[Buddha-l] Re: Filtered Buddhism

[Richard Hayes]

On Thursday 28 June 2007 13:31, Jamie Hubbard wrote:

> So the DL is very reluctant to let
> any version of physicalism in the door, even more sophisticated versions
> than simple materialism.

In this, HHDL is probably following Dharmakirti, who argues at some length 
that it is, strictly speaking, impossible to determine whether awareness is 
caused by matter or the other way around. This is because knowledge of cause 
and effect comes about only as a result of observing whether one thing arises 
in the absence of another thing. But, for all we know through experience, 
matter is never found independent of awareness and awareness is never found 
in the absence of matter. So we can only make conjectures about which causes 
the other; we cannot have definitive knowledge. Having said that, Dharmakirti 
adduces several considerations to show why he thinks that awareness cannot be 
reduced to material events. In the final analysis, all he really succeeds in 
doing is to show that the materialist (in his day there were several 
materialistic schools of philosophy, some of them quite sophisticated) cannot 
prove that matter is the sole cause of awareness. (If it turned out that 
matter WERE the sole cause of awareness, argued the materialists of 
Dharmakirti's day, then that would make rebirth impossible.)

> Since folks have been talking about rebirth lately, Richard, can you
> give us a bit more about the cottage industry among Buddhist
> epistemologists? And is this discussion related only to asrava/klesa and
> the like or also to particular objects and universals -- that is, how
> does one find the *absence* of self, for example? 

The discussion is quite general. The question is how one can know the absence 
of anything.

As luck would have it, I have spent most of today working on an article on 
that very topic. It's a translation and discussion of verses 11-38 and their 
commentary in the chapter on inference in Dharmakirti's Pramanavarttika. (You 
can get a sneak preview of the current state of the work by going to 
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes/pvsv.html ) In this range of verses Dharmakirti is 
terribly worried by the problem of whether one can establish a universal 
negative proposition of the form "No A is B" through non-observation alone. 
That is, if one never observes an A that is B, is that failure to make the 
observation the same thing as proving that no A is B? Dharmakirti concludes 
(rightly) that simple failure to make an observation of something is not a 
ground for concluding that the thing does not exist.

> BTW, I am also curious about your general thoughts about "not finding
> something is not the same as finding its non-existence." When HHDL uses
> this it always seems like a dodge to me . . .

It is not a dodge provided that one adds, as Dharmakirti does, a qualifying 
phrase. What he says is that the failure to observe something THAT WOULD BE 
OBSERVED IF IT WERE PRESENT suffices to prove that it is absent. But how does 
one prove that something would be observed if it were present? Well, if one 
is talking about things that have been observed in the past, there is not a 
big problem. I can conclude with some confidence that Paris Hilton is not on 
my desk as I write this. (But I bet if I turned on Fox News right now, she 
would be there!) But when something is in principle unobservable, as atoms 
and souls and subtle bodies are alleged to be, then all the failure in the 
world to observe them will not establish their absence or non-existence. 

And here is where things can become quite dodgy. It may be a little too easy 
to put things into the category of being too subtle to be observed. (Catholic 
theologians can stuff all sorts of things into that category!) On the other 
hand, it would be foolish, I think, to say that there just aren't things that 
are too subtle to be observed. The category of things that exist but can't be 
observed can be quite useful; it's just that it's damned difficult to know 
what things to put into that category and how one can put anything into that 
category without begging the question.

Is that answer confusing enough?

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes