= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
grouchymusicologist comments on Welcome to Heaven - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (242)
It just sounds blatantly self-contradictory, whereas the metaphor with Christian heaven is inexact but at least I sort of understand it. Here, I feel like adopting the rhetoric of Eastern religion actively impedes my having any idea what the hell it means (and doubly so if it's just a metaphor for some other concept).
You're confused because Kevin (no offense to him) doesn't really know what he is talking about. Nirvana has nothing to do with "becoming one with the universe" and "literally obliterating one's consciousness" is a really bad translation of the doctrine of anatman. It isn't a metaphor, it is a genuine metaphysical and prescriptive doctrine.
He is right that Buddhism should be part of the conversation. The damage New Age, Depak Chopra bullshit has done to the West's image of Buddhism is really a shame, though.
Oh, I suppose so. I'm reasonably conversant with Buddhism, and I know that neither of those two phrases is close to being a good description of nirvana. I was more concerned that the borderline word-salad of "literally obliterating one's consciousness and becoming one with the universe" was being used as if it weren't a completely meaningless turn of phrase. Garbage in ...
:D We're talking about religious metaphors; are you surprised? I think the heaven metaphor is also self-contradictory because I don't think the idea that Christian heaven = absolute, total, eternal, maximum pleasure is accepted by most theologians.
http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html Jill Bolte Taylor talks about one thing that I think would go into a real physical equivalent of Buddhist Nirvana, an ability to dissolve the barrier your mind creates between the atoms that make up your body and the atoms that make up everything else around you.
Your mind creates that barrier? I thought that was a property of the particles themselves.
I believe the idea is that there is no such barrier in the territory, only in the map. (I express no opinion on the value of this idea.)
Experiencing reality without a consciousness barrier is a seriously bad medical condition in humans, but having no conceptual barrier between the self and the rest of reality is something a transhuman mind might be able to handle without going insane.
What would it be like to experience reality without a consciousness barrier? That sounds intriguing but I'm not sure exactly what it means. Is it the same as being unconscious? And it's an actual medical condition? Please tell me more!
I was referring to Jill Bolte's description of her stroke during her Ted talk linked by me earlier in this thread.
Sure, there is an obvious physical barrier, but your mind chooses whether or not to recognize that barrier as meaningful.