Comments on: Certain knowledge

By: Following science as a layperson | Love of All Wisdom

Following science as a layperson | Love of All Wisdom — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 05:05:37 +0000

[...] on evidence. Descartes thought that the one thing he could be certain of was that he existed, but Buddhists have raised powerful challenges even to that view. If Descartes could be wrong in his certainty on the self, how can we really be certain of anything [...]

By: Against “non-overlapping magisteria” | Love of All Wisdom

Against “non-overlapping magisteria” | Love of All Wisdom — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:39:31 +0000

[...] discovered, in ways that change things we thought we knew for sure. I’ve previously noted the difficulty with attempts at certain knowledge. Since writing that post, I’ve become a little more confident in saying we can never truly [...]

By: Amod Lele

Amod Lele — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:34:18 +0000

Welcome to the blog, Harold. This is very interesting – could you say a bit more about your condition? How does your perception of the world differ from that of other people you encounter, and how does that affect your view of certainty?

By: Harold Knight

Harold Knight — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:29:55 +0000

All certainly aside…
One of the most entertaining aspects of certain kinds of epilepsy (mine is Temporal Lobe) is the complete lack of certainty in existence. Tuning out and seeing one’s surroundings, not through a glass darkly, but through a glass much too bright is the regular experience of folks like me. What that does, of course, is make speculations about “certainty” or “reality” or “epistemology” interesting mental games to play in those moments when the world looks as if it exists. Those who want to know what certainty is should include a few epileptics in their conversation just to keep things on an even keel.

By: michael reidy

michael reidy — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 12:33:29 +0000

Amod,
It’s a complex argument and I hope I have not mangled it too much. It’s not so much discursive, apodeictic thought that Sartre is talking about but consciousness as such which he identifies with being. If I might risk a simplistic assimilation, the vritti or mental modification is distinguished from pure consciousness in an analogous manner. Of course Sartre’s being consciousness is human being consciousness.

By: Amod Lele

Amod Lele — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 22:05:27 +0000

So as I understand it, Sartre’s point is that thought and being must be separate, so that thought cannot be foundational for being, but only the other way round? I’m not sure I agree with that. It seems to me that when one looks for foundations properly, one establishes being and thought at the same time – because one establishes that thought exists. And I’m not sure it’s a huge leap from there to say that at that fundamental level, being and thought are the same – whether one expresses that point by saying “brahman is sat, cit, and ?nanda” or “the real is rational and the rational is real.”

By: michael reidy

michael reidy — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 21:48:57 +0000

Amod writes: Hi Michael – I’m not sure I get Sartre’s point. Why is the recognition of consciousness not knowledge, and so why can it not be axiomatic? |||||||||||||||||||||| Hi Amod, Elsewhere in the section which I quoted he writes:

We said that consciousness is the knowing being in his capacity as being and not as being known. This means that we must abandon the primacy of knowledge if we wish to establish that knowledge. Of course consciousness can know and know itself. But it is in itself something other than a knowledge turned back on itself.

What I take Sartre to mean is that the Cartesian cogito is not primative but consciousness looking at itself. It is in the realm of knowledge and so is not foundational of itself. It does not establish itself.

Thus reflection has no kind of primacy over the consciousness reflected on. It is not reflection which reveals the consciousness reflected-on to itself. Quite the contrary, it is the non-reflective consciousness which renders the reflection possible; there is a pre-reflective cogito which is the condition of the Cartesian cogito.

Really the whole section needs to be read to get the flavour and feel of his somewhat anfractuose though profound thought. My seeing in the pre-reflective cogito a 'kuthasta' may be no more than the yellow Toyota syndrome - when you buy one, you begin to see them everywhere.

By: Amod Lele

Amod Lele — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:27:05 +0000

Hi Michael – I’m not sure I get Sartre’s point. Why is the recognition of consciousness not knowledge, and so why can it not be axiomatic?

By: Amod Lele

Amod Lele — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:25:08 +0000

I don’t know Chalmers’s work well, although it sounds to me like it’s closer to the truth than reductionist accounts like Dennett’s. I’m generally not an empiricist, because I think empiricism tends to put the cart before the horse, so to speak. Scientific experiment tells us a great number of vitally important things about the causal processes of the empirical world; but for it to make sense, we must logically assume a number of ideas that make experiment on causal processes possible, including the existence of causality, truth and thought (the latter being a part of consciousness). As Michael notes below, existence cannot be a perception, but a ground of perception; so too, perception is a ground of empirical knowledge and experiment.

Where the Buddhists differ from Kant is in denying that the self (especially free will, at least in ??ntideva’s case) exists at a transcendental level. For Kant, the knowledge of free will is in a certain sense more certain and fundamental (because undisprovable) than anything we could know empirically. For Buddhists, if we have any such knowledge of the self, it is only at the lower, conventional level, for the benefit of those who haven’t got to the real truth yet.

By: James

James — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 01:08:25 +0000

Hi Amod,

I’m going to leave aside the question of the freedom of the will for now (let’s just say that I’m not entirely convinced either that it exists or that we ought to assume it does).

I suppose that I have always considered the Buddha’s anatta doctrine to essentially be saying something not dissimilar to what some, such as Kant, have said later; no matter where you look, you find you cannot “find” your Self in empirical reality. The soteriological function of this interpretation is obvious and I don’t think that it was meant to be taken much further than that. The thoughts without a thinker notion has always seemed to me like it describes the phenomenon pretty well. Of course, I know that I’m running the risk of Buddhist heresy.

Regarding empiricism, I have to admit that I have a certain tendency towards it. I have suspicions that most everything that goes on in the human mind can be boiled down to brain functioning. Except, of course, for consciousness. But then I run the risk of a sort of epiphenomenalism, which I am not yet ready to grant (because if consciousness doesn’t have any causal efficacy, then it couldn’t be an object of thought, now could it?). A conundrum.

I wonder, are you terribly familiar with David Chalmers? I have a copy of his “The Conscious Mind” buried under a pile of books that I’ve been meaning to get to.