What do I know? This. Something sees a dissected brain on a laboratory table and what sees is not an object like the thing cut open on the table. Can I explain beyond that? No.Sure, I can talk about brain neurons and the optical cortex, and that does provide an objective correlative to explain the processes involved in seeing. But it does not explain the seeing itself.
I found the study of consciousness through brain science quite helpful in providing objective explanations about mind. There is, for example, neuro-plasticity, which provides evidence that intention (roughly, the "will" part of free will) can help the brain change itself. (See Paul Bach-y-Rita, who taught his father to walk after a stroke). But that was as far as it went.
In The Parable of The Poisoned Arrow (more later), Buddha was in effect talking about intellect but not the kind brain scientists used to discover neuro-plasticity. So this article is about what he meant and what he did not mean.
As I already knew would happen, none of my readings in neuroscience and the philosophy of consciousness got me any closer to seeing as seeing. Buddha meant that I start with experience. Not my everyday experience, although I could use it, but instead what reveals itself in deep meditation.
A sensation arises in a leg attended by a sensation of the leg itself. The sensation comes with the leg as something "there." The edges of this body are sensations of a location. But all arises in the empty space of consciousness. The space can have faint, wispy boundaries but they too are sensations. Sensations arising and falling away, to be followed by new ones arising and passing.
