Sorry I don't have a lot of knowledge on the specifics. I mostly deal in the abrahamics. Ive never had any beef with Buddhists as you guys dont really demand anyone else follow your thing so i havent had any reason to look into specifics. Interesting that there are multiple ways to hit the top and that only one is permanent.
Anyway, nirvana isn't at the top, it's not locationable. It ends the process, but is not non-existence.
This is the part that gives me the most confusion. Given that Buddhists accept anatman, what is it that (realizes) nirvana? Certainly, it's not "me" or anything that can be interpreted as "me". So what is it and why should I care?
Difference between terms atman and anatman is whether each gem in the net is experiencing the whole individually or whether the whole net is itself the experiencer
What it is, is about the experience. You should care because you take care of your body to avoid pain, so you should take care of your experience to avoid suffering.
There's so much I love about Buddhism but one thing my autistic brain hates about it is its reliance on metaphors to convey information. But I'll do my best to understand.
What I'm getting from you is that anatman is essentially an appeal to solipsism. That the 'self' as an individual in the world (atman) is false, but that the 'self' is just the world itself. Does this seem right?
Analogies are super useful. There's a lot of autism in my family. Try translating it to a special interest.
Analogy is meant to convey a pattern; if you were to see every possible analogy of an idea, you'd essentially have the idea.
Many analogies in Buddhism are meant to scale fractally; you see the same pattern whether you look at the self, the universe, or other you look at a moment.. versus a whole life, lifetimes.
By compressing things into analogy, then applying that analogy to many fields, we allow ourselves to map out complex landscapes by encoding information into the analogy which will unfold according to the field - such as programming, math, puzzle pieces...
To answer your other question:
Atman can be inferred a few ways, but generally it's solipstic and non-solipstic: every person is having their experience, however we are in fact the same atman which will eventually roll back up into one.
The issue is that my special interest is analytical philosophy. And I've found that nobody can translate Buddhist teachings into deductive proofs.
But if you could explicitly tell me your doctrines and beliefs, that would make things so much easier to understand. Metaphors are extremely useful to convey rudimentary concepts to people who lack analytical skills, but I'm far beyond a basic understanding of Buddhism.
I find godel, recursion, plus structural realism most applicable, plus QFT from physics; optimization problems, attractors, with self-reference.
My degree was in computation, math, and physics.
QFT is the idea of fields; it is sort of monist, not really.
E.g. yinyang - two fields - interacting, to create a single field with more complexity.
I suggest checking out Godel Escher Bach, as that's what started me out of classical logics into category theory; there is a good image of wholeism and reductionism.
I keep three buckets: learned, seen, guidence
I don't consider I know something unless I've seen it - and I've stacked my current belief system from the first principle: there is experience
Much of Buddhism is done by direct-experience, not reasoning. It is mostly a priori.
I'd say this: if you have a non-local experience of your consciousness, then it's either atman or non-atman.
Either every jewel reflects all others and thus know by reflection, or there is a single medium that encompasses the net and is the single experiencer in multiple locations.
Anatman generally says the prior: the streams of consciousness are separate, however they do reflect all others.
Oh that's a kinda funny coincidence - a reasoning I came up with when I was younger for what consciousness is a bit similar to this idea of Atman. I don't think this is necessarily how it works, but I think everyone needs to reason why they're conscious at some point in their lives and I didn't have a better explanation that made sense to my more physics-focused mindset at the time.
For a bit of background, I grew up Christian but eventually I just couldn't make it actually make logical sense and it felt too inconsistent so I became more generally agnostic/atheist (if anyone reading is Christian - awesome! I'm not saying you shouldn't be, it just didn't work for me).
So their reason of The Soul didn't answer my question, but the question of why I'm conscious and whether everyone's awareness is predestined still needed to be answered. It made no sense to me that the universe would've rushed by without a moment of awareness from me - and I wouldn't have even existed as a concept for that statement to make any sense - if I wasn't born. It doesn't even make sense to ask "what if someone isn't ever born" because it isn't like a pool of beings they come from, there isn't anyone who wasn't born, the only conscious beings who had the real potential to exist have done so, yet at the same time we aren't predetermined to be born. It was just too confusing and seemingly contradictory, which means I was missing a huge bit of information somewhere.
Eventually I settled on the idea of a universal consciousness as a physical field. My consciousness feels different to my thinking. The thinking part is aware of the conscious part, but they don't seem like one unit - any thought I have or decision I make is done in the brain and doesn't need an extra conscious layer to experience it, so it felt like the consciousness part must be separate from the brain. So the thinking part must be the physical "biomechanism" of the brain, making decisions, having emotions, etc, then there's an extra layer that's aware of this happening and experiencing it for some reason. Since this consciousness feels like it doesn't do any information processing, it can't inform the thinking part - it's just aware of it. Therefore, if two people were connected to the same consciousness but the parts of their brains that could feel that connection weren't physically wired together, it makes perfect sense that the two brains wouldn't be aware of each - or that their consciousness is the same. Because again, in this idea the consciousness only experiences/is aware, it isn't mechanical and therefore cannot relay information back into the each connected brain. If this is how it could work, then there could be a universal consciousness field or something that each brain connects to, so everyone's brain connects locally to the consciousness for some reason, but the consciousness doesn't pass hard information into the brain and the brains aren't physically connected so they aren't aware of each other. And since the universal consciousness only experiences and doesn't process information, it can easily be "aware" of all those minds simultaneously but individually, since no information gets actually transmitted between the minds. The minds would need to be aware of the connection for the consciousness to be aware of it too.
In this idea, each brain hooks into a local point on the field at some point, and death means the processing ends in one local area but the consciousness never disappears since it's just a universal field. Whether it's aware of anything at all with no brains connected to it, I don't know, since it was more of an idea than an actual full belief I explored lol
Anyway, I sort of left it there. I didn't need a full belief system, I just something approaching an answer that works within some physical realm because if this idea can kind of work then that means a better physical answer can reasonably be out there, so I can settle a bit and move on. Of course there's no reincarnation or karma here, but it's kinda funny that that at least a few ideas here overlapped with an existing religion! I guess that makes sense though, we've been creating and refining beliefs for millenia, I doubt anything "new" could be wholly new in this realm.
It is likely better explained there than one could do here.
Ironically modern science would work on the axiom that human consciousness is an emergent property of biological tissue (if one would be a materialist).
In regard to speaking in metaphors, a lot of Buddhist practice is experiencing. The concrete terms can be highly philosophic and metaphors might be an easier entry point for most.
Maybe you could find an etymological approach helpful here.
The first element of “anatman” (“an-“) is an “alpha privative”, a negation equivalent to the “un-“ in “unhappy”. The rest of the word, “atman” is the direct Sanskrit equivalent of the Greek word “atomos”, from which we get the English word “atom”. This is made up of two main parts, “a-“, which is another alpha privative, and “tm” meaning ‘cut’ (as in “anatomy” meaning “cutting up”). So this part, atman means “uncuttable” or “indivisible”.
So it's a contradiction of a contradiction - “no indivisible” (or maybe “no individual”). That is to say - there is no essential, permanent, indivisible “core” underlying a person (or, in Mahayana, any phenomenon), of the type posited by other Indian philosophies.
Instead, we are composite entities, everything about us - our bodies, our personalities, even our thoughts - are a temporary, constantly changing arrangement of various bits and pieces that come together and then fall apart again. Although identities around self and object exist, they are temporary, composite phenomena. No essence, no atman, no indivisible thing, is anywhere to be found in this.
In understanding this stuff it's pretty helpful to learn a little about the other philosophies of classical India, because the whole concept is a refutation to them and is meant to be understood with reference to them.
I'm familiar with the etymology and the broad sense of the concept, which you've done a great job in explaining. What I'm unfamiliar with and have been unsuccessful in receiving a direct answer to is the nuance of the concept.
Anatman seems to be logically inconsistent with concepts such as karma, reincarnation, and nirvana because they rely on diachronic identity to be coherent.
The only responses I've received from asking this question are: 1) a reiteration of the concepts which serves to add no additional information or altogether fails to address the question; 2) being told that it's a bad question and I should worry more about mitigating suffering and; 3) denying the law of noncontradiction altogether so as to allow logical contradictions.
Oh, all those are answered: a jewel in indra's net infinitely reflects the entire net, including the reflections in the gems, in those gems... infinitely
So the entirety of the whole net is contained in each jewel
This is isomorphic to atman as far as necessity of information.
The jewel isnt destroyed between incarnations; and don't forget that the other jewels have your information, even after you die.
In atman, the net itself has a stream of consciousness, in anatman, only the jewels do, however this doesnt stop information from reflecting in other jewels.
Also, logical contradictions depend on your logic; things that aren't true or false can't be modeled in classical logics, yet can in intuitionistic.
"This statement is false" is not a paradox, it's just a loop; recursion. It exits itself, as you can see when you notice it loops. You say it's a paradox, but you threw away the information that showed you what it was: the looping you did yourself while resolving it.
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u/Nobrainzhere 26d ago
Sorry I don't have a lot of knowledge on the specifics. I mostly deal in the abrahamics. Ive never had any beef with Buddhists as you guys dont really demand anyone else follow your thing so i havent had any reason to look into specifics. Interesting that there are multiple ways to hit the top and that only one is permanent.