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Comment by denton-scratch | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a physicist; but the GP mentioned consciousness as an alternative to matter as the fundamental "substance".

Well, I've come across that idea before; in certain kinds of Buddhism, consciousness is considered fundamental, the senses are created by consciousness, and the material world is projected by consciousness through the senses.

Well, this was explained to me in the context of a particular type of tantric Buddhism; but actually the basic idea is common across most mainstream Buddhism. Most schools teach that the universe is cyclical, and is completely destroyed at the end of an era, before being recreated ex-nihilo. The creation process is started with the appearance of Brahma, who then hallucinates the rest of the universe into existence.

So in that model, it is consciousness, not matter that is fundamental, because the material world cannot come into existence without consciousness.

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...so you're just using "Brahma" to refer to the computer that is running the simulation that is the universe. And when the simulation becomes aware of its own condition, it becomes conscious?

This is just rephrasing of the symulation hypothesis in mystical terms and is just as useless as the symulation hypothesis itself (regardless if it's "true" or not).

There's some valuable deeper stuff in hindu and buddhist philosophies, but this set of ideas isn't it (neither valuable nor actually deep, just "exotic" sounding to an extent).

> ...so you're just using "Brahma" to refer to the computer that is running the simulation that is the universe.

That "Brahma" isn't a computer; the model doesn't suggest that the universe is a simulation. You seem to have wedged in an interpretation that is fundamentally materialist, which sort of misses the point; according to this model, consciousness is fundamental. That is what was being discussed.

I agree that it's "mystical" to postulate that consciousness is fundamental; but it's equally mystical to assume that matter is fundamental.

In the Buddhist tradition where I learned this, the Brahma story was just that - a myth. But they treated the "consciousness is fundamental" thing as a core teaching, they elaborated it, and the practices grew out of that view. The tradition was a practice tradition; they shunned metaphysical speculation, and "philosophy" was generally treated as another technique for breaking-down conceptual thought.

This wasn't something you were supposed to believe, or reason about; it was presented as a way of seeing the world (a "view") that was useful in Buddhist practice. In the same tradition, we were taught that all views are provisional.

I was just answering the OP's question about what "fundamental" means in this context. I am not advocating for the view that consciousness is fundamental. I happen to take the view that consciousness exists, and is not an emergent phenomenon; but I don't have a philosophical system built around that idea. It's just that I can't see how the subjective experience of consciousness can emerge from what amounts to a system of levers and gears.

> I agree that it's "mystical" to postulate that consciousness is fundamental; but it's equally mystical to assume that matter is fundamental.

Sure using "matter" like this without defining it is equally mystical. That's why we'd take 'computation' to be "fundamental" or 'the wave function'. "Matter" is just a higher level emergent property of what we perceive.

> I happen to take the view that consciousness exists, and is not an emergent phenomenon

OK, now I see why my viewpoint would sound so "off" to you, we're probably on different extremes of the thinking spectrum :) I don't discard you're viewpoint, it's just so so so so far from mine:

I take most of what we label "reality" to be emergent properties from some kind of fundamental computation (and by "computation" I don't imply a "computer" like we know, just "math that `can run`") whose math is probably too complicated and strange for us to intuitively understand (we can just hope to get to calculate better approximations of it). I don't just see consciousness as an emergent phenomenon. I see matter as an emergent phenomenon. And also space-time itself as an emergent phenomena inside our emergent consciusnesses. The "fundamental" could just very well be something like the simplest celular automaton with non-periodict behavior or maybe something too strange for our ape-minds to ever be able to comprehend (or too simple to understand how it could be the basis - there could be enough complexity/structure in just 'the distribution of all the prime numbers' or 'the digits of pi' to contain our entire universe with its infinite past and future "inside of it").

And to clarify, "simulation" is also quite generalizable - a simulation is just something that runs as an informational phenomenon on top of some physical substrate, but is fully independent of that susbstrate to the extent that it could be "ported" from that substrate to another completely different substrate that just happens to also preserve the subset of mathematical laws required for the computation. Eg. "software" that can be "ported" so it's independent of the actual nature of the hardware. Digital/discrete (as opposed to analogical) computation gives you this magical "divorce" of computation from substrate. It doesn't have to be something like our current day software running on something like our computers - any kind of "portable discrete/digital computation" is "a simulation".

> a simulation is just something that runs as an informational phenomenon on top of some physical substrate

A simulation is a simulation of something; it's by definition not the reality being simulated. If you want to say you can have a simulation without simulating something, that "reality" is itself a simulation, then we're into turtle territory; this simulation models that simulation, which models another simulation, all the way down.

That path leads to solipsism, which I think is a stultifying view. It's a view that I once entertained, but eventually rejected.

It’s not particularly exotic; it’s phenomenology aka continental philosophy.

(Many kinds of Buddhism known to the west are actually repackaged European philosophy; this was intentionally done in Asia so it’d be easier to sell back to us.)

> Many kinds of Buddhism known to the west are actually repackaged European philosophy

Schopenhauer was interested in eastern philosophy. There is certainly a thread of Buddhist thought in some European philosophy.

I don't think it's at all reasonable to suggest that Asian Buddhists (in Asia) deliberately produced a formulation of Buddhism to appeal to Western tastes. Rather, Buddhist teachers in the West tried to find a way of presenting Buddhism without the cultural baggage.

The kind of Buddhism that I learned was largely mediaeval or earlier in its origins. Even 19thC developments in (e.g.) Tibetan Buddhism had little impact at the time on European philosophy; those developments were largely concerned with points of doctrine that flew over the heads of European thinkers.

So I'm not sure what kinds of Buddhism "known to the West" are actually repackaged European philosophy. Nichiren? "Soft" vipassana? I don't really agree that there has been much pollination of Eastern Buddhist thought from European philosophy.

Thai Theravada and Japanese Zen (and State Shinto) were reinvented in the 1800s to look more European and incorporate Romanticism because they knew if Europeans showed up and you didn't have a European-style religion, they'd declare you savages and colonize you. It more or less worked.

See "The Making of Buddhist Modernism", review here: https://vividness.live/the-making-of-buddhist-modernism

That didn't happen in Tibet, although it modernized later with a marketing campaign resulting in everyone vaguely associating the Dalai Lama with "compassion" and "ethics".

Thanks for the link. I've read his first article; I will read on.

My training was entirely in a Tibetan tradition. In 19thC Tibet, there were significant changes happening; but they were largely to do with ecumenicalism and the endless sectarian conflicts over minute points of doctrine.

"Rockstar" Tibetan lamas were certainly a thing. I was told once that, if you ask your teacher whether it would be good to attend a talk by visiting lama X, the least-favourable response would be along the lines of "He has many followers".

it is a reversal of "I think, therefore I am" -> "I am, therefore I think"

(slight nitpick, the idea(consciousness is fundamental, creation is cyclical) goes back much earlier than buddhism and is part of advaita vedanta.)

> slight nitpick

I'm aware that the cyclical universe is from the vedas; a lot of what passes for Buddhist metaphysics is pre-Buddhist. The Buddha didn't care much for metaphysical pronouncements; he was more a meditation teacher than a cosmologist.

So I didn't mean to claim that these ideas were Buddhist in origin; I just learned of them from Buddhists.

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