388 NOTESexperience. In fact, the relevant notion of enlightenment experience requires that
such experiences essentially involve discovering what has been true all along.
6 Not at any rate so long as they think the doctrines they favor to be logically contingent
truths.
7 I assume that we both have sufficient evidence that we are seeing a coin of some sort.
8 With the addition, of course, of claims about consciousness and memory.
9 I think that they are also reasonably accepted, save by Advaita Vedantins who claim
that all of what could be said on their behalf is “sublated” and so trumped by
enlightenment experience.
10 We will not worry here about second-order conscious states – e.g., one’s being aware
that one at least seems to perceive a tree or is having a headache similar to the one
she had yesterday.
11 If there are genuine moral experiences – awarenesses of obligations, for example –
they are recognitions of the truth about what one ought to do, whether one is so
inclined or not. If there are genuine aesthetic experiences – awareness of beauty, for
example – they are recognitions of what is beautiful, whether one thought so or not.
They are neither introspective nor sensory. Nor are they relevant to our concerns
here.
12 One cannot show that some list of principles of experiential evidence is a complete
list, so even showing that, say, forty-seven principles are such that, if any one of
them is the right one, enlightenment experience is not evidence for religious belief,
would leave open the worry that there was one more principle which was the right
one and on it enlightenment experience was evidence. Of course the worry might be
small.
13 Philosophers who agree with the rest of what is said here may think that putting the
matter in terms of evidence is not quite correct; it won’t matter for our purposes
whether speaking of evidence is exactly right here. For example, those who think we
cannot be wrong about such states will want to talk about something stronger than
evidence, which will not affect our basic point.
14 Another answer is that claims that a multiplicity of persons and physical objects
exist are somehow self-contradictory, all relational claims are self-contradictory, the
notion of a substance (physical or mental) is self-contradictory, or the like. But there
seem to be no very good arguments for such accusations.
15 The question arises as to whether states is the right word – don’t states have to be
states of something? But similar questions arise about such terms as qualities (of
what?), events (aren’t events matters of substances coming to gain and/or lose
qualities?), processes (don’t these occur to something?), and so on.
16 René Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” Meditation II, in E.S.H. Haldane
and G.R.T. Ross (eds), The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Vol. I (London: Dover
Publications, 1931), p. 150. The original edition of Haldane and Ross appeared in
1911 and the first edition of the Meditations appeared in 1641.
17 The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Vol. II, p. 30. The passage comes at the
beginning of the “Reply to the Second Objection.”
18 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 150. The passage comes from a section entitled “Argument
Demonstrating the Existence of God and the Distinction Between Soul and Body,
Drawn Up in Geometrical Fashion,” Definition V, at the end of the “Reply to the
Second Objection.”
19 One sort of dualism will take being self-conscious to be the nature of a person;
others opt for being capable of self-consciousness, and sometimes being so.
20 Tattvarthadhigama Sutra, chapter V, sections 29, 30, 31, 38, 41, 42; Sourcebook, p.
256.