[Buddha-l] Buddhists taking a stand against Islamaphobia

[Dan Lusthaus]

>> Erik says
> Even if you tell me that I accept the truth of a truck coming
> my way at 100 M/h [...correspondence between any actual truck and my ideas 
> of trucks, etc. would be] very difficult to maintain because
> if I would want to check if there is nothing wrong with the projection I
> would have to get out go my mind and out of the world to enter the space
> in between where the projection takes place. Nobody ever succeeded to do
> this.

On the other hand, the survival rate for people standing in front of 
speeding trucks insisting it is only in their heads is very, very low. The 
most compelling argument against the type of idealist closure Erik recounts 
is to slap them -- hard -- in the face, repeatedly, until they relent and 
admit there is a physical reality that impacts their mental experience 
without being reduced to it exclusively. And while they are considering 
whether to revise their position, one can ask them between slaps: "If this 
is all in your head, why are you hitting yourself?"

If, on the other hand, the question is merely a matter of exactitude --  
i.e., how exact is the mental image of the physical occasions it is 
replicating? -- then room for doubt will always be at play, since the 
*degree* of distortion and variance subjectively introduced is always hard 
to measure and varies between individuals. Hence, as Foucault and others 
have observed, the correspondence theory (big in the 16th c; e.g. Descartes) 
gave way to the representational theory (big in the 18th-19th c; e.g., 
Kant).

The idea that theft is a social construction is a later derivative of the 
representational theory (when it is treated as more active than passive). 
But it is not a social construction (while the judicial systems designed to 
curtail and punish it are). Tiny children already have a powerful sense of 
"mine" and have to be socialized to accept the notion of sharing (there are 
rare exceptions of generous tots).

Western philosophy progressing from correspondence to representation to 
constructivism parallels what Yogacara brought to the Indian epistemological 
scene, which by and large nevertheless remained rooted in correspondence 
theory.

Dan