Mind /manas / viññāṇa / ಮನಸ್ಸು / मन

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Dinesh ^club

The mind is a system that produces appearances for its owner. Things appear silver, for example, or they appear to have little windows, or they appear to fly, as the result of how the mind produces experience. And if the mind can make us ‘experience’ an airplane, why couldn’t it produce an experience of itself that leads us to think that it causes its own actions? The mind creates this continuous illusion; it really doesn’t know what causes its own actions. Whatever empirical will there is rumbling along in the engine room -- an actual relation between thought and action -- might in fact be totally inscrutable to the driver of the machine (the mind). The mind has a self explanation mechanism that produces a roughly continuous sense that what is in consciousness is the cause of action -- the phenomenal will -- whereas in fact the mind can’t even know itself well enough to be able to say what the causes of this actions are. To quote Spinoza in ‘The Ethics’, “Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined. Their idea of freedom, therefore, is simply their ignorance of any cause of their actions. In the more contemporary phasing of Marvin Minsky (1985); “None of us enjoys the thought that what we do depends on processes we do not know; we prefer to attribute our choices to volition, will, or self control…. Perhaps it would be more honest to say, ‘My decision was determined by internal forces I do not understand.”

5 years ago. Edited 2 years ago.

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Mind /manas / viññāṇa / ಮನಸ್ಸು / मन

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