/lit/ - Literature

>>16484988
This position has absurd implications which thus reveal it to be false. In order for me to write and post this message under such a scheme, I first would have to look at my computer and have the cognition “this is my computer and I am going to write something”. Aside from the self denied by Nagarjuna, there are two potential explanations for how this cognition can be apprehended. The first is that these individual thoughts could be self-revealing or self-illuminating, each being a flash of awareness, this is the position that later Yogacharin Buddhists like Dharmakirti take. However, this is highly illogical, and Shankara already explained why this is wrong in his criticisms of Yogachara doctrine. And this potential explanation isn’t even available to Nagarjuna anyways as a solution because it involves a reflexive relationship such as the eye seeing itself or the fire burning itself, and Nagarjuna himself rules out these types of relationships as untenable in MMK verse 3.2. So, if the thoughts and sensory perceptions don’t apprehend themselves, then they must be witnessed by each subsequent thought or ideation. The mental ideation not directly manifesting itself in awareness, but being witnessed by the next mental ideation which takes note of the previous one, the stream of consciousness then being a too-fast-to-notice stream of mental ideations arising, witnessing the previous, falling away, and then that next ideation doing the same in turn.

To go back to the example of my computer, this results in the situation that I can never obtain knowledge of my computer and make this post, because the first apprehension of it is without sentience and must be witnessed by the next ideation for it to appear in my consciousness; but that second ideation is also not conscious and requires another ideation to perceive it; this results in a infinite loop of mental ideations which never results in an actual cognizing of any knowledge such as knowledge of my computer, because this virtual but non-apprehended just gets passed along like an infinite game of telephone without ever having the chance to appear in conciousness, since there is no end or based sentience which the ideationa lead to, and to which they can finally be manifested. Hence, from examining the absurd implications of Nagarjunas position on consciousness, and from the fact it is contradicted by our self-evident knowledge of things, we can establish that his position on consciousness is incorrect, that his reasoning is wrong and that Nagarjuna misunderstood how consciousness and mental activity works