/lit/ - Literature

>>16483970
>How can a religious doctrine be "refuted"?
Because they also make metaphysical and philosophical claims about consciousness, causation, existence etc which can be rationally analyzed and shown to be false through an examination of what the consequences of these positions are and if they hold up, or by noting existing counter-examples which disqualify the claim from being true and so on. So, while Buddhism makes unfalsifiable metaphysical claims, like all religions do, such as when it teaches rebirth, these cannot be falsified, because we are unable to verify if rebirth is true.

However, when a Buddhist philosopher such as Nagarjuna makes the claim that we don’t have permanent selves and that there is no abiding witnessing self to unify all thoughts and perceptions, and that there is instead only a nexus of sensory and mental events; we can rationally analyze it and see if it is supported by reasoning and experience. If something is contradicted by our experience and also violates logic then that is a nearly foolproof method for indicating the falsehood of a claim.

If we consider the above claim of Nagarjuna it has the following implication: given that we are conscious and have awareness of thoughts, perceptions etc, there must necessarily be a locus of sentience within the person for the apprehension of those thoughts and perceptions to take place. If those mental events are not witnessed by an abiding awareness or self who is different from them, then the only alternative explanation left for how we can become aware of that mental activity is to say that those mental activities such as individual thoughts collectively generate the false illusion of the continuity of consciousness which we all experience and which allows us to recognize changes; this is the position that Nagarjuna commits himself to by his denial of any unifying self