Greetings, Friendlies, The thing about the Interpreter Module, it’s only as good as its inputs. As Gazzaniga says in Who’s In Charge, the interpreter can be hijacked. Remember back from PPP 4, Cool Avijjā Examples, the patients who did not recognize themselves in a mirror (Mirrored-Self Mis-identification)? The proposal here is that there is some […]
Tag: atomic essay
Brain Modularity and Consciousness Of. In Who’s In Charge, Gazzaniga says there is no gatekeeper to conscious experience. It’s just a plethora of subsystems, “modules”, competing for consciousness. So. Many. Questions. Your thoughts?
Greetings, Friendlies! In Part 8 we considered the modularity of brain organization. So what? Well, at the 50,000 foot level, if avijjā resides primarily in not understanding the kind of beings we are, then understanding brain function is a movement towards less avijjā. But let’s zoom from 50,000 to, say, 20,000 feet and ask again, […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) Taking a moment to articulate how I am understanding/using the words “brain” and “mind”. In this format I try to use the word “brain” to specifically speak about the organ of the brain. The 1.3kg mass of tissue housed inside the skull. “Mind”, on the other hand, is more loosey goosey. It […]
Greetings, Friendlies! Coming off the highs of irreverent pāli translations, we descend into the doldrums of cognitive explication. (Not for me. I LUV this stuff. But I get that it’s not for eveyone.) So. Modular Brains. This concept came up previously in the “Viññāṇa/Consciousness Of” post. But respecting our PPP Methodology it is here broken […]
Greetings, Friendlies! One more round in Make-Believe Land before returning to complete faith and reverence. (Maybe.) An hour into that fateful saṅkhāra talk I asked something to the effect: “I get confused when people say: that’s a sankhāra, also, that’s a sankhāra, and that other thing. Also a saṅkhāra. Listening to this talk, I’m wondering, […]
Perhaps. If it is the case that one’s understanding is demonstrated through clarity of instruction… then it may be we are in some trouble regarding the concept of Saṅkhāra. A particularly good example of a recurrent phenomenon: a 2022 retreat with Akincano Weber and John Peacock on Dependent Origination [1], the Saṅkhāra talk. Sixty-four minutes […]
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PPP, Part 6, On Noumena
Greetings, Friendlies! A swerve into classical philosophy. :) Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) initially proposed the concept of “noumena”, contrasted with “phenomena”. Phenomena are what make up human experience. What we call objects and experiences, phenomena originate from our sensory perceptions (aka Saḷāyatana, sense doors, sight, sound, taste, etc), these perceptions are then formed into phenomena, ie, […]
Greetings, Friendlies! Following on from Pile of Provisional Positions 3, about the Classical View of Humanity, and the idea of Avijjā as not understanding how our minds work… In the two semesters I studied Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins, the course that most blew my mind (and this is a high bar) was Cognitive Neuropsychology. […]
Greetings, Friendlies! Following on our metaphorical room cleaning: let’s begin by picking up the Classical Western View of Humanity. The Classical View seems important juxtaposed against what is possible with a more scientifically informed view. By scientifically informed, I mean, among other things, physics (itty-bitty physics all the way up to great big physics), ecology, […]
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Learning in Public
Greetings, Friendlies! I’d like to offer a framework for what it is I think I’m doing, and for what that might mean for you as a reader, how you might engage should you be interested in such engagement. The Classical PhD holds one advantage over the Independent PhD: inherent in the structure one is in […]
When I was small(er) my parents gave me the book, What to Do When Your Mom or Dad Says… Clean Your Room!. Part of a series titled “Survival Series for Kids” (Seriously. My poor parents.): A proto- Marie Kondo treatise. With better pictures. One begins by clearing off and making the bed. That is, establishing […]
Greetings, Friendlies! I harbor some baseless supposition (BS?) that classical dhamma education unfolds via a structure honed over, perhaps, several thousand years? Theories and practices presented in an order and at a pace curated and refined for generations. Practical. Reproducible. Safe. I have not been the beneficiary (or victim) of such a system; coming up […]
If I consider you as inside my tribe, I am naturally “good” to you. I will take care of you; I may even risk my life to save you or that which you love.
If I consider you outside my tribe, look out.
What I see as the fundamental problem, and what I am most interested in working on, is that we humans do not understand the kind of beings we are.
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Avijjā as Mis-understanding
Greetings, Friendlies. :) For your consideration: what about translating Avijjā as “Mis-understanding”? “Ignorance” seems a little pejorative, “confusion” a little apathetic. Mis-understanding may sound odd at first, but in dhamma circles we do something similar when we speak of dis-ease. We are not speaking of illness, we are speaking of _not being at ease_. In […]
Previously we proposed that chemotaxis may be a precursor of vedanā and that holding this view (lightly) may contribute to a more embedded/interconnected understanding of human-beingness in the spectrum of life. This time I’d like to play with the idea that infusing an understanding of vedanā with a sense of taxis/movement can more coherently embed […]
“if we want to focus our minds on serious and difficult things, we may at points have to take some radical steps – and to do things that will strike some people as odd and or even unwarranted.” ~Alain de Botton, How to Think More Effectively A few years ago I wrote about Gregg McKeowen’s […]
Continuing to unpack MN 139, On Avoiding Conflict (Parts 1, 2, 3)… recently Ajahn Nisabho gave a bonzer talk, Culture War Pacifism: The Dhamma of Dolly Parton. He spoke about engaging skillfully in political discourse, about not being caught up in the collective papañca of the culture wars. Might this bit in MN 139, about […]
MN 139, on avoiding conflict, could be divided into three themes: cultivating oneself, communicating with others, and seeking out good influences in one’s life. I didn’t catch this at first, but now I see in this second theme, Communicating With Others, Gotama encouraging us to speak in such a way that we allow our interlocutors […]
Greeting, Friendlies! Part of the tangle of ideas I spoke about in Part 1 comes from reading or hearing teachers or practitioners* use words in contexts such that I think they are referring to a territory near(ish) to Awakening. In this post I’d like to acknowledge these words and ask the hivemind what others might […]
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MN 139, Part 2: Synopsis
Cultivating oneself, communicating with others, and seeking out good influences. All this in the service of avoiding conflict. Sounds reasonable.
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MN 139, Part 1: How to Not-Conflict
Playing around with different translations for the sutta title. Parsing Pāli for fun and profit…
Sometimes ideas get all wrapped up and around and through each other and a clever theory, when gently prodded, reveals itself a writhing, gnarly mess. Maybe this doesn’t happen to you? It totally happens to me. I think I understand a thing, I get all excited about it, I try explaining it to someone, or […]
Edit: If you want to start with Part 1, that’s here. The meditation teacher Leigh Brasington wrote a book on Dependent Origination which he self published and made available for Dāna on his website. He kindly (and enthusiastically!) read my previous post on DO and Conditionality. With his permission, here’s an image we cobbled together: A few […]
In Part 1 we talked about motivation for starting an Independent PhD. But why an Independent PhD rather than a classic, Institutional PhD? I describe my Independent PhD as “Four-ish years of study, practice, and discourse that culminates in a book no-one will read.” But the beauty of an Independent PhD is that it doesn’t have to be four […]
You probably know the Indian parable of the Blind People and the Elephant (Ud 6.4), where a group of folks who are blind-since-birth are brought together ’round an elephant. I propose a different ending. What if, instead, the blind people figure it out by working together?
Part 1 – Are there two Nibbānas?
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On Anurodha, “Liking”
In your day-to-day, off-the-cushion experience, what part of the 12-link Dependent Origination cycle (12-nidanas) do you notice most readily? I ask because I think it may be the case that many of us spend our days “liking” stuff or “disliking” stuff. But liking/disliking is not in the 12-nidanas. When I first began learning about Dependent Origination I was surprised to […]
Greetings, Friendlies! The writing challenge continues; taking a quick zoom out and spending a few sessions writing about the Independent PhD as the container for this Dharma PhD gig. I don’t know if y’all are interested in this material; maybe anything that is not a sutta spreadsheet is anathema? Let me know if that’s the […]
Dharma PhD 