Can the idea of Karma be related to the idea of the four causes? — Janus

I don't think so. The word itself, 'karma', comes from the root 'kr-' which is derived from the word for 'hand' and has taken on the meaning of 'work' or 'doing'. In Vedic India, good karma was something that was generated and maintained by the observation of the appropriate rites and rituals. The Buddha appropriated the idea, but broadened it to include any intentional act and in so doing severed its connection with religious rites and rituals. (Indeed one of the Buddhist vows is to 'avoid reliance on rites and ritual'.) But karma is not a naturalistic philosophy in an Aristotelian sense.

In respect of the Aristotelian idea of telos - it think it was simply assumed in Aristotle's day that things exist for a purpose, and can only be properly understood in terms of the end towards which they're directed. In the case of ethics, the 'proper end' for man, is sought through the pursuit of eudaemonia - flourishing - and also the pursuit of knowledge. Those are the basis of Aristotle's virtue ethics.

The underlying issue is of course the sense in which the Universe itself can be understood as animated by purpose. I suppose it is safe to say that in the ancient world, this was simply assumed, as the world was, for the ancients, the 'theatre of the divine' whether that be understood in terms of the ancient pantheist Gods or later monotheism. Part of the so-called 'disenchantment of the world' which marks the transition to modernity was the abandonment of that understanding. Medieval cosmology, based on Ptolemy, was thoroughly Aristotelian, believing that the sphere beyond the moon - the 'super-lunary' realm - was literally the changeless perfection of Heaven (which is why supernovae and comets were the source of such dread). The transition to the heliocentric solar system resulted the crumbling of that worldview and ideas of telos along with it. (Although biologists found it necessary to devise a neologism, teleonomy, to 'allow for the apparentpurposefulness and of goal-directedness of structures and functions in living organisms'.)

Personally, I think the whole question of the nature of intentionality, and whether the Universe is animated by purpose, is still open.

I don't think so. — Wayfarer

And yet according to the idea of Karma present actions are understood to give rise to (cause) future states, aren't they? It seems there must be some conception of causation involved in this understanding: and I am wondering just what that conception consists in, if it relates to the 'four cause' model, and if so, how, and if not, then what is that conception and how is it different?

Well, of course it’s true that karma comprises a causal link between action and result. But that wasn’t elaborated in terms of the fourfold causation of Aristotle.

The theoretical analysis of karma is part of the abhidharma - Buddhist philosophical psychology. This is presented in terms of 'dharmas' (which in this context refer to the 'elements of experience' rather than 'dharma' as 'the principle of the teaching as a whole'.) That analysis was made on the basis of the twelve-fold chain of dependent origination (Pratītyasamutpāda). This comprises a formula in which each link in the twelve-fold chain is explained in terms of arising dependent on the previous link, beginning with ignorance (avidya) as fundamental cause.

Over time this gave rise to the notion of the 'storehouse consciousness' (ālaya-vijñāna, sometimes glossed as the 'collective unconscious') of the Yogācāra school of Buddhism; that forms part of the monastic curriculum in Tibet and East Asia, but not in Theravada. It is here that the idea of the 'mind-stream' (citta-santāna) which flows from life to life was developed. (It is this concept which tends to undermine the Buddhist opposition to the idea of the soul.)

But again, very different to Aristotelian philosophy, which was much more naturalistically focussed, in keeping with the Greek attitude generally. Aristotle was very much a naturalist, spent much of his life categorising biological specimens and the like whereas the focus for Buddhism was soteriological (i.e. pursuit of Nirvāṇa).

Thanks, but I'm already aware of what you write about here, and it doesn't really address my question. What I am wondering is whether there is any actual philosophical explanation of the causation that is purportedly involved in karmic action. I mean it cannot be akin to either material or efficient cause it would seem. Maybe it could be tied in some way to the ideas of formal or final causation, I don't know; and that's why I asked the question, I was hoping someone well versed in Buddhist philosophy might be able to throw some light on the question.

As regards Cosmic purpose, which is kind of the "other half" of the question, it would seem, from what I know at least, that Buddhism does not admit of any overarching purpose.

I was hoping someone well versed in Buddhist philosophy might be able to throw some light on the question. — Janus

Sorry to let you down (as I seem to so often do).

it cannot be akin to either material or efficient cause it would seem — Janus

Try Sheldrake's morphic resonance. That is the nearest thing to a 'mechanism' or cause. But you're right - there's nothing whatever in mainstream philosophy or science about it.

Sorry to let you down (as I seem to so often do). — Wayfarer

No, I didn't mean it like that! :smile:

No worries.

As regards Cosmic purpose, which is kind of the "other half" of the question, it would seem, from what I know at least, that Buddhism does not admit of any overarching purpose. — Janus

Mahayana Buddhism most certainly does conceive of an over-arching purpose - that is 'the awakening of all beings'. It is not historically oriented in the same way that the Christian worldview was - with the expectation of there being a 'second coming' and the Day of Judgement at the end of history. Buddhism remained much more attuned to the cyclical cosmology of the East - the notion that the world/universe goes through periodic episodes of creation and destruction. Mahayana Buddhist cosmology envisages an infinite universe with infinitely many 'life-bearing orbs', on which beings all go through the same processes as they do here on Earth (which is close to one of the ideas that Giordano Bruno was executed for.)

Whereas in the Christian West, religion became identified with the idea of 'God's plan for history'. That is still the belief of many evangelical and millennial sects. So the abandonment of religion also entailed the abandonment of there actually being anything like purpose, meaning or intention. That is writ large in such essays as Bertrand Russell's Free Man's Worship, and a lot of atheist existentialism.

But it's also a form of historical consciousness - of 'being modern' as an outlook, a basket of attitudes and beliefs. That is the kind of thing that Owen Barfield and Jean Gebser wrote about.

Anyway, duty calls, have to log out.

The following passage from Biosemiotics by Jesper Hoffmeyer (page 53-54) ... — Janus

...is pretty unreliable. :)

The way I would look at it is that purpose and form are tied together by what, in modern physics, has become enshrined as the principle of least action. So when Nature has a purpose - an intent to be expressed in an action - there is an optimisation where the shortest path is the one chosen.

This is actually a really mysterious fact - or at least it requires spooky nonlocality because it means that nature picks out the most effective path having considered absolutely every available possibility.

So folk like Aristotle, Plato and Peirce looked at nature and could see something like this at work. Causation involves the holistic settling on some generalised optimal balance.

Plato made finality part of his world of forms. The idea of the good was the light that illuminated all the more particular forms. So goodness - as another way of getting at optimality, balance, effectiveness - was the ultimate purpose of existence. That was the telos.

Aristotle then made the distinction between final and formal cause more explicit. Finality spoke to generality - pure purpose, but now in all its manifest variety - while form became the explicitly particular - and now included the accidents of substance. Instead of one goal, goal-centredness became a thing. And formal cause became - in my view - over-identified with whatever the heck shape something wound up taking.

The idea of necessary form (that which serves the purpose) and accidental form (that which is only purposeful in the sense it doesn't actively prevent the said purpose being achieved) got confused.

Peirce then did take a fully constraints-based/hierarchical view of causation and so had a sufficiently complex model of reality to separate the necessary from the accidental (when it comes to the third thing of the actual).

And then while he stressed "irreversibilty" - a tellic trend in nature - it wasn't about the universal growth of accidents or randomness, but the exact opposite. The purpose of the Cosmos was the universal growth of reasonableness or orderly intelligibility. It was the growth of habits - the constraints that suppress randomness and chaos.

So there are differences and similarities. I prefer to focus on the similarities. What all these guys saw was that there is some kind of holism going on, some kind of downward acting oversight, which causes the Cosmos, the physical world, to be organised by a global optimising principle. The forms that matter take are intelligible because nature can check every possible option to find the most locally effective choice to actualise.

Now this is unmysterious when we think about it as evolution or development. It seems every possibility is being actualised and then either promoted or erased. We can see the optimisation in action.

But current physics - not yet having that kind of "four causes" holism when it comes to picture of reality - is still stuck with a rather hand-waving story on how nature actually implements its least action principle in practice.

With quantum theory for instance, we know that a path integral or sum over histories formalism works. The calculations are correct to umpteen decimal places. But how nature knows to try every path and actualise only the most optimal path (on average - this is a probabilistic story with quantum physics) is the weird and non-local hole in the theory as yet.

Final cause is traditionally understood to be synonymous with final purpose. How can we relate the ideas of "randomness" and "irreversibility" to the idea of 'purpose'? — Janus

Again, purpose does align with irreversibility. It says things are heading towards some end because they are moving away from some beginning. And right from the beginning, they were already headed in that direction.

But Peirce definitely didn't think randomness was the final desire. It was instead the chaotic beginning that reasonableness would leave behind by imposing its logical habits of order.

And even the Heat Death of the Universe can be understood as a state of maximal order, minimal chaos. (Entropy counting is a trickier concept than folk usually realise here.)

The Eastern idea of Karma is often explained as the idea of "cause and effect". Can the idea of Karma be related to the idea of the four causes? — Janus

I think it is related but different.

Eastern philosophy stresses equilibrium balance. So it is a picture of fluctuations or striving settling back towards stillness.

And again this is quite a naturalistic picture. You find it in the organicism of Anaximander or Heraclitus. The only surviving fragment of actual writing from Anaximander is a rather enigmatic comment about cosmic injustices becoming balanced.

So he had a developmental model of the Cosmos - the creation of worlds by the separation of the pure potential of the Apeiron into the hot and the cold, thence the dry and the moist. But this was a Karmic model also in that there was nothing standing in the way of all the separated apeiron simply folding back into itself and returning to its initial untroubled state. Disturbances might erupt - like turbulence in a stream - and then just as easily vanish.

This was also the Buddhist doctrine of dependent co-arising. It is the reason for a cyclic view. Stuff can bubble up and organise to have complex form. But that kind of symmetry-breaking seems perfectly reversible. There is no reason it should persist, except by accident, or because we falsely try to maintain it.

So you have two contrasting metaphysics - even though both are broadly organic and holistic.

And I, of course, find the fact that there is this dichotomy of choices only what one would expect. The actual whole story is triadic. So the equilibrium story, and the tellic story, are like the synchronic and diachronic views of the one metaphysics.

This indeed fits very nicely with the Big Bang/Heat Death cosmology of modern physics. As I mentioned about counting entropy, a problem is that from one point of view, the total entropy of the universe has never changed. It may have cooled, yet it has also expanded. So one thing has been exchanged for another, without changing the sum total.

So from a cross-sectional perspective, the universe is always in thermal equilibrium (if we forget the tiny fraction that is negentropic matter for the moment). But from a longitudinal perspective, the universe is transforming from a chaotic fluctuating beginning to a big silent nothingness of minimal fluctuation.

To sum up, the ancients did look at nature and did see a holistic story. But it gets confusing as there is then a tendency to latch onto one or other of a pair of dichotomous alternatives. Either existence is basically eternal and unchanging - so any eruptions of busy striving will be something temporary, and bound to get cancelled out. Or it is basically striving and transformative - and so there is some actual one-way journey that starts in chaos and winds up in some kind of intelligible perfection (like our good selves even :) ).

Peirce is the modern metaphysician who finally set out a larger framework - a tradic or hierarchical one - that could incorporate these two alternatives. It could be both a story of holistic equilibrium and a story of a natural growth of purposeful form.

But that kind of ninja metaphysics is hard to wrap your thinking around. Hoffmeyer and his fellow Euro-semioticians are a fine bunch, but they come at semiotics from a broadly linguistic angle. What is central to them is the code duality - the symbol~matter aspect of the story.

The biosemioticians who best understood Peirce - in my view - were those in the US who were the pioneers in applying hierarchy theory to biological science. They were looking at things structurally. So they could recognise straight away how semiotics mapped to that kind of triadic complexity - the kind which is built of pairs of dichotomies, the kind that has both a cross-sectional metaphysics and also an "exactly opposite" longitudinal one.

So when Nature has a purpose - an intent to be expressed in an action - there is an optimisation where the shortest path is the one chosen.

This is actually a really mysterious fact - or at least it requires spooky nonlocality because it means that nature picks out the most effective path having considered absolutely every available possibility. — apokrisis

This isn't problematic if one assumes Platonism to be true, no?

Eastern philosophy stresses equilibrium balance. So it is a picture of fluctuations or striving settling back towards stillness. — apokrisis

Except that 'stasis' is not the end towards which Buddhism strives.

Śāriputra, foolish ordinary beings do not have the wisdom that comes from hearing the Dharma. When they hear about a Tathāgata’s entering nirvāṇa, they take the wrong view of cessation or extinction. Because of their perception of cessation or extinction, they claim that the realm of sentient beings decreases. Their claim constitutes an enormously wrong view and an extremely grave, evil karma.

Furthermore, Śāriputra, from the wrong view of decrease, these sentient beings derive three more wrong views. These three views and the view of decrease, like a net, are inseparable from each other. What are these three views? They are (1) the view of cessation, which means the ultimate end; (2) the view of extinction, which is equated to nirvāṇa; (3) the view that nirvāṇa is a void, which means that nirvāṇa is the ultimate quiet nothingness. Śāriputra, in this way these three views fetter, hold, and impress sentient beings.

Sutra of Neither Increase nor Decrease

Peirce is the modern metaphysician who finally set out a larger framework - a tradic or hierarchical one - that could incorporate these two alternatives. — apokrisis

There were actually three.

In 1893 Peirce used the word "agapism" for the view that creative love is operative in the cosmos. Drawing from the Swedenborgian ideas of Henry James, Sr. which he had absorbed long before, Peirce held that it involves a love which expresses itself in a devotion to cherishing and tending to people or things other than oneself, as parent may do for offspring, and as God, as Love, does even and especially for the unloving, whereby the loved ones may learn. Peirce regarded this process as a mode of evolution of the cosmos and its parts, and he called the process "agapasm", such that: "The good result is here brought to pass, first, by the bestowal of spontaneous energy by the parent upon the offspring, and, second, by the disposition of the latter to catch the general idea of those about it and thus to subserve the general purpose." Peirce held that there are three such principles and three associated modes of evolution:

"Three modes of evolution have thus been brought before us: evolution by fortuitous variation, evolution by mechanical necessity, and evolution by creative love. We may term them tychastic evolution, or tychasm, anancastic evolution, or anancasm, and agapastic evolution, or agapasm. The doctrines which represent these as severally of principal importance we may term tychasticism, anancasticism, and agapasticism. On the other hand the mere propositions that absolute chance, mechanical necessity, and the law of love are severally operative in the cosmos may receive the names of tychism, anancism, and agapism."

C. S. Peirce, 1893

But Peirce's 'law of love' got pretty short shrift amongst his later scientific interpreters.

The biosemioticians who best understood Peirce - in my view - were those in the US who were the pioneers in applying hierarchy theory to biological science. — apokrisis

This is so as to simulate living processes for such purposes as biology, computing, artificial intelligence, and other practical applications.

This isn't problematic if one assumes Platonism to be true, no? — Posty McPostface

But how does that Platonism work? Yes, we have the allegory of the cave. But that points to a very unrealistic kind of reality-creating mechanism.

Consider the catenary curve - the form that a sagging chain adopts to satisfy the principle of least action - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catenary

We can solve its dynamics with an equation that distinguishes between the constants (that stand for an equilibrium condition) and the variables (that are all the accidents that are the different actual arches or suspended chains).

So Plato offered no connecting metaphysics. He imagined a world of static forms that simply cast a shadow that was imperfect in its variability.

What you need is a description that ties matter and form together, having first separated them. And physics does this by being able to define a set of boundary conditions and a set of initial conditions.

So a dynamical or emergent view of existence would say that Platonia is not inhabited by a zoo of particular abstract objects - horses, triangles and spears - but is the home of constraining physical principles. Symmetries and their symmetry breaking possibilities. Then these principles get expressed directly because ... they are constraints. They exist in their very expression.

Well, if we're talking about the behavior or things in state space, then everything is striving to the lowest quantum level, hence the most optimal state space available locally. I don't know how to explain relative state space due to not knowing how QM meshes with GR or SGR.

But, your point is correct, if things ALWAYS strive towards the lowest quantum state possible, and hence the most efficient route, then there seems to be a 'hidden variable' that is the idealism of Platonism at work, no?

But Peirce's 'law of love' got pretty short shrift amongst his later scientific interpreters. — Wayfarer

Yep. This is indeed a case where his trichotomania may have led him astray. ;)

My metaphysics is content with accident and necessity - or freedoms and constraints. Creative love is not needed as a further category.

If we want to include an anthropomorphic dimensions to the discussion, that can be done via the contrast of simplicity and complexity. Hierarchy theory can speak to the human aspect without having to bring in transcendental agapism.

So sure, human feeling is fine and wonderful. But it is a side-story to creation, not its final goal. Hierarchies of complexity - like tiny dots of planets coated with a thin biofilm of life and mind - may arise in the middle of the Cosmic tale, like erupting turbulence. But the bigger picture is simpler. The Universe on the whole is just a spread/cooling bath of radiation. Humans are specks of heightened entropification - the socio-economic structure required to combust a trapped store of fossil fuel - that flared and disappeared in the Cosmic blink of an eye. Nothing more.

So agapism fails in that it lacks the immanence which makes evolution by fortuitous variation, and evolution by mechanical necessity, ring true to us natural philosophers.

Peirce makes mistakes, like anyone.

But, your point is correct, if things ALWAYS strive towards the lowest quantum state possible, and hence the most efficient route, then there seems to be a 'hidden variable' that is the idealism of Platonism at work, no? — Posty McPostface

I agree that Plato was trying to put a finger on the same general idea. Any causal description of nature is going to need some kind of global downward acting purpose to organise its affairs. It can't be all a matter of blind accident with no helping hand.

So, then Platonism is a absolute sense of idealism working on local and global state spaces? Just another way of stating the idealism of Platonism hereabouts.

EDIT: A while ago I had the question on mind, as to whether QM obeys causality. For that to be the case, then some absolutism in terms of 'hidden variables' or Platonism is required IMO.

Except that 'stasis' is not the end towards which Buddhism strives. — Wayfarer

Oh well. Stillness doesn't have to be dead emptiness. It is the disengagement that resolves the karmic cycle of engagement.

But you are right that there is a tellic trajectory in Buddhism if the letting go is meant to result in nirvana - which you would read as a state of pure mind?

So it depends on how you frame this. Is the end a return to the beginning - if all is spirit and ceasing to strive is to become one again with that spirit? Or is the end a proper transformation - where the material world was the beginning and pure mind is the desire?

So everyone is wrestling with the same metaphysical conundrum. Existence seems to be both a tale of entropy and negentropy, progress and illusion.

There is the growth of complexity out of simplicity - with us sitting at the enlightened peak of that, and presuming that the ladder extends all the way to the pure mind up in heaven.

Then there is also the just as obvious cycle of life and death, birth and destruction. Complexity arises and crumbles. Material simplicity wins.

Both these stories are true of nature. A grand metaphysical narrative has to show how that can be the case in a complementary, rather than a contradictory, fashion.

But you are right that there is a tellic trajectory in Buddhism if the letting go is meant to result in nirvana - which you would read as a state of pure mind? — apokrisis

Customarily, Nirvāṇa is said to be inconceivable, but it is sometimes imagined as being stasis or quiescence. And traditionally Buddhism has been more inclined towards negative descriptions of Nirvāṇa in terms of what it is not - i.e. not being anything which is self, suffering, and impermanence (i.e. the whole domain of experience.)

But there are also positive descriptions such as it being:

permanent, stable, imperishable, immovable, ageless, deathless, unborn, and un-become, that it is power, bliss and happiness, the secure refuge, the shelter, and the place of unassailable safety; the real truth and the supreme reality; that it is the Good, the supreme goal and the one and only consummation of life.

A key point being that it is only 'understood by the wise', i.e. understanding or seeing it is wisdom (jñāna). And it might be noted that Nirvāṇa is not Heaven (even if on the village level they are sometimes conflated.) The traditional view is that there may be Heavens (typical of Buddhism there are numbers of them), but beings in those realms are ultimately doomed to be re-born in lower realms, as they too are 'impermanent and subject to decay' albeit over much vaster time-scales than the human. (That's why, in Tibetan depictions of the 'wheel of life', the Buddha and bodhisattvas are shown as being outside the circle - they're not 'in heaven', they're actually 'off the map', so to speak.)

Then there is also the just as obvious cycle of life and death, birth and destruction. Complexity arises and crumbles. Material simplicity wins.

Both these stories are true of nature. A grand metaphysical narrative has to show how that can be the case in a complementary, rather than a contradictory, fashion. — apokrisis

I think that religious metaphysics, generally, understand the human - or more broadly, the subject - as intrinsically real. In other words, reality is also a subjective reality, not simply an array of things, forces or material energies (although I think perhaps 'subjective' is misleading, it's more 'possessing subject-hood', but that's a very awkward expression.)

Hence Nagel's observation that

Plato was clearly concerned not only with the state of his soul, but also with his relation to the universe at the deepest level. Plato’s metaphysics was not intended to produce merely a detached understanding of reality. His motivation in philosophy was in part to achieve a kind of understanding that would connect him (and therefore every human being) to the whole of reality – intelligibly and if possible satisfyingly.

...The Platonic sense of the world is that its intelligibility and the development of beings to whom it is intelligible are not accidental; so our awareness and its expansion as part of the history of life and of our species are part of the natural evolution of the cosmos.

...in the Platonic conception, even the biological and cultural evolution that has led to the starting point at which each of us arrives on Earth and reaches consciousness is embedded in something larger, something that makes that entire history less arbitrary than it is on the reductive view.

(From Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament.)

Whereas nowadays, we're inclined to dismiss such an understanding as anthropocentric - notwithstanding that even science is at the end of the day a human enterprise. But now we see the human as the kind of tag-end of an undirected process. I think that's what underlies the sense of 'otherness' that so pervades much of modern culture; whereas the underlying ethos of a traditional metaphysics is a sense of relatedness to the cosmos.

Except that 'stasis' is not the end towards which Buddhism strives. — Wayfarer

Customarily, Nirvāṇa is said to be inconceivable, but it is sometimes imagined as being stasis or quiescence. — Wayfarer

permanent, stable, imperishable, immovable, ageless, deathless, unborn, and un-become ... that it is the Good, the supreme goal

Aren't you contradicting yourself now?

I think apparent contradiction is a consequence of the inability to imagine such a state, which is not simply non-existence or non-being.

Hey, it was you who said it wasn't about stasis, except that it was.

Remember that my own metaphysics is founded on vagueness, apeiron, quantum foam or firstness. So I have a pretty specific conception of a state of being that is "less than nothing" in being "potentially anything".

So there are differences and similarities. I prefer to focus on the similarities. What all these guys saw was that there is some kind of holism going on, some kind of downward acting oversight, which causes the Cosmos, the physical world, to be organised by a global optimising principle. The forms that matter take are intelligible because nature can check every possible option to find the most locally effective choice to actualise. — apokrisis

What's this, some form of pantheism? Are you saying that the belief expressed by these metaphysicians is that the universe, or "Cosmos" is some sort of thinking mind, which considers every single possibility, prior to every physical action, choosing the most "locally effective"? Or is this a way of saying that the entire physical universe which we know of, is just a computer simulation, and the computer figures every possibility prior to actualizing the most effective choice? What do you mean by "nature can check every possible option"? Is "nature" a computing machine making decisions according to a predetermined program of entropy or some such thing, or is it a free willing being, making decisions according to a principle of "Good", or as wayfarer pointed to "Love". Why would you say that choosing the principle of Love for one's metaphysics is a mistake?

Here's something you ought to consider apokrisis, if you wish to produce a more comprehensible metaphysics. You appear to be mixing together two completely incompatible metaphysics without offering any real principles which might establish compatibility and consistency between them.

The forms that matter take are intelligible because nature can check every possible option to find the most locally effective choice to actualise. — apokrisis

Remember that my own metaphysics is founded on vagueness, apeiron, quantum foam or firstness. So I have a pretty specific conception of a state of being that is "less than nothing" in being "potentially anything". — apokrisis

So you have here, first, from Anaxagoras, the concept of Nous, a controlling mind of the cosmos. Then you have from Anaximander, the concept of apeiron, which is an infinite potential. Do you not see that the one metaphysics excludes the other, in the sense of contradiction, leaving one or the other impossible if you accept either one? If there is a controlling mind, "Nous", then infinite possibility, apeiron, is impossible because the controlling mind, Nous, is itself a limitation. And if there is infinite possibility, apeiron, then there cannot be a controlling mind, because the existence of the controlling mind, Nous, would be a real limit to the possibilities, leaving the possibilities less than infinite.

You have a proposed solution, the triadic solution, which suggests the co-existence of both. But this solution is impossible. As described, one excludes the other, so the two cannot coexist in the triadic way. This is why Plato, and his followers, Aristotle and other Neo-Platonists, went in a totally different way, introducing a completely new principle the Good, the Perfect, the Ideal, the One. This new principle, introduced by Plato out of the necessity derived from the inapplicability of the other two, is neither the controlling mind, Nous, nor the infinite possibility, apeiron, nor does it allow that either one of these is a valid principle.

The conclusion to be drawn, is that both of these, the controlling mind, Nous, and the infinite potential, apeiron, are inherently incompatible. The triadic approach you present, which is an attempt to do the impossible, establish compatibility between the two incompatibles, ought to be dismissed, as the impossible solution. Further, since neither one, the controlling mind, Nous, nor the infinite possibility, apeiron is capable of describing reality in itself, both of these ought to be dismissed as unacceptable. Simply put, they negate and annihilate each other. Therefore we must proceed to derive a new principle, as Plato did, which might be "good", "love", "karma", or some such thing.

I was hoping someone well versed in Buddhist philosophy might be able to throw some light on the question. — Janus


Sorry to let you down (as I seem to so often do).

it cannot be akin to either material or efficient cause it would seem — Janus


Try Sheldrake's morphic resonance. That is the nearest thing to a 'mechanism' or cause. But you're right - there's nothing whatever in mainstream philosophy or science about it. — Wayfarer

I had not enough time to write a more detailed response before. It might have seemed that I was suggesting that you are not well-versed in Buddhist philosophy, and that is one possibility. But the other possibility is that there is nothing in Buddhist philosophy (which you also seem to suggest here) that explicates, in any way analogous to a Western philosophical approach, the concept of cause involved in Karmic action.

If we accept the overall Western approach (with all its differences; ancient, medieval and modern, of course) as being paradigmatic of philosophy, this would seem to point to the fact that the East has no real philosophical tradition of its own at all. Just as western theology is a separate discipline from philosophy, in that it founds itself on faith rather than experience or speculative reason, so the eastern traditions are theologies rather than philosophies.

In the east you have the trope of the enlightened master. The master is said to know things that lesser mortals cannot. Now there are two possibilities here; either this is true and the master does know things in ways impossible to ordinary people, or this is merely a cultural myth. If we accept for the sake of argument the idea that the master can understand the absolute truth of karma, for example, that he or she can absolutely know this truth purely from experience (with no faith at all needed), even though no discursive explanatory account of it is possible in the way explanatory accounts of Aristotle's 'four causes' are, what does this entail? I would say that it entails that although for the master Karma is not a matter of faith, it is nonetheless a matter of faith for everyone who is not an enlightened master. How many enlightened masters are there? How could we lesser mortals know the answer to this, know what karma even really is (in the absence of explanation of it) or even know whether there are actually enlightened masters at all? Obviously for us, it is merely a matter of faith, no matter how you cut, and thus belongs to theology, to religion, but not to philosophy.

The conclusion to be drawn, is that both of these, the controlling mind, Nous, and the infinite potential, apeiron, are inherently incompatible. The triadic approach you present, which is an attempt to do the impossible, establish compatibility between the two incompatibles, ought to be dismissed, as the impossible solution. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are talking about two incompatible things. I'm talking about two complementary limits.

A dichotomy is logically that which is mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. So Apeiron and Nous would have to "exist" as the inverse or reciprocal of each other. They would be the mutually opposed limits on being, and hence Being would be that bit - the actual or substantial bit - left in the middle. The limits themselves are not part of what is actual because they are the extremes that mark the limit of what even could be actual. We might give them names, like Apeiron and Nous. But they are the names of the complementary limits on being.

This is why my metaphysical approach is irreducibly triadic or hierarchical. It says actuality is the meat in the sandwich. Two reciprocally-defined bounds define the limits of reality, and so you have everything that is real found in-between those limits.

This is systems thinking - just like Aristotle's four causes and hylomorphic form. The substantial is the bit that exists in-between the limitations of formal causes and material possibilities. The approach I take is the dichotomous/triadic one that actually underwrote Ancient Greek metaphysics and so modern science.

But Aristotelean logic - the three laws of thought - then also had a huge influence on metaphysical argument. While four causes thinking was holistic, the laws of thought (and atomistic philosophy) set the scene for the great reductionist project. Which in turn resulted in theistic dualism.

So here you are trying to assert the authority of the law of the excluded middle. Faced with a dichotomy, you say its complementary pair must be reduced to either/or. One thing or the other. You deny the third thing of the reciprocal relation that creates the separation and so also forms the interaction. You say - with the full force of an unexamined habit - that only a yes/no answer is logically acceptable.

Holism has a metaphysical logic. Reductionism has its own metaphysical logic. If you feel confused by my posts, it is only because you read them through the same distorting lens every time.

Mahayana Buddhism most certainly does conceive of an over-arching purpose - that is 'the awakening of all beings'. — Wayfarer

But this purpose is a human purpose, not a purpose purported to be inherent in reality itself, isn't it?

If we accept the overall Western approach (with all its differences; ancient, medieval and modern, of course) as being paradigmatic of philosophy, this would seem to point to the fact that the East has no real philosophical tradition of its own at all. — Janus

It might be instructive to consider the Kyoto School. That was a modern attempt to take a Westernised look back at the Eastern tradition to recover its essential themes.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/

...it is fair to say that the Kyoto School thinkers generally consider the purest sources for the idea of absolute nothingness to lie in the traditions of the East. Hisamatsu went so far as to speak of absolute nothingness as “oriental nothingness” (Hisamatsu 1960); though it is important to bear in mind that his claim is that this idea was first clearly discovered in the traditions of East. Absolute nothingness is by no means only relevant to Eastern cultures, anymore than in 1500 CE the earth was only round in the West. Moreover, if the idea of absolute nothingness “came to awareness in the spirituality of the East,” as Nishitani says, the philosophy of absolute nothingness is generally considered to be the Kyoto School's own contribution to the contemporary world of thought opened up by the meeting of East and West....

...The Kyoto School might even be thought of as recovering a suggestion from one of the first Presocratic philosophers, Anaximander: namely, to think finite beings as determinations, or delimitations, of “the indefinite” or “the unlimited” (to apeiron)...

...Their explicit references are primarily to Mahāyāna Buddhism, especially to the East Asian Buddhist schools of Zen (predominantly the Rinzai tradition but also notably Dōgen of Sōtō) and/or Pure Land (predominantly Shinran's Shin). The key Sanskrit term in Mahāyāna Buddhism here is śūnyatā (“emptiness”; kū in Japanese). With the noteworthy exception of the later Nishitani, however, the Kyoto School tends to favor the Chinese glyph mu (“nothingness”; wu in Chinese), which is found predominantly in Zen, and which reflects the early attempt to “match terms” with Daoism in the translation and interpretive development of Buddhism in China. Let us briefly examine both of these Asian sources for the Kyoto School's philosophies of absolute nothingness, śūnyatā and wu/mu...

Continuing the discussion with @Wayfarer....

In Mahāyāna Buddhism śūnyatā refers first of all to the fact that all things come into being in “interdependent origination” (Sanskrit: pratītya-samutpāda; Japanese: engi), and they are therefore “empty” of any independent substantial self-nature or “own-being” (Sanskrit: svabhāva). This thought is closely tied to the basic Buddhist thesis of “no-self” or “non-ego” (Sanskrit: anātman; Japanese: muga). All beings, including the ego, are interconnected and in flux.

Psychologically, śūnyatā refers also to the releasement from all attachment to beings, from all reification and willful appropriation of them. Such attachments are both based on and in turn support the primary attachment to the fabricated ego, since the ego both strives to possess and is unwittingly possessed by its reification of beings. Awakening to the emptiness of all things, to their lack of substantial own-being or egoity (Japanese: shogyōmuga), thus frees one both from an ego-centered and reified view of things, and from the illusion of the substantial ego itself.

However, if the movement of negation stops here at a one-sided negation of being (i.e., at negation of the independent substantial reality of things and the ego), and if the idea of “emptiness” is not itself emptied,[8] then we are left either with a pessimistic nihilism or with an ironically reified view of śūnyatā. These are what the Buddhist tradition calls “śūnyatā-sickness” (Japanese: kūbyō).

True śūnyatā must be understood to dynamically negate the very opposition of being and (relative) nothingness (see Nakamura 1975, Vol. 1, 278). Hence, in Mahāyāna we find an explicit return—through a “great negation” of a reified misunderstanding of being—to a “great affirmation” of a non-reified understanding of being. Emptiness thoroughly understood is nothing separate from or opposed to “being” properly understood.

As the often chanted lines of the Heart Sutra put it: “[phenomenal] form is emptiness; emptiness is also [phenomenal] form; emptiness is no other than form; form is no other than emptiness” (see Bercholz/Kohn 1993, 155). The famous Mahāyāna Buddhist philosopher of śūnyatā Nāgārjuna (ca. 150–250 CE) went so far as to provocatively state: “The limits (i.e., realm) of nirvāna are the limits of samsāra. Between the two, also, there is not the slightest difference whatsoever” (Inada 1993, 158). In other words, nirvāna is neither a nihilistic extinction of nor a transcendent escape from the phenomenal world (samsāra); it is rather an enlightened manner of being-in-the-world here and now (see Garfield 1995, 332).

This radical reaffirmation of the phenomenal world was particularly stressed in East Asian developments of Mahāyāna Buddhism, where we find such remarkably affirmative phrases as: “true emptiness, marvelous being” (Japanese: shinkū-myōu).

The way I would look at it is that purpose and form are tied together by what, in modern physics, has become enshrined as the principle of least action. — apokrisis

We might see a tendency of things to take paths of least action and enshrine that as a principle. This may give us the impression that nature is purposeful, but the notion of purpose seems to be emptied of its meaning in the absence of deliberation; it seems to become an idea of mere function.

Again, purpose does align with irreversibility. It says things are heading towards some end because they are moving away from some beginning. And right from the beginning, they were already headed in that direction. — apokrisis

But again, this would seem to count as purpose only if there had been some intention right at the beginning if not along the way.

What you say about Karma is an interesting slant, and makes it sound like a kind of final cause. But again the tendency to return to equilibrium absent any inherent intention in things to behave that way (according to a spiritual reality that this world is an expression of, perhaps, or the direction of a God) would tend to look more like function than purpose. :smile:

It might be instructive to consider the Kyoto School. That was a modern attempt to take a Westernised look back at the Eastern tradition to recover its essential themes. — apokrisis

Hmmm, interesting..."absolute nothingness". And yet absolute nothingness is not absolutely nothing...a deep paradox!

The middles section of the quoted passage, with the reference to Anaximander, seems to be right up your alley, apo!

We might see a tendency of things to take paths of least action and enshrine that as a principle. This may give us the impression that nature is purposeful, but the notion of purpose seems to be emptied of its meaning in the absence of deliberation; it seems to become an idea of mere function. — Janus

Or even less than that. It is a mere universal tendency.

So yes, it is a deflationary view. But not an eliminativist one. And that is a significant difference.

Mind is purposeful. Life is functional. Physics speaks to propensities.

Mind, being the most complex or particular, clearly has the most choice to make because it is that which is most individuated from the general or contextual. It can have purposes or choices that set it apart from its circumstances. Indeed, that is kind of definitional.

Life makes choices that are functional. They are choices entrained to environmentally general demands like maintenance and replication.

Physics is then about the truly universal tendencies. And there are now no choices apart from the most general ones already baked into the fabric of being as that which characterise the Cosmos itself.

But still, the least action principle shows that there is something "mysterious" going on in the very heart of reductionist physics. There is a necessary holism that reductionism just cannot explain and simply accepts as a useful simplifying fact.

Newtonian mechanics quickly became recast in the language of Lagrangians and Hamiltonians for practical reasons. The principle of least action made the business of calculating simpler. And then Quantum Mechanics really needed the principle of least action - in the guise of Feynman's path integral - to make calculations of any complexity even humanly possible.

The middles section of the quoted passage, with the reference to Anaximander, seems to be right up your alley, apo! — Janus

That's what led me to the Kyoto School of course. I was googling for references. :grin:

There is speculation about who influenced who as Anaximander was around at the same time as Taoist thought was developing. Anaximander was a coloniser and traveller. So the essential ideas could have gone West to East or the other way. Or developed as obvious for both.