I suppose this counts as threadjacking, but this thread seems about played out, so I’ll respond to your response to my off-topic aside.
I’m interested in what you say. I don’t think it’s necessarily off base. But my little cheeky comment was in reference to the Buddhist concept of anatta, or non-self. That is, Eliezer’s insistence that there is no purposeful unifying force behind what we experience as “our” desires reminded me of an analogous teaching of the Buddha. Evolution can be seen as a unifying force, I suppose, since it is the common wellspring of our desires, but as Eliezer is rightly at pains to point out, it is decidedly not purposeful. “A thousand shards of desire” is what we are left with.
One of the key concepts of Buddhist meditation and scholarship is that desires are ultimately independent of the desirer. [Note: I differentiate serious, classical Buddhism, which has a ridiculously large set of founding texts and canonical commentaries, from pop Buddhism. or the selective Western brand of Buddhism which takes the concepts that have appeal for people brought up in a society where the dominant religious traditions are monotheistic and authoritarian (the West, that is) while leaving behind the less sexy teachings which are in fact the core of the practice.] In the first stages of serious meditation, before you achieve any mystical bliss or whatnot, it becomes quite clear that the thoughts and desires that we take for granted as “our own” are in fact caused by specific conditions and fall away when those conditions cease. That’s the practice-based observation. The theoretical concept that springs from that is that, in fact, we build our mistaken sense of a unified “I” out of these falsely-apprehended experiences. (I say theoretical because my personal inquiries have not yet fully borne this out… perhaps they will, perhaps not… there are Buddhist scholars and monks who claim to know this to be ontologically true… I have reasons to doubt them, but I also have reasons to believe them… further inquiry is required).
Of course this teaching comes from a time before any understanding of evolutionary theory, and is practiced today by people who, broadly speaking, still don’t have any real understanding of such (yours truly included!). I don’t want to throw around too much sloppy thinking here, but I will suggest that there may be more than one angle at which to come to an understanding. Both disciplined scientific inquiry and disciplined meditational inquiry are (properly) undertaken with a desire to get at an understanding of reality while systematically eliminating misapprehensions and biases as they arise.
Anyway, all that is not to refute what you said, but to explain my comment.
I will take issue with your positing that the teachings on the end of suffering were added by later theocrats or rulers who wanted to broaden its appeal for the masses. In the oldest texts we have (written down around 2200 BC, after 300 or so years surviving in an oral tradition the fidelity of which has been shown in other contexts to be remarkable), the Buddha teaches again and again about suffering. Several places in the sutras he is quoted as saying, “I teach one thing: suffering and its end.” The teaching on the Four Noble Truths (said to be the first teaching he ever gave though admittedly that’s pretty hard to ascertain for sure) is the central teaching of the Buddhist canon. Many, many, many of the Buddha’s teachings came in for debate, abandonment and wholesale tortion as they spread to various different societies with their own cultural norms and mores and institutions and languages. But the teachings on suffering and its end are the same in Tibet as they are in Sri Lanka as they are in Japan. You might argue that the original teaching was somehow a cynical appeal to the masses (I am very much inclined to say it was not), but it’s clearly not a later corruption.
I’m very interested in parallels between the kind of ruthlessly rational inquiry displayed by the thinkers on this blog and that displayed by the early Buddhist, including the Buddha himself. I find myself looking for ways to reconcile the two. Of course, in even admitting that, I’m busting myself! If I have my desired conclusion in mind as I sift through the evidence, I have already forgotten the central teachings of Overcoming Bias! … I’ll press on though, catching myself where I can! ;)
Richard:
I suppose this counts as threadjacking, but this thread seems about played out, so I’ll respond to your response to my off-topic aside.
I’m interested in what you say. I don’t think it’s necessarily off base. But my little cheeky comment was in reference to the Buddhist concept of anatta, or non-self. That is, Eliezer’s insistence that there is no purposeful unifying force behind what we experience as “our” desires reminded me of an analogous teaching of the Buddha. Evolution can be seen as a unifying force, I suppose, since it is the common wellspring of our desires, but as Eliezer is rightly at pains to point out, it is decidedly not purposeful. “A thousand shards of desire” is what we are left with.
One of the key concepts of Buddhist meditation and scholarship is that desires are ultimately independent of the desirer. [Note: I differentiate serious, classical Buddhism, which has a ridiculously large set of founding texts and canonical commentaries, from pop Buddhism. or the selective Western brand of Buddhism which takes the concepts that have appeal for people brought up in a society where the dominant religious traditions are monotheistic and authoritarian (the West, that is) while leaving behind the less sexy teachings which are in fact the core of the practice.] In the first stages of serious meditation, before you achieve any mystical bliss or whatnot, it becomes quite clear that the thoughts and desires that we take for granted as “our own” are in fact caused by specific conditions and fall away when those conditions cease. That’s the practice-based observation. The theoretical concept that springs from that is that, in fact, we build our mistaken sense of a unified “I” out of these falsely-apprehended experiences. (I say theoretical because my personal inquiries have not yet fully borne this out… perhaps they will, perhaps not… there are Buddhist scholars and monks who claim to know this to be ontologically true… I have reasons to doubt them, but I also have reasons to believe them… further inquiry is required).
Of course this teaching comes from a time before any understanding of evolutionary theory, and is practiced today by people who, broadly speaking, still don’t have any real understanding of such (yours truly included!). I don’t want to throw around too much sloppy thinking here, but I will suggest that there may be more than one angle at which to come to an understanding. Both disciplined scientific inquiry and disciplined meditational inquiry are (properly) undertaken with a desire to get at an understanding of reality while systematically eliminating misapprehensions and biases as they arise.
Anyway, all that is not to refute what you said, but to explain my comment.
I will take issue with your positing that the teachings on the end of suffering were added by later theocrats or rulers who wanted to broaden its appeal for the masses. In the oldest texts we have (written down around 2200 BC, after 300 or so years surviving in an oral tradition the fidelity of which has been shown in other contexts to be remarkable), the Buddha teaches again and again about suffering. Several places in the sutras he is quoted as saying, “I teach one thing: suffering and its end.” The teaching on the Four Noble Truths (said to be the first teaching he ever gave though admittedly that’s pretty hard to ascertain for sure) is the central teaching of the Buddhist canon. Many, many, many of the Buddha’s teachings came in for debate, abandonment and wholesale tortion as they spread to various different societies with their own cultural norms and mores and institutions and languages. But the teachings on suffering and its end are the same in Tibet as they are in Sri Lanka as they are in Japan. You might argue that the original teaching was somehow a cynical appeal to the masses (I am very much inclined to say it was not), but it’s clearly not a later corruption.
I’m very interested in parallels between the kind of ruthlessly rational inquiry displayed by the thinkers on this blog and that displayed by the early Buddhist, including the Buddha himself. I find myself looking for ways to reconcile the two. Of course, in even admitting that, I’m busting myself! If I have my desired conclusion in mind as I sift through the evidence, I have already forgotten the central teachings of Overcoming Bias! … I’ll press on though, catching myself where I can! ;)