[Xmca-l] Re: [xmca-l] Looking for a copy of this article

Sun Mar 10 03:45:08 PDT 2019

Hello Alfredo and Haydi,

Thank you for your teamwork to bring the fish to shore!

I have been as of late considering disability and pathology and how these are digested in different ways specifically how they are discussed and parsed. How are they different or the same? What determines a pathology? or a disability?

And so....an essay emerges...

When considering mind, in Vedanta it is said that there is a subtle body of which the mind is included, and that this subtle body is on a never-ending incarnation from gross body (an incarnation) to gross body (another incarnation across space and time) propelled by past karmas that are impossible to evaluate and determine if only because they are so numerous as a collection associated with one individual being. (This chain is broken when the mind in its ignorance is released through knowledge of itself, very similar to John 8:32, "the truth shall set you free," as well as Socrates's "know thyself." )

In addition, the closest we can come to evaluating karmas is to say they are one of four kinds: there are karmas that have a known cause/known result; unknown cause/unknown result; unknown cause/known result; known cause/unknown result. So any karma constituted by an unknown cause or result is why a system of karma can at most be a belief and cannot determined through empiricism. Especially since there is no way to travel across lifetimes through births and deaths and collect data that way. If only! But even within a lifetime, unknown is unknown, until it becomes known. It's not the same with known becoming unknown, in that case it is just forgotten or lost. Such is the nature of knowledge (meaning knowledge might just not be in our heads or in books, but many other places besides...distributed cognition anyone?).

To continue, within this cosmology, it is understood that this subtle body enters into a gross body and the individual leads its life based upon those predetermined karmas that travel in the pocket of the subtle body. They fructify much in the way the arrow leaves the bow. However that analogy is too simplistic as it does not consider free will. To explain that: the more intelligent the individual, the more choices are possible during the lifetime to express free will, however that lifetime's karmas create the map of that individual's lifetime, as it were; while choice expresses itself as where does the individual travel across this map, how does it direct itself within this map?

In a way, the collection of karmas function like DNA and how its genetic expression manifests in an individual body. But the body itself is inert material; what causes the sentience is its subtle body, and that is why we can notice that when a being dies, there is something that has left it, no longer present, yet the body remains in its inert state, which then decomposes back to basic elements. The subtle body has gone on to its next lifetime to incarnate again.

In a sense, the nature of the gross body (determined by karmas) in its relationship to its subtle body functions much like prism, where light (in this analogy represents the subtle body) penetrates the prism (the gross body) and the light that emerges *appears to emerge* from the prism itself, when the prism is actually functioning more like a filter breaking down the light spectrum.

In this way, consciousness is not determined by the gross body *as its cause*, consciousness is everywhere and it shines and reflects everywhere, but the manner in which it shines, the *how* it shines, manifests in infinitely multifarious forms, and thus, similarly, intelligence also manifests in infinitely multifarious forms.

Consciousness is not what you think!  :)

I was thinking about this metaphorically by considering the way a body of water will reflect light. We cannot look to the water to find the source of the light, nor determine what is it about water that causes it to be reflective. And yet we simply accept that water has this property. It just is.

If we were to take a Cartesian approach and atomize water to its smallest part, we still could not find the source of light that appears to emerge from it (that is to say, if we could not perceive a sun, let's say). Neither could we identify why water has reflective properties by reducing it to its parts, though we might measure how reflective water is, which in turn we might discover and determine that the purer the water the more reflection it possesses the easier for light to penetrate it; the more impurities, the less it reflects and penetrates. It is not the nature of water to be non-reflective, but instead that there are other elements in it that obstruct or alter its reflectivity.

By mistake, we might super-impose what are the properties of those other impurities upon the water's properties. And we might even mutually super-impose the properties of the water upon the properties of other obstructing or altering elements present, at the same time.

What a knotty piece of yarn! (Or hall of mirrors!)

In this way, since we can perceive a sun after all, panning out from the above analogy, we do *know* there is something beyond the water that is the source of light that may or may not be reflective of it (due to what other elements are present in the water). Of course, light does not generate from the water, even though it appears to come from it. That is an illusion.

So I'd offer that consciousness, that we tend to believe is sourced in the mind, is actually just a reflection from "outside" the mind. The most we can do, when studying mind, is to measure different kinds of reflectivity, based upon the nature of body reflecting it. Yet, we can never determine the source of consciousness by taking apart a body, or analysis of its constituents, behaviors, etc. We can only compare and contrast reflectivity, which in terms of the mind, could be called intelligence and aptitude, and so on, as functions, not causes.

Does that seem coherent? or is there something objectionable here?

What is nice about this, is that pathology and disability need not be damning from this model, but instead an expression of a ratio of reflectivity to obstructions, which also includes how well an individual's interactions develop with its environment (i.e., language, culture, society, and tools). That it is possible to discover and learn about various ways to exercise and facilitate what brings out the best of itself, in the sense of the ancient Greek concept of excellence, within an individual, in terms of itself, and certainly not to be forced into comparison with other individuals and their reflectivities / intelligences, aptitudes, deficiencies, and so on, with the (albeit unconscious) goal to pathologize, relegate, dominate, or subordinate.

Ok?

Kind regards,

Annalisa

________________________________
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of Alfredo Jornet Gil <a.j.gil@ils.uio.no>
Sent: Sunday, March 10, 2019 12:06:51 AM
To: xmca-l@ucsd.edu; eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: [xmca-l] Looking for a copy of this article

Hi Annalisa,

this is a very short piece, a commentary of another article. I could only access HTML, and exporting to PDF did not work that well, so I also pasted the text into Word.

Alfredo

________________________________
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu>
Sent: 10 March 2019 03:14
To: xmca-l@ucsd.edu
Subject: [Xmca-l] [xmca-l] Looking for a copy of this article

Hi Xmcars,

Is anyone out there who might be able to catch a copy of this article and send it to me?

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/evolutionarydevelopmental-modeling-of-neurodiversity-and-psychopathology/C5478B5189A10630A98378828A09EB40

Thanks so much.

Kind regards,

Annalisa
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ucsd.edu/pipermail/xmca-l/attachments/20190310/5b2356fd/attachment-0001.html 