firstly i am sorry for responding late, actually festivals are going on here. So not getting any time for responding.
bobo0100 wrote:As I said in the last post, there is a causal relationship between the state of the brain and the state of the consciousness. For example, if someone was to be informed about the recent death of someone close to them, they would likely react by experiencing (consciousness) grief, but they would only experience this when the brain has began releasing chemicals that make one experience grief. As such we can say that there is a state of the brain that correlates to a state of the consciousness, but this is only correlation. There would be causation if we where to change the state of the brain and observe the predicted change in the state of the consciousness. This sort of causation has been proven in the labs, I believe they used drugs to effect the chemicals in the beings brain, but I'm not a neuroscientist. In the words of Sam Harris "The mind is a function of the brain" and when the brain stops functioning, the mind stops.
ok, i am not really getting what are you implying here. let me say how i am getting this paragraph.
so in first case you told a person that someone something and this person's brain produced certain chemicals and he felt certain emotion.
and we can study what chemical was produced in the brain.
In the second case we can inject/induce(or something like this) those chemicals in the brain of any person and he/she will feel the same emotion.
ok agreed, but what is it implying ?
feeling any emotion is not consciousness itself(i am pretty sure you did not meant that, but i am not sure what you meant)
it is a conscious event(but according to the tradition this event(any conscious event) does not occur at consciousness itself. It occurs in the brain and consciousness just observes it )
bobo0100 wrote:
You seem to be romanticising the idea of Karma as a property of the universe witch is untouchable by science, as if the property would no longer be valuable if it where touchable by science. In this whole conversation you have proposed no way in which the claim's can be falsified, spite my requesting such a thing on multiple occasions, I have suggested a few but you play half asked apologetics to get around them. Why do you wish to believe something that cannot be logically proven?
as i said earlier it can be validate/falsify only if you realize Atman(one's own consciousness)
But then how to know that there is even something like this(Atman/Pure Consciousness),because all that we experience are conscious events(you can take any experience of yours and see that it's a conscious event )
like a prove that you said you want
Now i am not sure weather you will count it as a prove, but i did found that at one level we all(or most of us) do experience this Atman, and certain experiments can be performed to check some of it's properties.
So, the place where you might experience it(Atman/Consciousness ) is in deep sleep.
In deep sleep Science says that there is no consciousness.
Now here science says there is no consciousness and Vedanta(tradition) says there is pure consciousness.
But both of them agree that there is no conscious events(all thinking, imagining, sensing and perceiving).
Because the events are absent, You have no perception of any object or a memory of perceiving any object during the deep sleep state.
(lets use mind for conscious events, because events happens in mind only)
Though the mind is absent, something is alive and continuing all through deep sleep because after you get up from sleep you say I am happy, I slept soundly.
Please note that the statement about happiness and having slept soundly has not come from a memory of the experience we had during the deep sleep state. Who is it then making this statement?
now here science says you did not had any experience, Vedanta will say you had a experience of nothingness/darkness.
now how is having no experience and having a experience of nothingness different ?
i mean how to distinguish between these two?
for this imagine that you were in a room and all the lights were off, so you open your eyes and see nothing(i mean there is nothing but darkness), then you came out of the room and told some another person that "i saw nothing".
Now it does not mean "you did not saw anything", but rather "you saw nothing"
i don't know if i am able to communicate myself well here, but i hope you are getting it
now one more point is, sometimes when you wake up from the deep sleep, you will have this institution that "i was and there was nothing".
This I have personal experience of, so for me it was, like I was.
And there is not sense of time or space there, I mean you will never feel that for two hours I was, it's very much like a moment(irrespective of the duration of the deep sleep),
it is like you are in space and there is darkness,
And when I say, I was there it does not mean i could see myself,
It's like you were there and you were like seeing/aware, and there was darkness/nothing
(now I have just told my experience because i think other people must have this experience also, or something similar )
So, during deep sleep if there was no consciousness then who had experienced this nothingness ?
I guess not always people remember this intuition(at-least i don't) but sometimes you do.
if there was no consciousness then we would go to sleep and we would wake up, and we could only infer from the time passed that for this period i was completely unconsciousness, but we don't say that, we don't look at the clock and say for two hours I was completely unconsciousness, we say, I did not know anything, it was completely blank and I slept peacefully, that itself is an experience(the experience of darkness/nothingness)
and this is unchanging, weather you are in good mood or bad or anything else, This experience of yours will always be the same(so emotions and all that happens on the level of brain/mind and consciousness/Atman is never touched by any of these, it just observes these things )
even more, if this this true, then every one must have the same experience(when they experience it), because ultimately all consciousness is just Brahamn(i.e, one)
So here, we do get one glimpse of the Atman/Consciousness
here I am not trying to defined consciousness but just trying to state that there is such a thing as Pure consciousness(Atman) which is different from conscious events
And falsification/confirmation of theory of Karma, or theory of Illusion or any other thing can only by done by it.