[Advaita-l] The Foundations of Adhyāsa - 5.2 (The Siddhānta: The Self is not the Body) (Part II)

[S Jayanarayanan]

 Since I do not observe any response indicating a full understanding of The Argument that was posted,
I'll try to elucidate further in this post.
 
Taking up one line of reasoning from an earlier posting of the series:
 
> It may also be a good exercise to check if the following second observation can be explained by appealing
> to material entities alone, in the case of a person with defective vision:
> 
>   Observation #2:  “Two overlapping 100-foot tall buildings are being seen.”
>   (Note: there is still only one 100-foot tall building in front.)
> 
> This Observation #2 is evidently an apparition of sorts caused by imperfect vision. In any third-person description
> of the material reality, the first-person Vision of “Overlapping images of two 100-foot tall buildings” will never
> appear at all.
> 
 
In the above example, we have the following two judgments:
 
Judgment X = First-person Perception:
  "Two *OVERLAPPING* 100-foot tall buildings are being seen."
 
Judgment Y = Third-person description of material reality:
  "There is a 100-foot tall building. There is a man (with defective eyes) standing across it.
  Light falls on the building and reaches the man's eyes. There are two images on each of the
  eyes' retinas. Signals from the retinas are transmitted to the brain, where they are processed."
 
 
Now, the case against Materialism is due to this conflict:
 
  Judgment X ≠ Judgment Y.
 
Why? Because the "two *OVERLAPPING* buildings" that appear in Judgment X are NEVER DESCRIBED in Judgment Y.
This shows that a description of reality using only material entities is INCOMPLETE at best, since it doesn't
fully explain First-person Perception!
 
Now, there is exactly one way to defend Materialism in spite of the above argument:
 
  First-person Perception is invalid.
 
This is seriously problematic even for the materialist - because the existence of material entities themselves
are known only via First-person Perception (pratyaksha)! Even scientists use their own Perception - Seeing,
Hearing, Touching, etc. to arrive at conclusions.
 
I will leave it at this.
 
Cheers,
Kartik