/lit/ - Literature

>>21375610
>I just fricken love Moby Dick and Dostoevsky!

>>20874603
God look at all that shyte.
No thanks, I’ll continue to start a new OP as long as you’re trying to include all this shit.
Alternatively if you shortened it to what is necessary, I’d actually include it.

In general terms, the issue is how to evaluate Buddhist descriptive and explanatory assertions about the mind in relation to Buddhist normative assertions. Likening Buddhist meditation to a scientific method glosses over this complicated issue.

Buddhist exceptionalists typically conflate the descriptive and normative aspects of Buddhist doctrines and meditation practices. For example, Sam Harris writes: a person can embrace the Buddha's teaching, and even become a genuine Buddhist contemplative (and, one must presume, a buddha) without believing anything on insufficient evidence. He thinks Buddhism is like science: One starts with the hypothesis that using attention in the prescribed way (meditation), and engaging in or avoiding certain behaviors (ethics), will bear the promised result (wisdom and psychological well-being). Harris makes it sound as if there is empirical, scientific evidence for the Buddha's normative teaching, including the ideal norm of buddhahood and the possibility of its attainment.

I disagree. The concepts of nirvana and awakening (bodhi ) aren't scientific concepts; they're soteriological ones. They aren't psychological constructs whose validity can be established through measurement. In other words, they aren't operationalizable. This doesn't detract from their importance. On the contrary, many important concepts aren't operationalizable. Take aesthetic concepts, such as beauty, perfection, the sublime, or wabi-sabi (the Japanese aesthetic of transience and imperfection). There is no way to establish what is beautiful or sublime or displays wabi-sabi on the basis of measurement. Aesthetic concepts are always subject to multiple interpretations, and their meaning is constituted by the artistic practices, theories, and communities in which they figure.

Soteriological concepts are like aesthetic concepts in this respect. They're always subject to multiple interpretations, and their meaning is constituted by the communities of practice and thought in which they figure. It's a conceptual mistake to think that belief in the validity of Buddhist soteriological ideas is based on having sufficient scientific evidence for them. They aren't the kind of ideas that can be directly established by science. If you embrace the Buddha's teaching, it's not because you have scientific evidence of its truth. Rather, you embrace a certain vision of the world that tells you how to lead a meaningful life. The Buddha's teaching has been interpreted in many ways throughout history, including today. You may strive to reinterpret it so that it doesn't contradict science, but science can't directly confirm or disconfirm it

>>18418826
>I can't justify myself but I won't spoonfeed you

>Starting with the Greeks

>Memetic responses are indeed botlike. That's why if you browse enough you start to see how responses are often devoid of individuality. Thoughtless replies like based, seethe, dialate, etc. Are a good example. But when you're on a phone it's kinda all you can "contribute" without spending 20 minutes drafting a post