The Chinese Room Argument
The argument and thought-experiment now generally known as the Chinese Room Argument was first published in a 1980 article by American philosopher John Searle (1932– ). It has become one of the best-known arguments in recent philosophy. Searle imagines himself alone in a room following a computer program for responding to Chinese characters slipped under […]
Absurdism
This article is about the philosophy. For an extremely unreasonable, silly, or foolish thing, see Absurdity. For absurdist humour, see surreal humour. For the literary genre, see Absurdist fiction. Sisyphus, the symbol of the absurdity of existence, painting by Franz Stuck (1920). Absurdism is the philosophical theory that existence in general is absurd. This implies […]
GENERATING THE ALTRUISTIC MIND OF AWAKENING
The ceremony for generating bodhicitta, the altruistic mind of awakening. Among the audience, those who are practicing Buddhists can participate fully in this ceremony. Those who are not Buddhists can participate in the ceremony as a means to strengthen your commitment to the ideals of compassion and altruism. Before you participate in the actual ceremony, […]
Eight Verses on Training the Mind
n essence, the short text entitled Eight Verses on Training the Mind presents the practices of cultivating both conventional bodhicitta, or the altruistic aspiration to attain buddhahood for the benefit of all beings, and ultimate bodhicitta, the profound insight into the ultimate nature of reality or “the ultimate mind of enlightenment.” The first seven stanzas […]
Reality
Also known as “meat space” to differentiate it from cyberspace and regular space, which is a vacuum. “How can this chair be a chair and also a quantum probability and also mostly empty space? How do those different realities co-exist? How can the same “object” follow one set of physics at a conventional scale […]
THE THREE HIGHER TRAININGS
Higher training in morality, in meditation, and in wisdom. The teaching on the Four Noble Truths, which was the Buddha’s first teaching following his attainment of full awakening, represents the foundation for the practices of emptiness and the cultivation of compassion. This teaching underpins everything that the Buddha taught subsequently and helps us to establish […]
The 7 Levels of Sapience
Self-awareness is ranked as Level 5 information integration and above according to the following criteria: Level 0 – Inanimate Objects Note: At this level, there is no capacity for experiencing pain or suffering. No information integration: Inanimate objects; objects that do not modify themselves in response to interaction – e.g., rocks, mountains. Level 1 – […]
THREE LEVELS OF UNDERSTANDING
In Buddhism, one speaks of three different levels of understanding, which are sequential—an understanding arrived at through learning and studying, an understanding developed as a result of deep reflection and contemplation, and an understanding acquired through meditative or religious experience. There is a definite order in the sequence of this three. So on the basis […]
THE INNER WORLD OF CONSCIOUSNESS
When we use such terms as “consciousness” or “mind” it often tends to give the impression that we are talking about a single, monolithic entity; but this is misleading. Our own personal experience reveals that the mental world is tremendously diverse. Moreover, when we examine each moment of cognition or mental experience, we realize that […]
DEPENDENT ORIGINATION AND THE LAW OF CAUSALITY
A key principle here is dependent origination. This fundamental principle of Buddhism states that everything arises and ceases in dependence upon causes and conditions. The fourth-century Indian Buddhist thinker Asanga identified three key conditions governing this principle of dependent origination. First is “the absence of designer condition,” which pertains to the issue of whether or […]
