Psychological vs. ontological facts

[Ramakrishnan Balasubramanian]

GK: gauDapAda kArikA
______________________________________________________________________________

Allan Curry wrote:

>In another post I mentioned that Gaudapada/Shankara use the perception of
>the world as a proof that it is unreal. If reality is not perceived in some
>fashion how can it be distinguished from the merely non-existent?  If it is
>admitted that a jnani does perceive in *some* way, that they are Brahman ,
>how can they then be certain that this knowledge is not merely another
>*illusory* mode of brain/mind function?
>
>I believe one of the responses to this criticism is that you can't have an
>illusion without having a substratum. Well, why can't the experience of
>non-duality be an illusion which is produced in the mind like other kinds
>of psychological events, while the real ontological substratum is something
>like a set of interacting quantum fields?  Must we assume that energy
>itself is conscious when we assert that consciousness is the substratum of
>the apparent universe or do we just ignore science completely?

There are two points to be noted here:

1. shrI sha.nkara anticipates this objection, viz, "knowledge is not
merely
another *illusory* mode of brain/mind function?" and states in his
introduction to the GK, that the GK.III (advaita prakaraNa) has been
written lest non-duality is also dismissed as an illusion. I am not sure
if you have gone through GK.III yet.

2. The position you are stating is quite similar to some of the
viGYAnavAdi
schools of buddhism. As Vidyasankar had stated in his post this school
considers the world to be one of fleeting momentary impressions each of
which
is unreal. However there is an objection to this idea. Namely,

_If_ each impression is momentary and unreal, then there should be
something
to connect these series of momentary and unreal experiences which
corresponds
to our empirical experience. This is again an undeniable substratum.
Note that
the something which connects these series of momentary impressions
cannot again be momentary.

Admitting any type of substratum would go against the philosophy
expounded by
the buddha in the kachchAyana gotta sutta. This is something which I
read
somewhere and have not been able to verify the veracity of statement due
to
lack of time. In any case Nagarjuna apparently recognized this and
considered
such ideas as heretical and is supposed to have condemned these in his
mUla
madhyama kArikA. Again I haven't had the time to go through this book in
any
detail. But you might be interested in going through these texts and see
if you can do away with a substratum.

As for the last part of your post, about science and advaita, an
interesting book is "Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics", By Henry
Stapp, Professor of physics in U. California, Berkeley (Springer-Verlag
publications). This book is not a hodge-podge of physics and vague
mysticism and the author has done a very good job, IMHO. It would be
better if you had some idea of quantum mechanics (an undergraduate level
course).

The chapters on Bell's theorem etc lead naturally to advaita. However
Stapp
seems unaware of Eastern philosophy or if he does, he does not mention
it. I
wanted to write something about the stuff in this book, hopefully
sometime in
the future.

Ramakrishnan.