Comment by fnordpiglet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fnordpiglet | Hacker News Reader

I ascribe to the idea that we have no true self, that consciousness is an illusory tool of the subconscious mind, which is a manifestation of the internal processes of the brain. The consciousness and feelings and senses we experience are second order effects of those processes. This can be easily observed through meditation and building the ability to exist without conscious thought arising, but being able to fully live life without it. It maps closely to a modern interpretation of Buddhism. The rest of Buddhism is how to exist in that state without suffering, which requires you to manifest a fundamental desire to build community and be helpful without exploitation. This makes sense because we are animals evolved to build communities and be helpful, and when we don’t despite immediate perverse pleasure that state dissipates leaving a suffering. The process of being a community mammal and the places those desires stem from a self reinforcing ways of building happiness by experiencing states our meat heads reward us for not just now but in an ongoing sense.

I find it sort of hard to find flaw in this construction of mind body, and it seems a simpler structure than all the non sense of sense particles and soul organs.

> consciousness is an illusory tool

The notion of an illusion requires an observer. What is that observer, if not self/consciousness?

The brain. It is an illusion of the brain.

A set of neurons gets some input and that feeds into another set of neurons that has to make all the information from many sources coherent. Those neurons label the input firing pattens as qualia and then act as if they were experiencing the world rather than just signal processing, and so ‘experience’ is not real in any metaphysical sense.

I’m not 100% sure I believe that theory, but I do find it highly plausible.

> The notion of an illusion requires an observer

In this debate, "consciousness" is an ineffable quality that goes beyond perception. Illusions only require perceptions for a self, not consciousness.

The system reacting to itself, but thinking that it is looking at a separate system.

Doesn't this really depend on the definition of "consciousness". If "consciousness" is the "experience" itself rather than the "analysis of that experience", then your point does not apply (for then, it would be impossible to "observe" through meditation without being "conscious" of the observation). In my view, the fundamental problem is not the "analysis" part of our experience but that there should be any individual "experience" at all. Why isn't the body able to fully function without a self-based experience related to that functioning?

Isn't an important aspect of Buddhist philosophy the inescapable nature of suffering in life? That it shouldn't necessarily be avoided? So why is existing in that state "without suffering" necessary?

I do like that your idea has space for focusing on community building.

There are two types of suffering in Buddhism, physical and suffering that arises from ignorance and attachment. The entire point of the Buddhist philosophy is the cessation of the second type of suffering. Enlightenment or nirvana is a state free of suffering and is the goal. It comes with an idea of escape from the cycle of birth and death, which is often construed to be mystical but is more an escape from the attachment of meaning to birth and death, along with entanglement in thought and emotion, pleasure, avoidance of pain, etc. This state doesn’t a lack of emotion, including negative ones or a lack of unpleasantness, but a lack of anxiety, depression, rumination, and the variety of other ways we torture ourselves with.

But no, escape of suffering is exactly the point. The premise is the unenlightened life can’t escape suffering, but there is a path, which Buddha compiled and taught from the Indian mystics of his day into a highly structured practice with exhaustive documentation on the detailed nuances of the human experience with a direct description of how to become enlightened through the practice of meditation, specifically vipassana, and teachings of how suffering arises and what motivations to cultivate to achieve release.

Edit: forgot to note the first type of physical suffering becomes merely unpleasant once you release your attachment to not feeling unpleasant and can accept it as part of the ever changing nature of reality and a fundamental acceptance of impermanence- that this too shall pass and the pleasant ends the same as the unpleasant and there are not naturally superior states

"Suffering" isn't a great translation of the Sanskrit word "dukkha". It's too broad. The Buddha talks about a very specific type of suffering that I think of as: "the desire for things to be different than the way they are."

The Buddha teaches how to avoid this craving for the world to be different than it actually is.

Look up the parable of the arrow. It's a good way to think about the difference between general suffering and dukkha.

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