Comment by kr4 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kr4 | Hacker News Reader

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Who said that there's no definition provided? as per my understanding of Upanishads which are the most profound works on consciousness:

consciousness (atman/soul) is self-existent, ever-blissful non-material energy. it has no beginning and no end. It never born so never dies. it's the absolute truth because it's not subjected to change, death and decay. Material reality is only a relative truth because it's always changing. Whole of our body cells recycle every year. But we're still aware of the body as before. that awareness is the non-material atman, which associates, itself with this body as long as it's bound.

Yogis for ages have been able to go to the source – atman – by silenting the mind and its modifications (vritis) and have been able to observe the causal, subtle and gross planes of existence along with wheel of time. Hence Upanishad declares: "That which cannot be observed through mind rather through which mind gets the ability to observe is atman"

We materialists want a material definition for this thing you call non-material. What is it. Define it so we can analyze it with our material-limited instrument, empiricism. Otherwise we're forced to conclude that it does not "exist" (is material) and downvote you for being so stupid.

I've defined it already. As far as experience is concerned, there are multiple systematic paths (under different branches of Yoga) to experience this non-material thing which is self only, but unfortunately you can't do it with your very limited material senses. Do you realize the subtle level at which brain operates? when your instruments can't fathom subtleness of your brain, how can such instruments even get the glimps of consciousness which is subtler than mind.

It hardly takes an year or two under proper guidance and full commitment to get glimpses of this subtlemost thing, do you dare to invest?

If you fanatically stick to a viewpoint without even evaluating the other view with an open mind, you risk of repeating what religious fanaticism did with pre-modern scientists in the west.

And regarding downvotes, do you think I care? I could have posted more popular comment in favor of materialism to gain more material points :p

Edit: To learn more, you can read autobiographies of two living yogis [0] and [1]. A succinct yet most authoritative practical guide is Yoga Sutras [2].

0. http://www.amazon.in/If-Truth-Be-Told-Memoir/dp/9351368068/ 1. http://www.amazon.com/Apprenticed-Himalayan-Master-Yogis-Aut... 2. http://www.swamij.com/index-yoga-meditation-yoga-sutras.htm

I was honestly trying to be facetious before. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear. Text sucks. I actually think it was really inappropriate that you were down-voted. The notion that you should have to produce material definitions for concepts presented as fundamentally non-material is tautologically absurd. It's basically a rude way of suggesting that you shouldn't present that view here. I think, absent some success by materialists, presenting non-material notions of an apparent thing is utterly acceptable. Not only that yours was on topic and directly in response to a comment you apparently read and attempted to respond to earnestly.

Maybe a related question:

Where does the idea of materialism fall?

Is the idea of materialism itself part of materialism?

Yes, obviously, in that the idea is embodied as neural connections in the brains of materialists. Any phenomenon that emerges from materialistic processes is also materialistic.

You can couple material with complexity such that everything can apparently be material. However if we limit our notion of "material" to what we observe in our universe then we can easily do the same with conceivable forms of non-material. We can even simulate them in our entirely material world using the universal correspondence of the turing machine. The "everything is material" explanation is a degraded form of the "everything is complexity" explanation. I suspect most formulations of an intelligent entity or an "idea" would be non-materially formulated but materially represented in this same way. If you assume materialism is the explanation for everything then yes all known instances of the materialism idea are incidentally materialistic.

Is probably somewhere in the Moiré fringes.

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