What Philosophy of Mind is Missing

Welcome to my next entry in Dissolved Distinctions, my blog series regarding topics in modern philosophy of mind as applied to both humans and non-humans. Prior entries in the series can be found here:

Intro: Welcome to Dissolved Distinctions
Part One: Is "What Is Consciousness" the Wrong Question?
Extra Reading: Whose Qualia Is It, Anyway?
Part Two: Theorizing Thinking: What Is Cognition?
Part Three: Mind Watching Mind, All the Way Down (Exploring Theories of Metacognition)
Part Four: Enacting Dualisms (subtitle: How Enactivism Betrays Its Own Logic)
Extra Reading: Deconstructing the Chinese Room

Today, I’d like to do something different. In “Is ‘What is Consciousness’ the Wrong Question?” I gave an overview of the main theories of consciousness in Western academia and critiqued each of them in turn before offering my own, very provisional definition.

In so doing, throughout this series I’ve been discussing and critiquing positions within philosophy of mind from an analytical, western philosophical perspective. This is for multiple reasons. For one thing, more processual and via negativa approaches are currently quite uncommon, and my writing is an attempt to fill that gap and get it all out there on the internet for some public preservation. For another, it’s been an entertaining exercise in translating many core terms and commitments from “Eastern” philosophical systems into the language of the “West.”

The time is ripe to shrug off the pretense and suggest that various considerations within Buddhist thought – particularly the Madhyamaka intellectual tradition that underwrites so much of the Zen and Tibetan Buddhist mindset – offer more generally coherent ways of discussing all of the topics that have so vexed European-derived foundationalist modes of thought.

In so doing, my hope is to avoid tradition-specific jargon and not just be a mere apologist for Buddhist doctrine. Indeed, there is significant diversity in the religion, particularly when it comes to Theravadin disagreements with Mahayana and Vajrayana schools but extending into sub-schools and debates within schools.

Why do I think Buddhism is so helpful here? Because from the outset, Buddhism has been significantly processualist. The earliest Buddhist texts reject souls, reject conceptions of self, reject belief sans investigation, indeed seem at times quite skeptical of any assertions presented fundamentally at all! Mahayana took this to its maximal extent under Nagarjuna, the founder of the Madhyamaka tradition, and paradoxically presented a non-metaphysical metaphysics: A viewpoint of the way things really are that refutes any propositional ability to ground the way things really are.

Let us begin with some fundamental Buddhist philosophical concepts. I will work to translate them into Western analytical vocabulary and rely on that vocabulary over the initial terms throughout this post.

The Western world seems to have been wedded to the concept of a soul from its earliest systematic metaphysics. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates characterized his teachings as a plea for psychic excellence – in the sense that ψυχή (psykhḗ), the soul, has a fundamental logical component and that excellence in reason leads to excellence of the body, dependent as it is upon such a soul. To be alive was to be “ensouled” with spiritual breath, Latin anima. But when we say earliest “systematic” metaphysics, we should be clear: we have evidence of much more even earlier than this, and the seeming lack of systematicity from prior periods is likely an accident of historical preservation. The ancient Egyptians believed quite clearly in a soul – some may recognize the term “ka” or “ba” in relation to this. Various ancient Mesopotamian traditions also believed in something akin to, if not perhaps exactly, a soul – a certain essence that persisted after death and sent one to the underworld as a ghost, which was a quite miserable yet seemingly morally neutral affair in which no matter how well or badly you lived, you’d eat nothing but dry dust in the underworld.

Buddhism, very pointedly, has nothing like any of this. This is not due to ignorance, of course. Brahmanical and Hindu traditions are generally defined by their commitment to Ātman, an eternal, unchanging, ultimately true essence of all living beings. Scholars generally prefer to translate the term as “Self” rather than soul because of how deeply Greco-Roman thought located reason, feeling, personality, and thinking as under the soul’s purview. Ātman-Self makes rather more minimalist assumptions depending on the tradition (and there are very many intellectual traditions in Hinduism). In general, we can say the Self is whatever’s left that’s completely permanent and unchanging within living beings. Since a person’s personality, memories, and character of thinking changes throughout life, Self cannot be these things, so in most Hindu viewpoints Self corresponds to either something non-conceptual or a “witness-consciousness” that illuminates the rest of existence.1

Buddhism arose during the height of a distinctive period in northern Indian history in which dozens (the Brahmajala Sutta records 62) of wandering ascetic movements were competing both between each other and against the entrenched traditions of the Brahmins in Indian society. The Buddha was thus one among very many of these individuals that were unorthodox – “nāstika” – compared to the orthodoxy of thinkers following the Vedas – “āstika.”

Many unorthodox thinkers themselves believed in a Self of some kind. This has continued with the Jains, who developed extraordinary sophistication to defend against critiques of eternal essence. However, many others did not. These included the strictly materialist Charvakas, the Buddha himself, and potentially the radically skeptical Ajñanans who denied the true knowability of all metaphysics and propositions. Therefore, doubt towards anything like a Self or soul was far from unheard of during the Buddha’s time.

What distinguishes Buddhism, however, is its approach to the topic. It is not clear that the Buddha affirmatively denied self as a metaphysical existent, and controversy has developed among Western scholars over whether he was an active denialist or an ambivalent figure that refused to make concrete proclamations on the subject. However, it can fairly be said that he denied that any component of human experience can be empirically established or perceived as an unchanging essence.

Already – even before getting to anything like Mahayana thought – this has significant ramifications on what we consider to be meaningful when we discuss philosophy of mind. If self-essence cannot be found, it follows that there’s nothing we can find that inherently grounds what we consider the traditional fruits of self and soul, like that of human creativity, ethics, normative judgments, and language. Yet the Buddha very explicitly and vehemently rejected nihilism. This is the methodology that defines Buddhism, known as the “Middle Way.” To put my own interpretive spin: our lack of self-grounding means that epistemic humility and rational pragmatism does the most productive work when it comes to guiding ethical action, and this work can only be done when we refuse to take bare assertions of metaphysics on faith.2

If nothing can provably ground self and experience, however, how can there be causation in any way that performs metaphysical work? Classical conceptions of cause and effect – which both Western and Indian thought had plenty of ideas about – inherently imply an ultimate cause from which all effects are traced from at their root. This is because if there weren’t an ultimate cause, we would have an infinite regress of causes and effects, which is problematic insofar as anyone keeps looking for something that fundamentally establishes existence. (This problem led Aristotle to end the regress at an “unmoved mover” that moves all things without ever being subject to change itself.)

The Buddhist answer is to reject causation as an ultimate existent. Instead, among all Buddhist traditions, causation is something that works on a conventional, pragmatic level, but cannot hold as an accurate description of the process of reality. Of course, an alternative still needs to be formulated as a substitute. This is pratītyasamutpāda – dependent origination, in which all phenomena arise in dependence upon each other, with no initiation or stopping point. Early Western parallels to this are rather scant, but we can see something like this suggested in Pyrrhonism, itself argued by some scholars to be deeply influenced by Buddhism. The most significant later Western parallel, meanwhile, is likely that of Alfred North Whitehead.

A perhaps neater way to describe dependent origination to Western ears is “radical contingency,” or relational pattern-formation. Dependent origination is a core component of Buddhist defenses of rebirth sans self, and it generally works to buttress how no-self operates. A relational account of reality establishes the image of us as “having” selves to be pattern-matched presuppositions upon a reflexive process. This itself implies “consciousness” to be a misleading noun-application, insofar as it presupposes an originating existent as part of a self to search for. In other words: if there’s no self and no soul, there’s no self or soul that “has” consciousness, and if there’s no empirical metaphysical justification for causation, there’s nothing for consciousness to be metaphysically predicated by.

It should be noted that this conception interacts quite complexly with the Buddhist commitment to karma, actions driven by intention leading to future consequences beyond a single rebirth, and some have accused Buddhism of incoherence on this point: in Hindu traditions, karma has typically been read in a causal fashion more familiar to Western viewpoints on causation. That said, the Buddhist conception of karma is itself highly non-linear and its many, many, many elaborations in Buddhist theology and soteriology themselves point toward a very processualist character.

This is where we get into linguistic territory that was not extensively discussed at all in early Buddhism but elaborated on significantly in Madhyamaka.

As noted, the Buddha denied that human experience can be found to contain a Self or soul. However, specific terms for inherent essence such as svabhāva are not present in our earliest found Buddhist texts. When discussed in the supplementary “paracanonical” doctrinal literature, it translates to a state of mind or character.

It was the Abhidharma school of Buddhist thought, in its efforts to systematize dharma-phenomena, that first began to make productive use out of the term. (Theravada doctrinal analysis borrows quite heavily from Abhidharma texts.) Within its post-canonical literature, svabhāva is held to be what separates phenomena from what the phenomena themselves construct in aggregate. In this view, all conglomerative conceptions of phenomena into objects, such as conceiving a table from all its dharma-elements, are what lack svabhāva.

Śūnyatā (“emptiness,” “voidness”), meanwhile, is a term with relatively diffuse meanings in the Pali canon, though the term “empty” (suñña) is used significantly more often. Theravadins have thus staked early Buddhism apart from Mahayana elaborations by suggesting that the Buddha related to the various aggregates of phenomena as being empty in the sense of deceptive or vacuous, as aggregation imparts an illusion of selfhood. It seems that the abstractualization of “empty” into “emptiness” took place quite quickly within Buddhist traditions; Abhidharma texts promptly connected the empty quality of aggregates to the lack of eternal substance within dhammas. In this way, Theravadins attempt to have their cake and eat it too – they define svabhava differently from Mahayana and argue that the dependent origination of momentary phenomena prevents their irreducible nature from actually involving inherent essence.

Madhyamaka takes these terminological formalizations from Abhidharma and, essentially, seeks to remove their commitments as tenable by extending the logic. It argues that the Abhidharma view of inherent essence is improperly narrow: if svabhāva is what separates phenomena from their aggregates, then our positive assertions regarding phenomena must themselves be conceptual aggregation or proliferation. Therefore, phenomena cannot be held as irreducible, and seeking to stop the analysis there becomes a misunderstanding of emptiness as an applied concept.

The Madhyamakan naturally also doesn’t stop at this assertion, either. Analogically speaking, they are willing slaves to the logic: if all positive assertions are indicative of conceptual proliferation, and if concepts are inherently relational/dependently originated/contingent, then vacuousness as an idea is itself vacuous, and so on. This allows the conventional world to function pragmatically even while an analysis of ultimate reality casts doubt on the conventional world’s inherent existence.

Readers are by now probably hoping I have an actual point. Here it is:

Western discussion of philosophy of mind is hopelessly mired in attempts to empirically prove or disprove an irreducible basis for things like consciousness, cognition, mind, and sentience. Some of this stems from the curse that is Popperian falsification as applied to the more abstract sciences. That in turn traces its route back to Greco-Roman (and prior) formulations of soul and psyche. As previously discussed in this blog, every theory of consciousness and cognition meets serious logical tensions so long as they assert dualist frames. Dualist frames encode necessity by turning processes into mere nouns; a Western theory of mind is constantly and desperately looking for some location or logical structure that prevents itself from vicious circularity and infinite regress. It is that search that is fundamentally misguided. It resorts everyone down to “differences of opinion” over empirical unprovabilities, eliding the fact that opinions themselves have gradations of logical merit.

The only way out of this pit is to insist on self-reflexive logical coherence.

My next post will discuss my attempt to formalize this self-reflective turn within Western symbolic logic and demonstrate how it applies to topics within philosophy of mind.