Arbitrary Marks

No time for a detailed post, but I want to draw your attention to this podcast from Buddhist Geeks. In it, the Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche says, in response to questions about the need for Westerners to believe in rebirth, that the concept isn’t necessary for practice, but it doesn’t hurt to assume it’s true. It makes for good living now.

In connection, I recommend Jay Garfield, “Nagarjuna’s Theory of Causality: Implications Sacred and Profane,” Philosophy East and West, Vol 51, No 4, 507-524. The article discusses just to what extent belief in rebirth is necessary, particularly for bodhicittas. The abstract is below:

[contemplative science] In all of these posts on the MMK (Mulamadhyamakārikā), I’m using Jay Garfield’s translation and commentary. That means that I’m not presenting all of the hermeneutic debates, but this version is what I have at a hand.

Earlier, I stated that “causation requires space-time coordinates in order to be intelligible. We need some way of distinguishing between the cause and the effect, and some way of explaining how the cause “picks out” this effect over another.” This attempt to isolate cause and effect is what motivates Nāgārjuna to posit what he calls “emptiness.” Emptiness is not “nothingness”, but rather the dependent origination of all things. At bottom, reality is–to put it using current buzzwords–relational.

In Chapter VII of the MMK, Nāgārjuna discusses the relationship between the agent and the action. We could understand this as the cause and the effect, too, since the same basic argument applies.

Dialectically, Nāgārjuna’s opponents were the Buddhists who admitted that the external world was empty, but wanted to suggest that, at the very least, agents existed. We need a subject to perceive that the world is empty, after all.

Nāgārjuna rejects this approach, claiming that everything, including agents, is empty. Here’s how the argument goes:

I think that this has a lot to do with problems in contemporary philosophy of mind regarding mental causation, reduction, etc. For now, the quote will stand on its own, but later I’ll continue with Kim and try to tie them together:
If one reifies phenomena–including such things as one’s own self, characteristics (prominently one’s own), [...]

In a few hours, I’ll be on a flight back to Chicago after spending the weekend in Austin, checking out UT and finding housing. I’ve spent so long aiming towards a PhD program that it’s mind-boggling to realize I’m going to actually start it in a few months.

Anyway, as I’m loitering at Mozart’s with my puppy, I thought I’d write a few comments on Kim’s chapter, “The Supervenience Argument” in Physicalism, or Something Near Enough.

As a former Reformed Presbyterian, I knew the work of Jonathan Edwards pretty well, or so I thought. I had read his Banner of Truth publications and knew more about him than just “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Not so: in the past month, I’ve come across his thought in two different [...]

A few weeks ago, I picked up Jaegwon Kim’s slim volume Phyicalism, or Something Near Enough and have finished his first chapter, an overview of the philosophical situation.

He calls the two problems of mental causation and consciousness Weltknoten, or a “world-knot” which philosophers haven’t been able to unravel yet. In a nutshell, the problem is that several key claims which seem to be necessary to hold are contradictory: