If you are up for reading a book, the “show notes” point at several that are squarely about this. Varela, @evantthompson, & Rosch’s is probably the most readable!
There’s lots of ways of coming at this, and it’s hard to write up in less than a book and more than a phrase.
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Replying to @Meaningness @OortCloudAtlas and
In a phrase: what physical properties could a thing-in-your-head have that would make it represent the fact that Ouagadougou is the capital of Burkina Faso?
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Replying to @Meaningness @OortCloudAtlas and
By 1990 it became apparent that no answer to that was possible, even in principle. Once you bite that bullet, the whole cognitivist project collapses.
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Replying to @Meaningness @OortCloudAtlas and
Then you can start to think about alternatives. There’s lots of appealing starting points, but so far none of them have led to a generative research program that can regularly crank out concrete substantive results. No “normal science” yet; it’s “pre-paradigm” in Kuhn’s terms.
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Replying to @Meaningness @OortCloudAtlas and
Somewhat relatedly: I find Culadasa’s appeals to cognitive science and/or neuroscience unconvincing and potentially misleading. Very short on details/footnotes; it seems to be a vague rehash of mainly 1980s-era stuff that has been discredited for decades.
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Replying to @Meaningness @OortCloudAtlas and
What do you have in mind in particular?
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Replying to @SpeakingSubject @OortCloudAtlas and
Well… a proper analysis would be a long post and would be interpreted as a nasty attack on a nice person. But, for example, >
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Replying to @Meaningness @OortCloudAtlas and
Is it particularly the case that critique is taken personally in the Buddhist world? I haven’t encountered that concern so prominently until these discussions.
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Replying to @SpeakingSubject @OortCloudAtlas and
That is my impression. I’ve described mainstream American Buddhism “the religion of niceness.” But it may just be me. I am not as considerate of others’ feelings as I should be.https://vividness.live/2011/06/10/nice-buddhism/ …
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Replying to @Meaningness @OortCloudAtlas and
Seems to me that here more than anywhere critique should be welcomed. After all, people base their whole lives on these practices, as far as I can tell.
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Well, yes… I mean, it would seem that what unites those of us in this conversation is the sense that Buddhism has *something* enormously valuable to offer, but is also so badly askew that it needs deep rethinking. TBF, Buddhism has done that throughout its history…
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Replying to @Meaningness @SpeakingSubject and
well, Culadasa may have the science wrong (I don't know) but I think for most practitioners the question is "does the practice he suggests produce the results he says it does?" It's long been a problem that we don't why some things work, which do work.
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