Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia;  Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.

   Post 110.  09/06/2020 continued . . .

  Why Buddhism is Enlightening

   Meditation is non-thinking

 Wright seems to think that evolution was smart enough to give animals internal guidance, in the form of emotions, that allowed them to survive in the wild long enough to reproduce. But, in the process of improving on the basics, human animals evolved a new guidance system, Reason, that allowed them to, not just survive, but thrive and multiply until they came to dominate the whole ecosystem for their own selfish motives. Unfortunately, fallible human reasoning may still not be matured enough to take complete responsibility for navigating homo sapiens behavior in the “asphalt jungle” of modern high-tech civilization. That’s why we still do stupid things, and try to justify them with flawed antiquated reasoning. Hence, self-control has long been a holy grail for philosophers and religious leaders concerned with ethical and moral behavior that goes beyond the limits of self-interest. Yet, “self-control has often been described as a matter of reason prevailing over feelings”. Unfortunately, emotions are firmly rooted in the body, and reasons are built upon that foundation. “No, the powers of reason embedded in the prefrontal cortex are themselves under the control of feelings”. Therefore, everything we do or think is motivated by base emotions : we even occasionally feel the need to reason.

The interference of our fallible feeling filter may be why the Buddha had to take such an oblique approach to mastering the root cause of human “suffering”. He probably didn’t even think of meditation as a form of reasoning, but perhaps as more like a distracting snack for sneaking past the gnarly guardians of the hadean “Id” (Freud’s term for the primitive personal identity). Yet, the blithely ignorant “Ego” is what most of us think of as our conscious selves, so it must be the rational self-critical “Superego” that decides to descend into the domain of dark desires in order to master the motives that cause us to stray from the strait & narrow path of morality. Our default emotions are designed to determine what’s subjectively Good or Bad for me and my genes. But rational values are more abstract and objective, being concerned instead with what’s good for our total social and eco-system. Unfortunately, those ethical abstractions mean little to our quick-thinking System One11 intuition, so the Buddha adapted an old rusty religious tool (meditation : doing & thinking nothing) to leverage the slow-but-sure System Two reasoning in its quest to wrest control from corrupting lusts of the flesh.

Wright refers to those introverted methods as “mindfulness meditation – that’s well suited to intervening at the level of feelings and altering their influence”. It focuses on the general experience without good or bad labels. But before he gets into specific techniques for dealing with inner obstacles, he discusses “what the evolutionary logic is behind the power they’ve amassed in your mind”. For example, he questions the logic of “why natural selection would use, as its working definition of success, gratification in one sense or another”. Instead, his own meditation method, like other rational & cognitive psychological therapies, requires deferred gratification, by focusing on future abstract goals instead of just letting the good times roll. Hence, as he gets into the nitty-gritty of Buddhist meditation, he has to define such arcane concepts as “the formless”, “emptiness”, “essences”, “nirvana”, and other negative terms that may be meaningless to the positive pragmatic empirical western mind.

                      Post 110 continued . . . click Next

Mindlessness

Ego is conscious self.

Id is sub-conscious self.

Superego is the observer of the Self. It’s an objective reflective view of Self.

11. System One :
   According to behavioral scientist Daniel Kahneman, Intuition is System One and Reason is System Two.  “The main thesis is that of a dichotomy between two modes of thought: "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow

Why Buddhism is True
The Science and Philosophy of Mediation and Enlightenment

Robert Wright
Journalist, Philosopher

“Buddhism’s diagnosis of the human predicament is fundamentally correct and that its prescription is deeply valid and urgently important”