, but I feel like I'm the same person I was before then (I'm leaving aside sleep, since that occurs naturally). I just don't see how a greater understanding of neurology, or simulated neurology, or some other method that led to general artificial intelligence, would necessarily invalidate the four noble truths or the general idea of rebirth.
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Aug 4, 2021 23:18
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I’m not arguing against the idea of intelligence in artificial intelligence especially as it pertains to problem solving as I’ve certainly been thrashed by a fairly low difficulty chess bot more intelligent than me before. I don’t think that implies it was a sentient being possessing a conscious mind. As we both know in the Buddhist view the mind from previous life conjoins with sperm and egg probably sometime after conception (I don’t think it’s clear exactly when) and sure maybe it’s possible for a computer to be a suitable basis for that kind of conjunction but I think the only way to be sure is to wait for the proof. I looked up general ai and brain simulation (which doesn’t seem to be going anywhere soon) and I’m sceptical neural simulation would provide that basis. Demonstrably having an identical sentient mind repeatably emerge in the same state from a specific physical configuration (like reloading a save file on a video game) would disprove rebirth for sure as that mind is clearly being produced by that physical configuration. If it is not shown that the mind is an emergent property of the computer then maybe this doesn’t disprove rebirth. All hypothetical of course though and I think in practice we will not have to worry as sentient ai seems extremely unlikely.
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Aug 5, 2021 01:49
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zhar posted:As we both know in the Buddhist view the mind from previous life conjoins with sperm and egg probably sometime after conception (I don’t think it’s clear exactly when) Is this a generally accepted view of rebirth?
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Aug 5, 2021 02:12
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having a mind require physical things to dependently arise does not "disprove rebirth." neither does a physical configuration leading to particular reproducible mental states. and that's ignoring the gross oversimplification of "like a save" when you're talking about something that is firmly in the realm of science fiction anyway.
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Aug 5, 2021 02:30
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mind is one way of talking about observable systems. i can best make sense of you by saying "zhar is minded." anything i can articulate, though, is ultimately incorrect (some utterances are closer than others to correct, but good luck figuring out which ones). this includes whatever i mean by "mind," "zhar," etc. i do not make good sense of my computer by calling it "minded." same with my socks. for my dog, well, he's minded in certain capacities and not in others. he's dog-minded. what you're describing as the buddhist view seems to be pretty classic cartesian dualism, and while there's some language that sorta pushes that way i don't think it's really accurate
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Aug 5, 2021 02:37
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zhar posted:in the Buddhist view the mind from previous life conjoins with sperm and egg Not exactly. According to sutras on this topic, the Buddha referred to four different types of reproduction, with sentient beings arising “from an egg, from a womb, from moisture, or spontaneously.” The third category includes beings like maggots and other larvae that grow out of rotting organic matter, while the fourth refers to hell-beings, gods, and beings in pure lands, who are born by the power of their karma alone. So I don’t see any reason to think that the arising of a mind in an artificial or non-organic being would disprove the Buddhist theory of mind or the doctrine of rebirth. It does seem that Louis Pasteur already disproved the Buddhist understanding of how maggots and such are born, although I don’t think most Buddhists would consider that a particularly fundamental doctrine. I think Achmed Jones is right that you’re assuming that the doctrine of rebirth implies something like Cartesian dualism, which Buddhism has historically denied altogether (normatively, if not always in practice). Even invisible beings like ghosts and gandharvas are described as possessing “subtle” bodies, since the orthodox Buddhist worldview doesn’t allow for the Christian/Islamic/Platonic idea of a soul or psyche that can exist independently of a body.
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Aug 5, 2021 03:36
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zhar posted:As we both know in the Buddhist view the mind from previous life conjoins with sperm and egg probably sometime after conception (I don’t think it’s clear exactly when) and sure maybe it’s possible for a computer to be a suitable basis for that kind of conjunction but I think the only way to be sure is to wait for the proof. I looked up general ai and brain simulation (which doesn’t seem to be going anywhere soon) and I’m sceptical neural simulation would provide that basis. quote:Demonstrably having an identical sentient mind repeatably emerge in the same state from a specific physical configuration (like reloading a save file on a video game) would disprove rebirth for sure as that mind is clearly being produced by that physical configuration. If it is not shown that the mind is an emergent property of the computer then maybe this doesn’t disprove rebirth. All hypothetical of course though and I think in practice we will not have to worry as sentient ai seems extremely unlikely.
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Aug 5, 2021 05:00
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Yorkshire Pudding posted:Is this a generally accepted view of rebirth? maybe not. that was a very bad post i fired off in a hurry using sloppy language. what I was referring to as 'mind' is the idea of the continuum of mental conciousness, but Ithink even this does have a pranic component. I was using conception to reason that rebirth into an AI/computer is possible, I didn't mean to imply that that was the only mechanism for rebirth (I can't see how you would have parents in the formless realm) but it does come off that way. Achmed Jones posted:having a mind require physical things to dependently arise does not "disprove rebirth." neither does a physical configuration leading to particular reproducible mental states. and that's ignoring the gross oversimplification of "like a save" when you're talking about something that is firmly in the realm of science fiction anyway. I agree. I tried to say in my last post I believe maybe it's possible for a mind to arise in dependence on a computer but the way I phrased it maybe implied something else, the only thing I think would disprove rebirth is if there was evidence the mind was an emergent property of the computer, that is the computer caused the mind. You're right that my example wouldn't prove that though, I didn't really think it through. Nessus posted:I have never heard this said as a specific statement on when the mind connects to the newly formed body. I don't think Shakyamuni spoke much about that specific, it would have kind of been getting off the plot. I do recall the analogy that rebirth is like lighting a candle from another candle: the two candles can be completely different, yet it is not incorrect to say that they shared the flame, right? Yeah, I think this is correct. If you simulated a bunch and they didn't diverge under the same conditions it would be worrying.
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Aug 5, 2021 12:31
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Laocius posted:It does seem that Louis Pasteur already disproved the Buddhist understanding of how maggots and such are born, although I don’t think most Buddhists would consider that a particularly fundamental doctrine. While something like this is totally true, I am curious how other Buddhists respond to this alongside the belief that the Buddha is capable of knowing, seeing, and understanding everything. Doesn't the Buddha being wrong about one thing call other things into question, even if it doesn't directly apply to the fundamental teachings of Buddhism?
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Aug 6, 2021 05:26
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the buddha was right about ending suffering. he wasn't some magic omniscient being that never made a mistake and if he was all that just call it "skillful means," gives you a good out of you want it. "tathagata teaches in mysterious ways"
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Aug 6, 2021 05:46
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"buddha, what happened when you were enlightened?" "i saw all the effects of karma, all my past lives, all my future ones. i know the outcome of my actions" "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE LIFECYCLE OF THE HOUSEFLY???" i'm being silly of course, but the short answer to your question is "nah." if somebody showed that meditating is bad for you or that clinging doesn't lead to suffering id be with you, but for poo poo that doesn't matter to the important bits of the path, you don't have to care. if you want to you can do the scholar "reconciling the texts" thing but you don't have to if that sort of thing isn't just fun and/or compulsory for you. if it is compulsory for the way your brain works, try to fix it. i'm not joking - my brain does the same thing. it's important to engage with the teachings. it's ok to reject some of them. some of the teachings you can't reject, but not being fully on board with everything is how it's supposed to work. one of the following will happen: 1. you'll figure out a way around it. write this down, it can help other people. this is scholarship. make good arguments with citations please 2. you'll come to accept whatever version of "orthodox" that you're having problems with. this is fine too 3. you'll find somebody else that has solved your problem and will become more interested in some other school/branch/whatever of buddhism. this also is no problem! people have been doing this poo poo for 2500 years. there's a lot of disagreement. there's a lot of ways to interpret texts. figuring out the way that works for you is half the point. and of course at the end of the day, there's not a huge amount of difference between "rejecting the [naive interpretation of the] teaching" and "reinterpreting the text" as always there are limits to things, but in general as long as you're not rolling into the sangha all trying to well-actually the monks and nuns nobody's gonna care if your understanding of the storehouse consciousness is different. or if you have 21st century views about maggots (they all do, too)
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Aug 6, 2021 06:03
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Waiting for the pope to get into my clutches so I can hadouken him with the fact the Bible calls bats birds. This will destroy Catholicism.
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Aug 6, 2021 14:10
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I was thinking a bit more about the AI thing and maybe I should clarify my own position and hopefully someone can tell me if I'm getting it wrong. I'm really sketchy when it comes to buddhist philosophy but at some point I was taught that everything has a substantial cause, eg the substantial cause of an apple tree is an apple seed and not a pear seed, soil, water or sunlight (the latter three being cooperative conditions). Something can't be the substantial cause for, or transform into something of a completely different nature. the mind has a different nature to the physical world including brain matter and electricity: although mental states can be inferred from and changed by the neural correlates and behaviour, the mind has no physical characteristics and even the wonders of modern science as rooted in physics have been unable to detect or measure consciousness (how much does a coma patient have, when does it arise and how much at each stage of foetal development etc) or determine the minimum requirements for conciousness to arise. The conclusion is that each moment of consciousness/mind has the preceding moment of consciousness/mind as substantial cause. I thought I originally heard this from a Theravada source but it seems it originates from Dharmakirti (goes through logic in more detail) so maybe not. I have no idea how widely held similar ideas are in buddhism as Dharmakirti is not a universal figure although from a cursory search I found this idea of rebirth consciousness in the abhidhamma which seems very consistent. There are obviously very different views regarding an intermediate state. The view held by scientific materialists of the relationship between mind and brain seems to be as I previously quoted like lamp and djinn or switch and light. Obviously switch position and light are correlated. it would be foolish to think the light switch is the light but less unreasonable to think the switch causes the light and likewise not unreasonable that the neural correlates cause the mind. I do not believe this is the traditional buddhist view. Neural AI simulation seems to depend on this view, and if a very realistic light switch was simulated in a computer and this resulted in light being produced, I agree this does not prove that the simulated switch caused the light - maybe it suggests the switch attracts the light or something. Personally I think noone will ever get light by simulating a switch but if they did it would certainly call into question my currently held beliefs regarding the relationship between light and switch and I have similar thoughts regarding brain and mind.
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Aug 6, 2021 20:32
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does the switch cause the light, or does the switch allow the flow of electrons to create light?
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Aug 6, 2021 20:48
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Achmed Jones posted:mind is one way of talking about observable systems. i can best make sense of you by saying "zhar is minded." I also wanna defend myself a bit here as when I was saying "not just really good at imitating certain behaviours" or seeming to have an observable mind, I was thinking of what is apparently referred to as 'narrow ai' or what my understanding of ai was outside of brain simulation. it's concievable that ai language processing and image generation get so good that you can have say, a visualised donald trump onscreen that you can call names and he gets angry in a way that the real donald trump might. my understanding of how this kind of thing works (based on the current method) is that you'd feed some fancy algorithm a big dataset of all the interviews and so on trump has done, language and so on and it uses some kind of magical mathematics to process what you're saying, distil this down and use how trump appears to react to things in other interviews (maybe augmented with how people generarlly react to thingss), the behavioural appearance of anger and so forth to poo poo out audiovisual information within some statistical margin of whats realistic enough. So it's been trained with what the word 'anger' means, with peoples facial expressions, definitions and so on and maybe it can infer with complex statistics from trumps prior interviews when he's angry and the whatever quirks he displays and generate something that looks like a genuine response, it really looks "minded", right? but this system has never been trained with the subjective experience of anger, it would be impossible to do so (in buddhist psychology anger is a mental affliction one is born with, not learned), it's just using complex equations and video files to generate an observable appearance of anger. to think that in the process of doing so a sentient being pops up and subjectively experiences anger behind the scenes and then dies is imo laughable and i'll have as much compassion for this ai as i do my toaster. Impermanent posted:does the switch cause the light, or does the switch allow the flow of electrons to create light? in this example i think the switch is a cooperative condition for the light like water for the apple seed (the latter) zhar fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Aug 6, 2021 |
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Aug 6, 2021 21:06
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oh if you're talking narrow AI it's easy. you just show it stuff outside of its applicability. then it clearly reacts in a non-minded way and we say "mindedness is not a good way to interpret what i'm observing about this thing" and we're done what you're describing is still incoherent. if the trump facsimile reacts to things just like the real trump would, why would you say that you haven't created consciousness? if the facsimile can react to all the things in a minded way, why would we say it's only weak AI? the only thing you're doing is saying "i make something indistinguishable from consciousness, except I say 'nuh uh it isnt consciousness' in the setup." If you can't articulate a way in which the thing you're describing is different from consciousness - and no, the words "magic algorithm that isn't consciousness" don't't do the trick - then you're just begging the question in a pretty blatant way regardless of how "laughable" you find things. trying to draw a sharp distinction between "born with" and "learned" is gonna be pretty fraught, too. the world doesn't actually work in that simplistic way.
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Aug 6, 2021 21:32
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I’m no expert in philosophy either, but fundamentally I don’t see any inherent conflict between emergentism and Buddhist views of the mind. Buddhists don’t universally* conceive of consciousness as a “substance” that moves between bodies, but primarily as a line of karmic continuity that links each moment of consciousness to the next, including between lifetimes. In other words, your mind may very well depend on your brain, but the configuration of your brain is itself conditioned by your prior karma, so it’s no more a challenge to Buddhist doctrine than any other circumstances of a being’s birth. It would be like trying to disprove karma by pointing to the immediate material cause of a karmic result. If I’m sick, for example, the fact that my illness is observably caused by a bacterium or virus does not mean that isn’t also the result of my past karma. Similarly, the fact that my mind is the result of the specific shape and chemistry of my brain doesn’t preclude my brain being produced by my past karma either. If the mind existed without depending on the brain, there would be no difference in mental capacities between humans and animals, for instance. Returning to your example, if two beings (mechanical or otherwise) had identical brain configurations and thought or behaved identically as a result, this would not necessarily disprove Buddhist understandings of consciousness and rebirth. A Buddhist observer could simply say that these two beings had very similar karma and thus received basically identical births. This does mean that a key doctrine of Buddhism is basically unfalsifiable, but whether that’s a problem or not is a more subjective question. Plenty of respected philosophical systems are based on unfalsifiable claims, after all. * I say “universally” because I know there’s always a diversity of views on these topics. The existence of phowa practices, for instance, would seem to require conceiving of consciousness as a “thing” that travels from body to body, but there may be some doctrinal nuances that I’m missing there.
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Aug 6, 2021 21:37
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Achmed Jones posted:trying to draw a sharp distinction between "born with" and "learned" is gonna be pretty fraught, too. the world doesn't actually work in that simplistic way. Especially in Buddhism, since anything you’re “born with” must be something you “learned” in a previous life.
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Aug 6, 2021 21:40
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Achmed Jones posted:oh if you're talking narrow AI it's easy. you just show it stuff outside of its applicability. then it clearly reacts in a non-minded way and we say "mindedness is not a good way to interpret what i'm observing about this thing" and we're done I just meant maths I have no hope of understanding when I said magic, not that it’s actually magic. It seems we both agree narrow ai isn’t going to do it though so I’m not going to continue this thread. Laocius posted:I’m no expert in philosophy either, but fundamentally I don’t see any inherent conflict between emergentism and Buddhist views of the mind. Buddhists don’t universally* conceive of consciousness as a “substance” that moves between bodies, but primarily as a line of karmic continuity that links each moment of consciousness to the next, including between lifetimes. I’d be very interested in a link or something to an emergentist school! I agree about the identical brain configurations to an extent: if they continued to behave and think identically for ever and ever that would mean they have not only very similar karma, like twins, but identical karma which seems unlikely. And I’m really not arguing that the human mind doesn’t depend on the human brain, otherwise id try to prove with by hitting my head with a brick but I’m not that dumb. I agree wrt karma to an extent but I’m still convinced by Dharmakirti’s logic that the brain doesn’t transform into a state of mind. Laocius posted:Especially in Buddhism, since anything you’re “born with” must be something you “learned” in a previous life. The mental afflictions like anger are derivative of the three root afflictions (kleshas) the king of which is ignorance which is the first link of dependent origination. How does one learn the cause of birth in a previous birth?
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Aug 6, 2021 22:31
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Achmed Jones posted:oh if you're talking narrow AI it's easy. you just show it stuff outside of its applicability. then it clearly reacts in a non-minded way and we say "mindedness is not a good way to interpret what i'm observing about this thing" and we're done Ok maybe I will return to this now I have a few minutes. One ethical problem is it’s entirely subjective what one considers as displaying “mindedness” so I’ll have to use what seems minded to me in these examples but maybe this isn’t your definition. A puppet can appear minded but obviously isn’t. A cartoon character is the same. I don’t imagine it would be too hard to make a little robot that scuttles around, runs away from heat and moisture and ‘dies’ with the battery, but similar to the previous examples it’s just a human mind figuring out what might seem minded to other humans, in this case programming it in without any fancy ai. Not sure many people would say it’s having conscious experience. For the same reasons an ai that’s been designed to do this automatically based on people clicking an angry face on a captcha that modifies some kind of statistical algorithm until it can compare some abstracted visual pattern with an arbitrary face which selects the same one as a certain percentage of captcha users, this still just human minds producing instructions to generate an image which hopefully appears realisticly angry and ‘minded’ to another human mind. I’m just not seeing where this new mind is arising from no matter how good it looks. Maybe it’s begging the question but yeah I don’t think it’s gonna have conscious experience kind of by definition. I mentioned kleshas in my previous post, I’m not going to double check a source or provide a citation for this one right now and I’m not saying it’s true but I’m reasonably confident it’s fairly classic Buddhism. If the mind was free from mental afflictions one wouldn’t generate karma for future rebirth, and if one could learn them why not an ariya bodhisattva?
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Aug 7, 2021 00:01
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zhar posted:I’d be very interested in a link or something to an emergentist school! I’m actually not aware of a specifically emergentist school of Buddhism, I was just referring to emergentism as a philosophical concept generally. Sorry if that was confusing. zhar posted:I agree about the identical brain configurations to an extent: if they continued to behave and think identically for ever and ever that would mean they have not only very similar karma, like twins, but identical karma which seems unlikely. Right. In order to behave and think identically for the rest of their lives, they would have to have identical experiences, meaning that they had identical karma, which as you said is unlikely, if not impossible. zhar posted:And I’m really not arguing that the human mind doesn’t depend on the human brain, otherwise id try to prove with by hitting my head with a brick but I’m not that dumb. I agree wrt karma to an extent but I’m still convinced by Dharmakirti’s logic that the brain doesn’t transform into a state of mind. I didn’t think that’s what you were arguing, but it sounded like that was the view you were attributing to Buddhism. I’m not very familiar with Dharmakirti specifically, so I can’t speak to his views on the subject, but I’m sure there are Buddhists who would argue against emergentism. I was more trying to present the best case for the compatibility of the two. zhar posted:The mental afflictions like anger are derivative of the three root afflictions (kleshas) the king of which is ignorance which is the first link of dependent origination. How does one learn the cause of birth in a previous birth? Anger and the other afflictions are simply negative psychological habits formed over the course of our samsaric existence. We can only overcome them—unlearn them—because they are not intrinsic to us. This is stated most clearly by the tathagatagarbha school, which claims that enlightenment is our original state of mind, prior to the development of these afflictions Incidentally, more western philosophers have apparently been turning to panpsychism as a way of resolving the problem of consciousness, which would bring them closer to both tathagatagarbha and yogacara.
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Aug 7, 2021 00:21
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if you can't think of how to tell a cartoon character's script from a mind, or a puppet from the puppeteer, there's not really anything i can do here. the whole point is that there are reasons why mindedness is a better explanation for humans than puppets. same with the robot. you keep saying "x is kinda like a minded thing," but so what? lots of things are kind of like other things. hydrogen is kind of like helium when oxygen is the contrast case. there is a difference, though. the difference is a proton (and the resultant behavior we observe). i bet you can think of what differences there are between cute little robots and minds. this is going in circles, though. i won't be responding to you any more. e: I couldn't agree more with laocius below Achmed Jones fucked around with this message at 03:09 on Aug 7, 2021 |
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Aug 7, 2021 00:30
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I would also say that it’s completely pointless to speculate on the difference between a “mind” and “something that behaves like a mind” until such a thing actually exists that we can observe. So far as I’m aware, no one has ever argued that puppets or cartoons or computer programs are sentient beings deserving of moral consideration. Until someone develops a puppet or cartoon or computer program that convincingly acts like it has subjective experience, and people start to treat it as such and argue for that, this is all just idle speculation. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Is the world eternal, or not, or both, or neither? Edit: To clarify, I think the hypothetical situation of an artificial mind is worth considering for its implications on Buddhism. What I find pointless (and basically irrelevant to Buddhism) is speculating as to how we would determine whether we have encountered such a mind. Until that situation actually presents itself, who cares? Laocius fucked around with this message at 02:26 on Aug 7, 2021 |
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Aug 7, 2021 02:11
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I do think it's possible that we will make machines sophisticated enough to be analogous to animals, to which we owe some moral duty.
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Aug 7, 2021 02:30
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agreed, nessus. and on a purely practical level, it's generally good IMO to be kind to robots and chairs and stuff because it gets you in the habit of reacting kindly/lets you practice the activity of being-kind. i almost wrote "not 'practice' in the sense of buddhist practice, but 'practice' in the sense of practicing being kind" and then of course it hit me that those, if not the same thing, at least have a lot of overlap on the ol' venn diagram. if we're doing the virtue ethics thing (and i very much think we should), it's good to be kind to robots and chairs because this cultivates the virtue of kindness/makes us the type of person that will be kind. doesn't matter that the robot or chair can't (yet) suffer, doesn't care one way or the other, etc - important thing is to fix the virtue/develop the habit/live skillfully. and since i want to be the type of person that is kind, it's of secondary (at best) importance whether or not the robot is sentient or sapient or what-have-you. what matters is that i'm sowing beneficial seeds. just throwin em out there, yeeting compassion into the void.
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Aug 7, 2021 03:16
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Laocius posted:Until that situation actually presents itself, who cares? absolutely lol, 100%. this maybe also applies to emergentism: as far as I can tell there is no traditional buddhist school that asserts this, although I haven't looked hard. Laocius posted:Anger and the other afflictions are simply negative psychological habits formed over the course of our samsaric existence. We can only overcome them—unlearn them—because they are not intrinsic to us. This is stated most clearly by the tathagatagarbha school, which claims that enlightenment is our original state of mind, prior to the development of these afflictions If the enlightened mind existed prior to the development of the afflictions that generate karma leading to birth, how did it aquire them and wouldn't this imply a buddha could fall back into samsara by re-aquiring them?
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Aug 7, 2021 10:23
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That question has occurred to me as well, but I haven’t studied tathagtagarbha or zen all that deeply, so I don’t actually know the answer. I’m sure that somebody has come up with one over the last thousand-plus years, so hopefully someone more familiar with this strain of thought can chime in and answer it for you. Interestingly, I usually hear zen teachers frame it in the exact opposite way from the question. According to them, if buddhahood were something external to us that we could gain, we would also be able to lose it. It is precisely the fact that we are originally enlightened by nature that makes eternal (or perhaps timeless) buddhahood possible. I would also add that many (probably most) zen teachers use terms like “original” somewhat metaphorically. That is, we are “originally enlightened” not in a literal, historical sense, but in the sense that enlightenment is fundamental to us in a way that transcends time itself.
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Aug 7, 2021 20:36
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Many Zen teachers would probably respond to this discussion with the classic Mumonkan Case 1, Joshu's reply to the question "Does this dog have Buddha-nature?". Taking Mazu's "Mind is Buddha", and applying it to the discussion itt, it's "is this dog 'minded' or not?", and Joshu's answer is enough to provide a lifetime of study and practice. As for my interpretation of his answer and how it pertains to this conversation from specifically a Zen perspective, the answer is that the question misses the point entirely. The point of Zen practice is the realization of one's own nature, which cannot be accomplished by stacking concepts on top of other concepts and building up an intellectual understanding of all the right answers. There's no such thing as closer or further away, but by burying oneself in pointless questions neither the bodhisattva nor sentient beings are helped.
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Aug 7, 2021 20:54
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