[Buddha-l] Re: Withdrawal of the senses

[curt]

The "Turing Test" provides another avenue of attack. It does not quite 
amount to a "proof" - but philosophy is not reducible to formal logic 
(as the positivists had to admit long ago), so "proof" is not only not 
necessary - it is unobtainable. Of course, no machine has yet really 
passed the Turing Test - but most humans wouldn't be able to pass it 
either, for that matter.

Also, while one person, by him or herself, may not be able to "prove" 
that "others" "exist" - two people can easily prove this by taking turns 
hitting each "other" over the head. You can compare the sensation of 
what it feels like when the "other" is hit, to what it feels like when 
"you" are hit. In order to be able to do appropriate statistical 
analysis, be sure that N>=30.

- Curt

W. Codling wrote:
> Thank you Michael for that summary of "The Matrix".  I have seen a 
> couple of them and could never figure out what the film offered that 
> had so many people attaching so much significance to it's content.  To 
> me the films resemble more those martial arts films that suggest the 
> availability of super-human abilities deriving from esoteric and 
> demanding training.  But your summary points out some interesting 
> spiritual-cum-religious aspects which I did not appreciate.
>
> The insight that almost any line of enquiry will lead to some of sort 
> of dyadic foundation is, I think, rather easily come to.  The reflex 
> is to pick one; or better, to think that a choice must be made.  You 
> have made the argument for why a choice must be made, but many forms 
> of Buddhist thought suggest that is a false conclusion.  It's a false, 
> but inevitable conclusion based on the interrogative notion, 'why?'.  
> It is surely a cliche by now that the basic Buddhist interrogative 
> notion is 'what?'.  Following the 'what is is?' line of meditative 
> inquiry also leads to a dyadic insight, but it lacks the urgency of 
> the 'why is it?' questioning.  Yogacara thought suggests that picking 
> one of the pills is 'falling into extremes' and tries to articulate a 
> relationship between the extremes which is not mutually exclusive.  We 
> are told in Zen that there's a hair's breadth difference between 
> samsara and nirvana, so the pills should be almost the same colour if 
> one wanted to convert the Matrix into a Buddhist parable.  The 
> iconographic point made by having the pills red/blue illustrates a 
> conceptual assumption about the relationship between the two.  The 
> whole point of the film would be different if the pills were almost 
> the same colour; and I predict that this would make no sense to us 
> because our icon-receptors are not configured to this notion of the 
> basic relationship.
> Wayne
>
>
>