13. A BUDDHIST DECONSTRUCTION OF THE MIND’S SELF

A fundamental tenet of Buddhism is the lack of inherent existence of phenomena, including oneself our normal understanding of things as substantial is an illusion, for they exist truly only as dependently related events. Various dialectic approaches have developed in Tibetan Buddhism, designed to challenge and ultimately to dismantle our reified view of reality. The Dalai Lama several times tries to pursue this type of logical enquiry with the scientists. He seems to be interested in the possibility that a scientific understanding of the brain’s processes might lead to a similar deconstruction of illusion.

DALAI LAMA: I would like to know whether, as scientists conducting neuroscientific research in your laboratories, you ever have a spontaneous feeling of affection for the brain itself as you normally feel for living beings as persons? Do you ever have that kind of feeling?

LARRY SQUIRE: Sure.

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: Yes.

ROBERT LIVINGSTON: Absolutely, yes.

LEWIS JUDD: Highly admire it.

DALAI LAMA: Even though we might like certain plants such as these flowers, or this table, or jewelry, or whatever else we may consider precious, that kind of feeling is very different from the feeling of affection or love that you have toward another human being. Underlying that feeling is a very personalized perception of that individual person. Do you ever get that feeling of personal affection when you are looking at the brain?

ANTONIO DAMASIO: That’s different.

DALAI LAMA: Is the kind of affection and love that we feel toward another person, as a person, a baseless illusion?

ANTONIO DAMASIO: I would say no.

DALAI LAMA: As a result of scientific investigations, we have more or less refuted the notion of a truly existent self. You can’t find a soul, or a human being. You can find the human body, but you can’t find the human being per se, the person qua person, the entity for which we feel compassion and affection. Nor can you find consciousness or awareness apart from the brain. So is our affection and love toward another person as a person baseless? Is that affection, love, and compassion focused upon a nonentity?

ALLAN HOBSON: Brain science is inadequate. Neuroscience is only thirty years old. I believe, however, that we can envisage a time when our knowledge of brains would be elevated to that level. If you imagine the current slope of progress, and the increase in complexity of function which we only recently have come to understand in terms of detailed and comprehensive brain mechanisms, then I can envisage a time at which affection, including human affection, and the entire individual personality of a particular brain, will be revealed.

DALAI LAMA: Would you fall in love with it?

ALLAN HOBSON: You would certainly feel compassion.

LEWIS JUDD: But you would not relate to a brain as you would relate to a person. That is really the question.

DALAI LAMA: This would imply that when a person experiences affection and love for another person, the person who is experiencing affection and love has a philosophical notion that the other individual constitutes a being or perhaps has a soul. That would be the implication.

If you understood the complexity of the brain to such a degree, is it possible for you to have that response to a brain?

ALLAN HOBSON: He is saying there is something more to the brain than its organic constitution. I agree that such is likely to be discovered through progress in brain science.

In fact, this is not at all what His Holiness intends by this line of argument, as will eventually become clear.

ANTONIO DAMASIO: We need to answer the first question, which was whether or not, working in the laboratory, we feel affection toward the brain. That’s the way I interpret your question. Can we feel affection, for instance, for material that we are working with, such as an image of the brain or a slice of the brain? The answer to that is no, at least in my view. What I can feel affection for is a particular individual, a person whom I know.

I should like to tell you a little bit about my experience in that respect. The older I get, the more I feel a great affection and compassion for those individuals who have suffered brain damage and who are subjects in our research. And that feeling is something quite powerful. In fact, in our laboratory, we treat these individuals as our friends. They are very precious human beings, and we grieve over their problems. But when I look at sections of their brains as taken in life by MRI scanning, or actual sections of their brains taken postmortem, I don’t feel any affection whatsoever. I am interested in these sections esthetically, in much the same way that I am interested in paintings. And also, particularly, because the brain sections provide very rich information for my work, for my thinking. But no, I don’t relate with affectional regard for such artifacts. In fact, to be quite truthful, I relate to them somewhat less affectionately than I do to paintings.

DALAI LAMA: In order to save the life of a particular human being, suppose that we undertake an operation on that person’s brain or some other part of the body. We may actually cut out some small, damaged portion of the brain. You have no compassion for that part, although it is properly identified as a part of that person’s brain. Why is the affection missing? Is it because we took that possibly offending part out, in order to save the life of that person?

Now, you know there exists a person, but if we investigate in a reductionist manner, where and what is that person? What is the human being that you have feelings for? Is that the body? Is that the mind? We may suppose that the brain is the one thing which we consider to be the proper owner of the body. So, such things: brain, mind, soul seem to be essential, whether they all exist or not.

ROBERT LIVINGSTON: I have a suggestion here, Your Holiness. This goes back to our intellectual ancestors, to a contemporary of the Buddha, Hippocrates. Greek physicians in the Hippocratic tradition held that the contract between a doctor and a patient is a “Contract of Philia,” or mutual friendship, a contract that includes mutual trust and affection. What this patient/physician contract means is that when a physician encounters someone who requests or otherwise exhibits a need for health advice or care—and this is absolutely without limits of age, sex, nationality, creed, or philosophy—the physician has a professional obligation to do whatever he or she can for that person. If the patient consciously acknowledges the physician and appeals for his or her help, then the bilaterality, the mutuality of the contractual relation of friendship goes automatically into effect. The physician, on the basis of that Contract of Philia, must do everything for that patient that he would do for a friend, and he must not do anything to that patient that he would not do to a friend. In other words, patients are not just diagnostic or therapeutic problems.

LEWIS JUDD: The point is, the physician is dedicating his or her knowledge and skills on behalf of the patient as a totality, as a person, not to some fractional part or organ system. The patient is not just a diseased liver or diseased brain, or whatever. The patient is an integrated, whole person.

DALAI LAMA: That’s it. You can amputate the person’s arms and legs, yet you know the person is still there, even without arms or legs.

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: Are you exploring this as an argument for believing that there is a soul?

DALAI LAMA: No, that’s not the case. Buddhists don’t accept that there is a soul. There is a reductionist approach used in Buddhism in which you do not find the self, that is, you find only emptiness. The absence of an intrinsic self is emptiness, and emptiness is something to be realized. It is not designed to reintroduce a soul. But we do designate a self. There is a conceptual designation of the self, which relates to the body and to the mind. But it is not something you can localize through reductionist analysis.

ALAN WALLACE: I think the question here that was being asked previously and was not really answered was: If we say that no such thing as a self, or a “soul,” exists in and of itself, and moreover, if there is no such thing as a mind existing apart from brain and brain states, can we feel compassion toward a brain and brain states? If we cannot, then is compassion itself a deluded state of mind, inasmuch as you are feeling compassion toward a nonentity?

ANTONIO DAMASIO: In that case, I would say, yes. In that sense, we are generally taking the person as a whole, a brain and a body. We can usefully return to the metaphor I used yesterday, which is that human beings are brains that have a body on their backs. Bodies are intimately and constantly connected to their brains and are represented there.

LEWIS JUDD: They are a person as well.

ANTONIO DAMASIO: The person is a totality.

DALAI LAMA: There is a principle you have introduced and that is the disparity between reality and appearances. Do you think this pertains and that there is an appearance of a person, but in reality no such entity exists?

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: Yes. At least there is an appearance of a mind, or of a self, but there is no such thing. There is an appearance of a flat earth, but it is no such thing.

LEWIS JUDD: It is an aggregation of functions.

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: It is also true that His Holiness introduced an interesting paradox. In a way, if we think of the person as a brain, and yet, we can cut out a part of the brain and say, well, that part is not part of the person, and for any part of the brain, we could cut it out and say the same, then how can the person’s “self” be the outcome of brain activity?

ALLAN HOBSON: Don’t take out too much!

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: I think that’s right. The story is going to have to be, “Don’t take out too much.” For any given small part, you wouldn’t want to identify the “self” with that part. But the brain consists of a distributed collection of integrated parts. And you can disturb it a bit. But, of course, if you take out too much, then you don’t any longer have this behaving/interacting/speaking thing for which you can have affection, or which you regard as a person, a self.

DALAI LAMA: According to one system of Buddhist philosophy,¹ it is said that there are two types of phenomena. The first type consists of things that can perform functions, and they are thought to truly exist in their own right. They arise in dependence upon causes and conditions and they produce results. According to this same system, there is another type of phenomena which exists purely as a result of convention or conceptual designations: for example, the borderlines of one country with others. These are simply conventions, pure constructions that exist only because of agreement, and are not capable of performing any function. In this philosophy, a certain category of such phenomena is the mere absence of a specific entity. For example, there is no plant on the palm of my hand. The absence of this plant—

ROBERT LIVINGSTON: There are plants there, though. There are fungi, proper plants, which inhabit all your skin.

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: There are no daffodils there.

DALAI LAMA: No daffodils. There is an absence here of daffodils. That absence is just a conceptual construct. So the question would be, does that mental construct exist? Maybe this is a metaphysical question that science never talks about.

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: It is true that there is an absence of daffodils in my hand.

DALAI LAMA: Is that absence of daffodils existent or not?

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: It is not a thing that exists. An absence of something is not a thing that can interact with something. On the other hand, at least in English, we would say that it is true there is no daffodil there. There could be; in fact, I could imagine a glorious bunch of daffodils there, but the absence of the thing is not a thing.

LEWIS JUDD: But it exists in your mind as you think about it.

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: I said you could imagine it. But there is a Zeno-style paradox coming up here. It is like saying, “Nobody runs faster than Sarah” and then concluding that there is a thing, namely nobody, who does run faster than Sarah.

DALAI LAMA: This relates back to the system of Buddhist philosophy that distinguishes things that perform functions from conceptual constructions, like the absence of daffodils in my hand. So the question is: Does the very absence of a daffodil exist, albeit, not as a thing?

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: The thought of it can exist, and the thought of it can be identified apart from my brain.

DALAI LAMA: Thought? But is the absence itself a thing?

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: This is a semantic fuddle, like saying “nothing” is a thing!

LEWIS JUDD: Don’t step into the pit!

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: That’s why I keep resisting. It is not a thing but, certainly, its absence exists.

DALAI LAMA: What about certain properties like a dynamic process, the ever-changing nature of a thing? It is not tangible, it is not visible.

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: How about water heating and getting hotter and hotter? There is a change.

DALAI LAMA: The change of temperature of water. So take water as the entity that has the quality of change, or take fire as the entity that has the quality of change. The property of change is something that exists in the water or in the fire. Take this entity of change—is it findable?

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: If you mean by change, a thing in itself, no. It is a process. It is something that goes on, so that the fire changes. But we don’t want to think of it as…this is getting into Zeno territory again. It is really a matter of wordplay.

DALAI LAMA: What is this property of change? Is it a thing, material or otherwise, or is it not? That’s the question.

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: It depends on how you want to think about it.

DALAI LAMA: When we asked about the absence of daffodils on my palm, you said it was not a thing.

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: True.

DALAI LAMA: There are absences.

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: There are absences.

DALAI LAMA: It does exist, but it is not there. The property of change, is it a thing as you define thing?

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: No. There are changes. Things change. But change is not a thing, not stuff, not an object.

LEWIS JUDD: But is it not a property of the object that is exhibiting the process of change?

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: I think what we are looking for are properties of fire, or properties of fire changing, or properties of elements, or properties of brains. But we are not looking for the property of change itself because there isn’t any such object.

DALAI LAMA: For the sake of clarification of terminology, does a “thing” have to be a material phenomenon?

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: Not by definition, not if, in actual fact, there are nonmaterial phenomena, for example, spiritual phenomena or ghosts. However, spirits and ghosts do not appear really to exist.

DALAI LAMA: In your belief system, are there things that are nonmaterial?

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: I think the only things that there are are physical things. That is, particles, forces, and so on. But I could be wrong.

ANTONIO DAMASIO: To follow up in relation to the issue of the absence of daffodils, or the issue of the changing temperature, you should not talk about those descriptions as things. But you can nonetheless understand the mechanisms that lead to such experiential events or states. And you can describe them, or account for them, by reduction to a different level of reality. For instance, you can explain why there are changes in the temperature of water by knowing what is happening to the molecules of water. And you can know why, for example, water coming from on high can move a wheel during its fall. So you can explain mechanisms which lead to change. But you cannot talk about them as things. You can talk about them as patterns that can be described.

ALLAN HOBSON: But they are patterns of things.

ANTONIO DAMASIO: They are patterns created by things.

LEWIS JUDD: They are ice crystals.

DALAI LAMA: Did you say patterns are not things? Can you say definitely, within the scientific context, that if something exists it should be findable under analysis? That is, if you seek it out, you should be able to find it?

ANTONIO DAMASIO: If you get to the proper level of analysis.

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: It may be difficult technically. But if it does exist, then there should be some way, either indirectly, as in the case of electrons, or directly, of being able to get a fix on them. However, one would not believe something were real in the absence of empirical evidence.

DALAI LAMA: Just as in science, so within Buddhism.