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THE_EMBODIED_MIND

                                             December 21, 2021

A friend of mine once recommended the book
"The Embodied Mind" (1991), sub-titled
"Cognitive Science and Human Experience",
written by Varela, Thompson and Rosch, from
the MIT Press.

I had the impression this was going
to be a book rooted in present
scientific understanding, talking        Take "Descartes' Error" as your
about the problems with the old          starting point, and take the next
mind-body dichotomy, and discussing      steps from there.
how to deal with them.


After flipping back and forth through it
for half-and-hour, I fear this is actually
a book about how the ancient truths of
Buddhism have the solutions to every               And I'm trying hard to
philosophic conundrum, and how Buddhism            skip phrases like the
beat cognitive science to the punch every          'embuddahed mind'.
time but we didn't notice.

By Buddhism, they appear to mean a particular
understanding of Buddhism which is supposed to
be the one true deeper understanding of it,
but which one suspects is somewhat unique to
the authors.

Chapter 6, p. 116:

    "The historical formation of various patterns and
    trends in our lives is what Buddhists usually mean
    by *karma*.  It is this accumulation that gives
    continuity to the sense of ego-self, so evident in
    everday, unreflective life.  The main motivating
    and sustaining factor in this process is the
    omnipresent mental factor of *intention* (see
    appendix B).  Intention-- in the form of
    volitional action-- leaves traces, as it were of
    its tendencies on the rest of the factors from
    moment to moment, resulting in the historical
    accumulation of habits, tendencies, and responses,
    some wholesome and others unwholesome.  When the
    term *karma* is used looesly, it refers to these
    accumulations and their effects.  Strictly
    speaking, though, karma is the very process of
    intention (volitional action) itself, the main
    condition in the accumulation of conditioned human
    experience."


p. 117:

    "The term for basic element in Sanskrit is
    *dharma*.  Its most general meaning in a
    psychological context is 'phenomenon'-- not in
    the Kantian sense where phenomena are opposed to
    noumena but simply in the ordinary sense of
    something that occurs, arises, or is found in
    experience.  In its more technical sense, it
    refers to an ultimate particular, particle, or
    element that is reached in an analytic
    examination.  In basic element analysis, moments
    of experience (the dharmas) were considered
    analytically irreducible units; they were, in
    face, called ultimate realiteis, whereas the
    coherences of daily life that were composed of
    these elements-- a person, a house-- were called
    conventional realities."

Chapter 10, p. 219

    "Hitherto we have spoken of the Buddhist tradition
    of mindfulness/awareness as though it were all one
    unified tradition.  And in fact, the teachings of
    no-self-- the five aggregates, some form of mental
    factor analysis, and karma and the wheel of
    conditioned origination-- are common to all the
    major Buddhist traditions.  At this point,
    however, we come to a split.  The teaching of
    emptiness (sunyata), which we are about to
    explore, according to the Buddhist tradition
    itself as well as to scholarship, did not become
    apparent until approximately 500 years after the
    Buddha's death ..."
                                                           GOLDLEAF_FRAME

So I go away more than a little disappointed--
This a book in the tradition of Lakoff: "look,    I'm beginning to wonder
I said 'cognitive science', now you have to       if "cognitive science"
listen to me!"                                    is turning into a code
                                                  word for pseudoscience,
                                                  something like
  But really, I often have some affection         "metaphysics".
  for books like this going for a humanism/
  sciences combo play...                                        CSICOP

        JONAHS_COOKIE

  Ah, the very California attempts at syncretism of
  disparate fields, to solve some philosophical                SYNCRETIC
  problems-- of which they appear to have only the
  most shallow understanding: Nietzsche is referenced
  a half-dozen times in the index, and every time
  it's the "God is dead" business, i.e. living
  without philosophical foundations.

  Maybe I'll get back to this book one of these days,
  as another "seeking wisdom in unlikely places"
  project.


      I liked the thumbnail description of the founding of
      Mahayana Buddhism, whose name literally translates to
      the "greater vehicle", which means they were declaring
      all other forms the "lesser vehicle".

      That reminds of some other religious transformations--
      e.g. people who are into Judaism are not real fond of
      anyone calling their form of the bible "The *Old*
      Testament".




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