Metaphysics of mind

Most every great wisdom tradition has advocated some form of immaterialism about mind. One reason is that mental states seem transparent and lacking in the texture or granularity of ordinary everyday things. Another is that immaterialism goes well with beliefs in immortality. It is pretty clear that living bodies die, decay, and disperse. But immaterial stuff, substances, or properties, might continue. Now Buddhism pretty clearly is not a kind of substance dualism since Buddhist metaphysics is event and process‐friendly, but substance‐unfriendly. In The Bodhisattva's Brain, I make clear that this is good; event and process metaphysics fit well with much of modern science, with particle physics and glass being a slow moving liquid, and you and I being impermanent.

But Buddhism in most every form I have studied, and among every Buddhist practitioner I have interviewed in Thailand, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China, as well as the members of the Dalai Lama's team, as well as every professional Buddhologist at universities I have queried, agree that most Buddhisms are committed to some kind of immaterialism (or are indifferent to the question). If the kind of immaterialism has a name it would probably be some kind of property dualism.

Coseru thinks that I myself leave open the door for property dualism and he thinks that maybe I should do so. He writes:

But there is an obvious tension in Flanagan's project. On the one hand, he declaims that “neutrality of the metaphysics of mind is not a live option” (90) …On the other hand, he does not hesitate to remark that “subjectively experienced states” may perhaps “have sui generis properties that are nonphysical” (52). By expressing hope that the identity theory may at least work for basic sensations, while at the same time shying away from epiphenomenalism, Flanagan could be offering us a more moderate version of naturalism.

Let me clarify: When I write that “Perhaps subjectively experienced mental states have sui generis properties that are nonphysical,” I am simply summing up what the advocate of the neural correlate view, who is a property dualist, might say. Not what I think.

So let me say where I think the evidence leads on the metaphysics of mind. It leads to the view that each and every mental state – conscious or unconscious – is some bodily state or other. This is token physicalism. Some mental states, sensations, for example, may well be the same, or very similar, bodily states across members of a species. This is type‐physicalism for sensations, and maybe for the basic emotions.

Why think physicalism is true? Specifically, why think such a hybrid physicalism is true, where some states like “thinking today is Saturday” is already multiple realized in different bodies, but where seeing “that red in the same way” is not? For physicalism in general, the answer is that it is an inference to the best explanation given everything we now know about the way the world works from across the sciences. For the specific hybrid token and type physicalism about the mental that I advocate, the reason to believe it is because things are working out very well for mind scientists who operate with this set of assumptions. And most do.

Still Coseru might press me: why not be what I call “quietistic” or agnostic on the matter of the metaphysics of mind? He expresses concern that I might only seem to be offering a “more moderate version of naturalism” —because I admit that we don't even know how seeing a paper clip is realized in the brain, and thus he wonders why I insist on physicalism given our vast ignorance. He writes: “Readers will be left wondering why, then, he would claim that the best explanation for why, say, ‘intentions to act . . . are causally efficacious’ is because ‘they are neural events (65).’”

Now I take it that Coseru's suggestion that I should express more openmindedness about the metaphysics of mind is in part because that will be more congenial to Buddhists who will have trouble thinking naturalistically about mind. But he also seems to think that the evidence warrants quietism.

Coseru may be right about the political point. But I favor commitment to physicalism about mind, first, for the principled reasons I just gave. Physicalism is an inference to the best explanation given what we know about how the world works. But second, and importantly in the present context, thinking that immaterialism of the property dualist or psychophysical parallelist variety is really a live option means that you also think that epiphenomenalism is a live option. But for epiphenomenalism to be a possibility, then natural selection would have to regularly choose mental state capacities that do no work. It would be the end of the world as we know it! In 1890, William James wrote that “epiphenomenalism” was an “unwarrantable impertinence in the current state of psychology.” It is an even more unwarrantable impertinence 125 years later!

The explanatory gap

The view of mind I am advocating is called “subjective realism” (Flanagan , , ). Experiences are real; they are not illusory, and desires, moods, emotions, beliefs, attention, deliberation are all causally efficacious. This much should be attractive to the Buddhist since it helps in part to explain how the work of meditation and self‐cultivation might actually work. The burgeoning industry studying the effects of meditation assumes that it does whatever work it does in normal psychobiological ways.

In any case, according to the subjective realist view, consciousness has special first personal psychological aspects (none of which involve nonphysical properties) because each and every experience is unique and experienced in a direct way by the organism whose experience it is (Flanagan ). That is what complex nervous systems do, or better, that is one of the things they do: they produce experiences to and for the systems whose nervous systems they are. Physicalism explains why we each have our own and only our experiences. We are each attached to our own and only our own bodies in the right sort of ways. My experience that I am typing right now is a bodily event in me. But I am not in touch with the neural events that are part of its realization, nor am I in touch with many events in my back and arms and fingers, and so on, that are also involved in my typing right now. The third person perspective of the mind sciences is what yields this knowledge. As for the explanatory gap, it gives way as we become more comfortable with some increasingly deep, reflectively equilibrated picture of how the mind conceived first, second, and third personally works. The view is metaphysically realist and epistemically nonreductive. Mental life is real, it does all sorts of work, and although each and every mental state is some bodily state or other, how it is detected and how it seems first personally and third personally are neither phenomenally nor informationally the same.

Phenomenology

Now subjective realism warrants deploying what I call, the natural method (, , , , ). In studying experience pay attention at a minimum to the phenomenology, the psychology, and the neuroscience and seek reflective equilibrium among these perspectives. This is common practice in cognitive neuroscience. My method is, as Coseru says, similar to Varela‐style neurophenomenology and to Churchland‐style neurophilosophy. But he rightly points out that I don't say a lot in the book about phenomenology other than in the first two chapters where I am very interested in what states of mind, if any, are on offer for a person who flourishes Buddhist style. What is it like to be such a person? A person on the path, a realized person or an enlightened person? Are the moral emotions experienced by such a person the same or different from that of a person committed to a Confucian way of being, a twenty‐first century liberal American way of being? An Aschuar Indian way of being? I care deeply about this sort of inquiry and recommend it.

But what about the idea that phenomenology or so‐called contemplative science could tell us something about the deep structure of mind primarily relying on phenomenology? Coseru writes: “Flanagan is inclined to concede that phenomenology might actually work as a reliable method for the descriptive analysis of experience. But, he <Flanagan> asks, ‘Does phenomenology reveal anything more . . . than how the mind seems first‐personally?’ (81) For the naturalist the answer is obvious: phenomenology cannot reveal to us certain hard facts about the nature and function of cognition; for instance, that color perception is mostly foveal or that, due to the lack of light‐detecting photoreceptor cells on the optic disc of the retina where the optic nerve passes through, there is a blind spot in a certain region of our perceptual field.”

Now Coseru himself has written deeply about the rich tradition of Buddhist phenomenology in his book Perceiving Reality (), and that he just recommended I might have attended to or pointed to. Although I cite the Abhidamma in The Bodhisattva's Brain and elsewhere as containing first class phenomenology, Coseru thinks that I might be more suspicious than I ought to be about Buddhist phenomenology and about the prospects for contemplative science. Maybe.

The main example he gives of where I am ungenerous is one where I express skepticism about a claim that Buddhist phenomenologists have made with some frequency in classical and contemporary literature to the effect that if one attends carefully one will see or experience the mind as it really is, where the way it really is, is pure luminosity, free from the three poisons, and not in any way physical. This alleged piece of phenomenological insight was endorsed initially, or seen, we might say, by Dharmakīrti (sixth century) in his Commentary on Dignāga's “Compilation of Prime Cognition.” But my suspicion in this case (it may be that all these cases need to be assessed case‐by‐case) is that the relevant phenomenological claim is so obviously a theoretical one that you'd expect to get from a tradition already making exactly these claims that we ought to be extremely suspicious of it. This point is related to my concern expressed to Charles Goodman about the work of meditation possibly being less a way of detecting, for example, that there is no‐self, or experiencing no‐self, as it were, than a way of inducing the belief that there is no‐self.

One final point: Coseru recommends that we note and explore the incredible range of views and the multiple intersections among some classical Buddhist phenomenologists and contemporary phenomenology. He is right to notice the range of views and the multiple intersections. But notice the state of play and ask yourself if it is a notch in phenomenology's credibility as an autonomous method for understanding and explaining mind that so many very smart phenomenologists from across the ages and across various traditions fail to agree on almost anything. In both the Buddhist dialectic that Coseru describes and the Western phenomenological tradition from Brentano and Husserl and James to contemporary HOT (“higher order thought”) and HOP (“higher order perception”) theorists, such as David Rosenthal () and William Lycan () to those who oppose them, there is very little agreement about, for example, how the self seems, let alone how it is; about whether propositional attitude states have phenomenal properties, and so on. There is nothing more important in life than experience, and sometimes it is good to survey ourselves in order to know ourselves, to work on ourselves, to better ourselves, and to engage in the universal human project of trying to flourish. My current thinking is that something like anthropological thick description is possible and extremely helpful for understanding how certain social groups see and experience their worlds. But I am increasingly skeptical that first person phenomenology will yield something like universal structures of experience or consciousness, will reveal anything very interesting or deep that we don't already know about the way experience is ahistorically. If one of the aims of “contemplative science” (Jerry Fodor used to quip that most disciplines that name themselves “science” aren't—compare: leisure science, recreation science, political science to physics, chemistry, biology) is to provide thick description of how experience seems, I am all in favor of it. But if the agenda includes getting at something like our true, original nature, Buddha nature, for example, I remain a skeptic. For Buddhist reasons, I think there is no such thing.

Reincarnation and no‐self

Truth be told, I'd love not to talk about reincarnation at all because afterlives, onward lives, future lives in either their heavenly Abrahamic forms or in their Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain forms, not to mention their Platonic and Pythagorean prelives form, are ideas that just don't fit with a naturalistic picture. But the topic is unavoidable. And of course I get how the relevant ideas might be both consoling and fit beautifully into a system with a karmic eschatology, and in that way serve several sociomoral/political purposes by encouraging the illusion. And truth be told many new age types who find heaven and hell laughable ideas, think that Buddhism is cool because, well, “you never know.”

Now Goodman worries that I get wrong the logical relationship between the doctrine of no‐self and the traditional belief in reincarnation and worries that I think or might be read as suggesting that the two are contradictory. But he points out that the conjunction of these two theses “is not a contradiction, but merely empirically rather implausible—which is not the same at all.” In the quote Goodman offers I don't say that there is a contradiction. I just say that how reincarnation could even begin to work for a being that has no‐self “presents serious logical problems” (Flanagan , 132). For reasons Goodman gives there is no combination of resources internal to Buddhism and available in the modern scientific world view that make any description of a pre, after, or onward life warranted. Goodman provides a very interesting and helpful account of how rebirth might work for a self—really a no‐self, anatman—conceived in a Buddhist information‐theoretic way. Indeed, his compelling description sounds eerily like what will happen when we are allowed to upload something like ourselves minus our phenomenal dasein—assuming we really do have some such—onto the iCloud or onto the singularity of artificial intelligence—and thereby have some sort of informational continuity—but no experiential continuity after we disperse in that old fashioned way called “death” and “dying.” Mark Siderits ()—the current heavyweight champion among Buddhist reductionists—has been suggesting lately that we really are something like Robo‐buddhas and that we ought to see ourselves as such. Ethically, the world will be better. The idea is something like this: If no one experienced herself in any way at all, if we could be like zombies, no one would have motivation to be selfish!

In any case, after Goodman artfully explains how reincarnation is supposed to work inside classical Buddhist metaphysics, he does come down where I do on the empirical implausibility:

Although we can't convict them of inconsistency, there are some embarrassing questions we could press against traditional Buddhists. Is the signal that carries the information from the dying person to the one who is born a physical signal, or a non‐physical signal? If it's a physical signal, how come we haven't detected it yet? What enables the mechanism in the brain that sends the signal to know what direction to send it in, so that it will be picked up by an appropriate embryo recipient? If it's simply broadcast in all directions, what would guarantee that only one embryo picks it up? If, as many claim, the signal is received at conception, how can a fertilized egg store all that information? But if the signal is non‐physical, what evidence is available that is sufficient to overcome the very powerful scientific case for the causal closure of the physical? And won't the signal be subject to the very same problems that sink interactionist substance dualism?

Questions of whether and how we are persons right now, how we do actually continue right now, if we do, and how we might continue to be even if only as information, and even if our phenomenal selfhood dies each moment, and even if it, our phenomenal self, eventually ceases to have even a closest continuer, is exactly the sort of profitable and exciting discussion that I think can occur when we open‐mindedly cross traditions and speak of such problems as the self and personal identity.

In The Bodhisattva's Brain, I only touch the surface of how Buddhism might help us think more clearly about selfhood and identity. I point out that no contemporary naturalist is a soul or atman theorist, so the only question is how deconstructive and reductive our analysis of actual psychobiological organisms should get. This is compatible with saying that among anatman type conceptions, science and metaphysics have not yet converged on anything like an obvious best view. For now I favor a view of the self as being constituted by relations of phenomenal psychological continuity and connectedness in an organic package. The view is something of an embodied Aristotelian, Lockean, or William Jamesean view than it is Parfitian or full on Buddhist reductionist view à la Mark Siderits ().

Now Goodman encourages me late in his commentary to push what in the book I call “the ephemerality envelope,” and accept full on “emptiness.” He writes “identifying with my present time slice, regarding that as a self, is just as much a mistake as regarding anything else as a self.” I know many Buddhists say this. But I don't think we should go that route and my reason is principled. It seems to me that Buddhist reduction is analytic or metaphysical. One can do the conceptual reduction of a person until they are empty of all being. But one cannot do an actual empirical reduction of a living psychobiological organism of the sort that humans are that reveals them to be empty of all the features that the biological and human sciences rightly attribute to them. While we are alive, we exist as gregarious social animals with the right sort of psychobiological equipment to support a kind of personhood that is not of an atman or soul‐based sort, but that is not reductive or eliminativist either.

Karma

Goodman writes:

Given that the traditional understanding of rebirth is, at least, implausible, we are in need of a new understanding of the meaning of karma. Flanagan proposes a “tame interpretation of karmic causation” (77), understanding this form of causation as just consisting in all the actions of sentient beings and the results that we ordinarily understand to flow from them. This category is certainly tame enough for the naturalist to accept, but it is so far from the distinctive theses that Buddhist texts have in mind when they talk about karma‐vipāka‐phala, the result of maturation of action, as to be not an interpretation of that concept at all. So much has been stripped away that it would be less misleading to say that Flanagan has abandoned the concept of karma altogether.

I am inclined to accept this. My only resistance comes from my naturalistic sympathy to the impulses that the desire for justice expresses and that the idea of karma embodies. There is a lot of research now in evolutionary biology, anthropology, primatology, and psychology that indicates that Strawsonian reactive attitudes for love, gratitude, anger, resentment, and forgiveness come with the equipment. Interestingly, Buddhists ask us to overcome some of these possibly natural attitudes, like anger, so theoretically they could say the same about whatever sublimated desire is expressed by karmic ideas that the universe will pay back the good and the bad eventually. Actually, Goodman () recommends something like this sort of adjustment in our retributive attitudes in Consequences of Compassion. Because all earthly mammals so far studied have what I am calling karmic impulses, I am inclined to say of the disposition to “karma‐tize” human action what P. F. Strawson said of induction: it comes with the equipment. Something like it or the impulse it expresses is likely to show up across all human forms of life. So, there is a certain amount of psychological realism in accepting and acknowledging the naturalness of what I call “tame karma,” and also recognizing its untame form as a projection or extension of certain natural wishes, hopes, desires into an unwarranted, hypertrophic belief.

Buddhist consequentialism

Goodman says too many subtle things on this topic both here and in his wonderful book Consequences of Compassion for me to do justice to in the few pages I have. Some quick comments: First, I do offer a “complex and heavily hedged” picture of the moral landscape both inside Buddhism and in general. As I say in my response to Bronwyn Finnigan below, I don't have an ethical theory and thus do not promote one in the book. In part, this is because I doubt that what we conceive of the moral domain is one thing, that what we conceive of as falling in the moral domain is the same as other traditions do, that there is a single source of value, moral or otherwise, and so on. This is one reason why in the book I say that I see my analysis of the eudaimonistic components of Buddhism as compatible with Goodman's, also very complex and hedged view. Like Goodman, I think that “consequentialist theories are not incompatible with eudaimonism” or even better (for his view), most good consequentialist theories provide a theory of human flourishing even if they do not locate the source of morality in human flourishing. Goodman's view in his book is that the deep source of Buddhist morality is in the agent‐neutral fact that suffering is bad. My suffering is no more or less important that anyone else's. And thus, the Buddhist view is not agent centered.

Of course, as often occurs in this dialectic, there are objections to the very idea of agent neutral reasons, as well as to the demand for what Goodman calls “foundational justification” or, what is different, there may be acceptance of the agent neutral reasons for great compassion as the source of our moral obligations, and then also the acknowledgment of various practical considerations for allowing various agent centered prerogatives, including attending first and primarily to one's own flourishing and that of one's loved ones. I think naturalized Buddhism will have to allow some such agent centered prerogative since if enlightenment is real, if there is truth, conventional and ultimate to be known, and if flourishing is possible the units that realize these goods are always people, sentient beings, Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and such. The sources may be impersonal but the realizers are not—indeed they cannot be—impersonal states of affairs. Again, this is a reason to resist full on emptiness for persons.

Meditation

In response to my wondering, my skepticism about the connection between attaining wisdom about no‐self and becoming less, even unselfish, Goodman suggests that knowing no‐self is insufficient to make one unselfish. But seeing that, or experiencing that, there is no‐self, that my self evaporates, will (or might) make me less selfish. He proposes that it is part of the work of the combination of resting meditation (shamatha) and insight meditation (vipassana) to “start to see through the illusion of self, [so that] then you can begin to relate to the world in a selfless way.” He says this might be like going through much of your life in a flow state.” And it might alter one's “acceptance window,” making one happier. This is all possible. It is even as Goodman says testable. But here's the rub.

• . Meditation allows one to see through the illusion of the self and this makes one less selfish, even unselfish.

• . Meditation one's states of consciousness so that one comes to experience oneself as less self‐y, and this makes one less selfish, even unselfish.

Goodman, like most Buddhists, frame things in terms of Hypothesis One. But Hypothesis Two is a possibility (there are many others) and it does not require that the self is an illusion, which is seen as such. It only requires that one's attachments be mitigated, mellowed, moderated, possibly overcome by altering consciousness and one's attitudes, possibly by producing a hallucination that makes it seem as if there is no‐self even though there is a self. The first hypothesis is that there is an illusion that is seen as such and this has good moral effects. The second is that good moral effects are produced by inducing a false view. This would be bad because having false views is naughty according to Buddhists, and producing and encouraging them is even worse.

The point is that there is still a burden on the Buddhist to explain whether the work of meditation involves the self being truly and correctly seen and experienced as illusory, insubstantial, or empty that is the key or whether it involves altering consciousness so that even though the self is no illusion, it seems so or at least that one's attitudes and attachments are see as less compelling and one's connection to others is magnified. I favor the second hypothesis. But it is yet another terrific topic for ongoing comparative philosophical, psychological, and anthropological discussion.