Can the idea of Karma be related to the idea of the four causes? — Janus
I don't think so. — Wayfarer
I was hoping someone well versed in Buddhist philosophy might be able to throw some light on the question. — Janus
it cannot be akin to either material or efficient cause it would seem — Janus
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
The following passage from Biosemiotics by Jesper Hoffmeyer (page 53-54) ... — Janus
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
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
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
Eastern philosophy stresses equilibrium balance. So it is a picture of fluctuations or striving settling back towards stillness. — apokrisis
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.
Peirce is the modern metaphysician who finally set out a larger framework - a tradic or hierarchical one - that could incorporate these two alternatives. — apokrisis
C. S. Peirce, 1893In 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."
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 isn't problematic if one assumes Platonism to be true, no? — Posty McPostface
But Peirce's 'law of love' got pretty short shrift amongst his later scientific interpreters. — Wayfarer
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
Except that 'stasis' is not the end towards which Buddhism strives. — Wayfarer
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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 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...
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
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
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
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
The middles section of the quoted passage, with the reference to Anaximander, seems to be right up your alley, apo! — Janus
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