-----Original Message-----
From: Gordon Fitch
>
>> >On the contrary, molecules and electromagnetic bonds are, like
>> >bricks, human mental constructions _as_far_as_we_know_. That
>> >is, they are organizations of phenomena. In any case, even
>> >if they were really real, if you were to dissolve a brick into
>> >its component molecules and the energy of its bonds, I'm pretty
>> >sure you would find something was now missing from your world
>> >that was suspiciously like an instance of brickness. That
>> >is, the _form_ of the brick would have disappeared, even though
>> >its material and energetic "substances" remained. Where did
>> >it go? Maybe home to the Empyrean, eh?
>
>Dace:
>> Yes, the form of the brick would disappear, except that it wasn't a brick
in
>> the first place. "Brick" is in our minds. You're right, though, that
this
>> also applies to "molecules." However, this does not apply to anything
whose
>> form arises organically. So, for instance, a spider is actually a spider
>> (regardless of what we call it.) Spiderness exists in the world.
>
>Everything you're describing is still a construal of phenomena.
>What we're guessing, in the case of the spider, is that the
>spider has some notion of itself (it acts to preserve its
>bodily integrity, it reproduces itself, and so on). In other
>words, the spider exhibits an appearance of consciousness of
>some sort, so that our construal of a spider-phenomenon may
>correspond to a spider's construal of about the same thing.
It doesn't matter if our construal of the spider corresponds to its own self-interpretation. The point is, there is something intrinsic to spiderness. I'm beginning to come around to the idea that "consciousness" should be defined broadly. Perhaps when I say "perception of mentality," I should call that "human consciousness."
>In the case of the phenomena which lead us to say "brick" or
>"molecule", we can't make even this guess, although clearly
>there are some categories of experience more associated with
>brickness than others. This is what I mean by saying
>consciousness is what is real. (It is curious that it has
>been turned into an epiphenomenon, whereas matter, which has
>less of a reality certificate, is held to underlie it. Given
>the attributes we assign to both, it would be much likely to
>suppose that mind produces matter than the other way around.
>But I digress.)
>
We concur.
>> >The process could be repeated with the alleged molecules and
>> >energy, probably, breaking them down into quarks or strings,
>> >so that the molecules too would disappear. Things seem to be
>> >a piling-up of forms within forms. And as the Buddhist mantra
>> >goes, "The form is empty; empty is the form."
>> >
>> This is from the Heart Sutra. The theme of this sutra is that reality is
>> other than the way we think of it. "Form" means the forms that we
project
>> onto everything.
>
>It seems un-Buddhistic to suppose that there _is_ anything
>for the forms to be projected upon.
>
That's an overly-literal interpretation of Buddhism.
>> >And yet everyone knows what a brick is, and can call to mind
>> >the shape and weight and texture of one held in the hand.
>> >
>> There's an old Zen koan in which two students come upon a stone and begin
>> arguing over whether it exists in their minds or in the world. They ask
the
>> Zen master which one is correct. The master answers by knocking them
both
>> in the head with the stone.
>
>Zen proceeds by rejecting rhetoric, which can be a useful
>exercise, but thorough adoption of the practice would would
>leave us with nothing to say in this mailing list. Even a
>single _mu_ would be an excess.
>
Zen loves rhetoric. But only when it's funny.
The point of Buddhism is that nothing is permanent; everything is in flux. The object of meditation is to let the mind come to rest, so we can see this clearly and stop attaching to things that have no substance. Then words and actions are no problem.
Ted