anatman meets functionalism: buddhist and...
TRANSCRIPT
Multiple drafts or Anatman? Neuroscientific and Buddhist Conceptions of the Self and Language
By Laura E. Weed The College of St. Rose
Abstract:
This paper will argue that Daniel Dennett’s multiple drafts, linguistic conception of a self cannot be correct. First, I will argue that the most basic sense of a self is a biologically primordial, enactive phenomena, whereas linguistic capacity, especially story-telling, is a sophisticated, specifically human and cortically directed activity. Second, I will explain the Buddhist anti-substantialist position which claims that consciousness is a relational fact among a variety of non-substantial skandas or adjuncts of existence that co-determinately arise, creating the natural world and the mind. I will show how this non-substantialist conception of a self and world better accounts for recent discoveries in neuroscience than standard western materialism or dualism do. Finally, I will show how an enactive, relational conception of self and mind can better account for linguistic phenomena, as well.
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Multiple Drafts or Anatman? Neuroscientific and Buddhist Conceptions of the Self and Language
1. Introduction and Overview
There is no general agreement among researchers in neuroscience or
consciousness studies about exactly what consciousness is. Some researchers focus on
very high level human capacities to exhibit a Theory of Mind, of a type that even toddlers
and autistic persons lack, to define as the state of consciousness.1 In the case that this
definition is accepted, even some humans do not rate as conscious agents. The self-
reflective conception of consciousness tests for mirror-recognition. On this standard for
consciousness some apes, some birds and dolphins rate as self-conscious, while infants,
dogs and cats do not.2 Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers have argued that
consciousness is the capacity of a logical engine to produce inferences, from which it
follows that computers, as well as animals and humans may be conscious. There are
many other varieties of definitions of consciousness emerging in the literature, as well.
Daniel Dennett has identified consciousness with an advanced level human linguistic
capacity, the capacity to generate a narrative story of oneself.3 Like other high-level or
abstract descriptions of consciousness, this one rules out the possibility that
consciousness could exist for creatures without linguistic capacity. Buddhists, in
contrast, have usually held that consciousness is a more biologically based, and low level
form of self-awareness and interaction with the world. By Buddhist standards, even
snails and clams and sometimes insects rate as conscious agents, but computers are ruled
1 Alison Gopnik, “Theory of Mind” in The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences” eds. Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999, pgs. 838-8412 Susan Blackmore, Consciousness, an Introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 2004, pgs. 170-1723 Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Little Brown and Co., Boston, MA, 1991, p. 210
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out because they are not biological agents. This paper draws on selected neuroscientific
research to support the Buddhist point of view.
Daniel Dennett’s multiple drafts, linguistic conception of a self cannot be correct.
Many of the arguments that I will present will apply as well to an argument against the
other higher-level accounts of consciousness, but I will not offer those here. First, I will
argue that the most basic sense of a self is a biologically primordial, enactive phenomena,
whereas linguistic capacity, especially story-telling, is a sophisticated, specifically human
and cortically directed activity. Second, I will explain the Buddhist anti-substantialist
position which claims that consciousness is a relational fact among a variety of non-
substantial skandas or adjuncts of existence that co-determinately arise, creating the
natural world and the mind. I will show how this non-substantialist conception of a self
and world better accounts for recent discoveries in neuroscience than standard western
materialism or dualism do. Finally, I will show how an enactive, relational conception of
self and mind can better account for linguistic phenomena, as well.
2. The Multiple Drafts model of a mind is too abstract, cognitive and cortical
a. Dennett’s Multiple Drafts Model of a Self
Daniel Dennett’s conception of the self or mind is based on the AI computer
model. He states his basic thesis in Consciousness Explained, this way:
Human consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes…that can best be understood as the operation of a “von Neumannesque” virtual machine implemented in the parallel architecture of a brain that was not designed for any such activities. The powers of this virtual machine vastly enhance the underlying powers of the organic hardware on which it runs.4
4Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Little Brown and Co., Boston, MA, 1991, p. 210
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Dennett argues that humans are ‘meme machines’ that developed through a
combination of genetic and phenotypic plasticity in the brain, as it interacted with our
environment. This interaction may have been primarily physiological for the first one
hundred thousand years of human evolution, or so, but has become increasingly cultural
as homo sapiens has become increasingly cultural. Dennett remarks,
…[O]ne way or another, the plastic brain is capable of reorganizing itself adaptively in response to the particular novelties encountered in the organism’s environment, and the process by which the brain does this is almost certainly a mechanical process strongly analogous to natural selection.5
Dennett argues that this mechanical process becomes cultural as we “learn to learn” and
learn to pass on the cultural acquisition of “Good Tricks” to our progeny. Cultural
memes are passed on this way, according to Dennett.
We have also learned how to make the fruits of this learning available to novices. We somehow install an already invented and largely “debugged” system of habits in the partly unstructured brain.6
So, for Dennett, as for functionalists, generally, most of our ability to think, act, or
self-reflect, as a human, is a function of human evolutionary interactions between a
plastic brain and an environment inhabited by ‘memes.’ Dennett uses Richard Dawkins’
conception of a ‘meme’ as a culturally passed on parallel of a ‘gene’ to explicate his
claimed analogy between culturally evolved and biologically evolved cases of change or
learning. Memes are repeated patterns encountered by the brain which develop cultural
significance and are passed on culturally as the debugged system of habits installed
5 Dennett, p. 1846 ibid. p. 193
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through learning. Consciousness, for Dennett, is just this collection of internalized
memes, the inputs and outputs of plastic brains.
A sense of self develops out of the memes linguistically, although images and
other memes may also play a role. Dennett argues that there is no centrality or ‘stream of
consciousness’ in the memes, so no ‘Central Meaner.’7 Instead there are parallel
pandemoniums of memes creating “Multiple Drafts,”8 which are streams of narrative that
we may use to tell stories of ourselves, or we may not even notice. More fragmentary
drafts will simply be generated and pass out of existence without our notice. But some of
the multiple drafts become patterns or central ideas in or lives and become combined into
stories or narratives that we tell about ourselves. He describes humans as story telling
animals, as follows.
Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly concocting and controlling the story we tell others and ourselves about who we are…Our tales are spun, but for the most part we don’t spin them: they spin us. Our human consciousness, and our narrative selfhood, is their product, not their source.9
While Dennett’s picture of the self provides a clear interpretation of the AI
paradigm for the function of mind and nature of a self, as rooted in logic-like linguistic
structures, I will argue that consciousness can not be the cortical-level cognitive and
linguistic story-telling function that he describes in the above passages. I have three
reasons for finding Dennett’s picture of the self inadequate. First, I will argue that
consciousness does not need memes, of either a linguistic or perceptual sort in order to
exist. For, it arises from more basic forms of intentional interaction with an environment
7 Consciousness Explained, p. 2538 ibid. p. 2549 ibid. p.418
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than linguistic or cultural memes do. Second, I will argue that emotions play as large a
role in consciousness as perceptions and cognitions do. Third, I will argue that the
primordial nature of consciousness can not be cognitive, perceptual or emotional, but
must be some more basic type of ‘background’ thing that includes or provides a basis for
cognition, perception and emotion.
b. Intentional interaction with an environment
Cognitive scientists disagree about what functions of a brain, should be identified
as the NCCs, or neural correlates of consciousness. Some, such as the HOT10, HOP11 and
HOGs12 theories, place the NCCS in the higher cortical areas of the brain, as requiring
thought (HOT), perception (HOP), or general organization(HOGs), respectively, for
consciousness. So they, like Dennett’s multiple drafts theory, will require more cognition
or perception than I think is necessary for consciousness to exist. Others locate NCCs in
the limbic system, or in a theater of consciousness.13 These theories will turn out to rely
on an isolated conception of the brain which will not satisfy the conception of
consciousness that I am developing in this paper, as well as requiring functions of the
brain that are more sophisticated than the ones that I will consider most important. I will
argue that the suggestion that there are neural correlates of consciousness is useful to the
degree that the involved brain structures are tied, in some rather direct ways, to action-
intention sequences of interrelationship with an environment. Three theories that do so
connect NCCs to the environment are Jaak Pankseepp’s Affective Neuroscience, Andy
10 David Rosenthal, "Mental Qualities and Higher-Order Concepts", Journal of Consciousness Studies, 13 2006. 11 Joseph Levine, Purple Haze, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 2001 12 Robert Van Gulick, “Understanding the Phenomenal Mind: are we all Just Armadillos?”, in Mind and Cognition, an Anthology, ed. William Lycan, 2nd ed., Blackwell Publishers, 199913 Bernard Baars, In the Theater of Consciousness, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK, 1997
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Clark’s dynamic-interactive conception of mind, and Francisco Varela’s conception of
mind as enaction or embodied cognition.
Jaak Panksepp argues that the neurochemistry of the brainstem is not
substantively different in humans than it is in lizards or frogs, animals with no cognitive
or linguistic capacity, and far less limbic capacity for emotion than even mice or rabbits.14
Yet, the neurochemistry of the brain-stem function enables reptiles to engage in activities
that promote productive interaction with the environment of types that Panksepp
characterizes as intentional interaction, such as seeking, fear, and rage. In mammals and
in humans, these basic activities become emotional, but even in reptiles they constitute
the pre-cursors of what he calls a “SELF a Simple Ego-type Life Form.”15 Panksepp
disagrees with authors who write all reptilian behavior off as mere reflex activity,
pointing out that the orienting activities and survival choices made by reptiles are
sometimes quite sophisticated and flexible. Although the limbic system is responsible for
the greater refinements in emotions that develop in mammals and humans, Panksepp
argues that the midbrain is responsible for the basic sense of a self.
…[T]he SELF first arises during early development from a coherently organized motor process in the midbrain, even though it surely comes to be represented in widely distributed ways through higher regions of the brain as a function of neural and psychological maturation [in mammals and humans]. Not only does this archaic SELF-representatior network control motor tone and some simple orienting responses, its intrinsic rhythms can be transiently moderated by a wide array of regulatory inputs, and it is highly interactive with all the basic emotional circuits [in mammals and humans.]…16
Panksepp’s primordial sense of a self is not cognitive or perceptual in any direct sense,
but is rather a sub-cognitive and sub perceptual feeling of presence and interaction. In
14 Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience Oxford U. Press, 1998, Chap 6, p. 97-12015 ibid. p. 30916 ibid.
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its favor, one of the key medical elements used in determining if someone is conscious or
not is whether they have the motor tone and orienting responses he cites in the above
passage. He explains his conception of consciousness as follows.
…[P]rimary-process consciousness will not be conceptualized simply as the “awareness of external events in the world,” but rather as that ineffable feeling of experiencing oneself as an active agent in the perceived events of the world. Such a primitive SELF-representation presumably consists of an intrinsically reverberating neural network linked to basic body tone and gross axial movement generators. It may provide a coherent matrix in which a variety of sensory stimuli become hedonically valenced.17 (author’s emphasis)
When the conception of a SELF is rooted in NCCs as basic as mid-brain and reticular
systems, it is fairly clear that sophisticated levels of cognition and perception can play
very little role in basic consciousness. Consciousness will also, on this account, spread
very far down the animal chain, to at least reptiles.18 If consciousness is as basic to life-
forms as Panksepp argues that it is, the cognitively-based AI account will surely be far
too sophisticated to account for it.
Andy Clark also describes the self-environment relationship in terms of functions
between an environment and an embodied brain, but in the Clark version, the inter-
relationships are described as abstract information-processing relationships. Clark
describes the mind as a collective composed of events in a physico-informational space19
that arises from the interaction of a brain and muscular system with an environment.
Humans co-evolve with their environments as feed-back loops in self-organizing
dynamical systems, of which Clark says,
17 ibid. p. 31018 Panksepp argues for capacity for instrumental learning even in the sea snail, Aplysia, p. 3619 Andy Clark, Being There, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998 p.66 Clark attributes the concept of physico-informational space to Kirsh and Maglio.
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These systems are such that it is simultaneously true to say that the actions of the parts cause the overall behavior and that the overall behavior guides the action of the parts.20
Selves or minds can be distributed across environments, according Clark’s view of
things, so humans do not exist as completely autonomous brains-within-bodies and
consciousness does not exist as a function of the autonomous brains. One’s memory of
where one’s shoes are is located as much in the architecture of one’s house and closet as
it is in the brain or mind on Clark’s view. There is nothing in his description that rules
out the possibility that a snail or a reptile could engage in this type of dynamic interaction
with an environment.
However, unlike Panksepp, Clark concurs with Dennett’s AI model of the mind,
thinking that robots might actually be fairly good candidates for representational systems
of the type that he believes conscious agents are. He thinks that the biological details of
brain stem construction are irrelevant factors and dismisses all but functional
relationships as relevant to a conception of mind. Clark claims;
By allowing representational glosses to stick to complex dynamical entities (limit cycles, space-state trajectories, values of collective variables, etc.) the theorist pitches the information-processing story at a very high level of abstraction from details of basic systemic components and variables, and thus severs the links between the representational description and the specific details of inner workings. The best representational stories, it now seems, may be pitched at an even greater remove from the nitty-gritty of physical implementation than was previously imagined.21
In an endnote attached to this passage, Clark concedes that a dynamical systems approach
to functionalism will not provide a mechanical, step-wise solution as an account of
mental functioning, but claims that this concession has positive effects in terms of ability
20 Ibid. p. 10721 ibid. p.170
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to give an account of mind. I think the effects are good for describing functional
dynamics, but poor for explaining consciousness.
I’ve included Clark’s dynamical interaction account of mind, here, because I think
that the dynamical-systems approach is very helpful for understanding how minds and
worlds do interact with one another and mutually generate the characteristics of one
another. But I think that Clark’s abstract description of interaction obscures the centrality
of Panksepp’s sense of self in consciousness. A computer is not a self-moving system
that engages in intentional, phenomenologically driven seeking, nurturing, fear, rage and
play activities, and it does not have a hedonically valenced and ineffable sense of self. I
vote with Panksepp that these primordially conscious activities are biologically based,
and that the brainstem is the most likely NCC for them. But I think that Clark’s
description of emergent dynamical systems is helpful to describe how dynamical co-
evolution could occur for creatures with brainstems.
Francisco Varela argued that sensori-motor enaction provides a form of
neurophenomenology, which ties cognition and other mental events to human-
environmental interaction. He distinguishes three levels of time scale that have been
discovered in neurological investigations, to clarify three distinct senses in which
phenomenal experience is temporal. The Specious Present, in William James’s term,
operates more quickly than the time scale at which linguistic formulations take place, but
more slowly than the automatic firing of neurons. Varela claimed that the three time-
scales correspond to levels of integration of experience, that constitute an horizon of the
present.
…[I]t is important to introduce three scales of duration to understand the temporal horizon just introduced: 1. Basic or elementary events (the 1/10
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scale), 2. relaxation time for large scale integration (the 1 scale), and descriptive/narrative assessments (the 10 scale).22 (author’s emphasis)
The first and quickest, 1/10 scale represents micro-cognitive phenomena, such as
perceptual reactions and oculomotor behavior that takes place in as few as 10-100
milliseconds. These neuronal activities establish basic rhythms that may or may not be
picked up by cell assemblies and incorporated into synchronous collections of integrated
cell assemblies. The second, slightly slower and more integrative rhythm operating at the
1 scale of time, (fractions of a second) results in dynamical networks, creating a specious
‘now’ that engages in reciprocal determination and relaxation with its neural sub-
assemblies.23 Varela describes this rhythmic activity as generating “transient aggregates
of phase-locked signals coming from multiple regions”24 of the brain, and generating a
form of neuronal synchrony that establishes a specious present as an experience of unity
of consciousness. 25
The third time scale lasts in the order of seconds, and constitutes the perception-
action time scale. Language and cognitive competence emerge at this time scale.26
Varela summarizes the significance of the neurological time-scale distinctions, for the
thesis of this paper, as follows:
Nowness, [which emerges at the second time scale ] in this perspective, is therefore, pre-semantic in that it does not require a rememoration… in order to emerge… 27
22FranciscoJ. Varela, “The Specious Present,” in Naturalizing Phenomenology, eds. Petitot, Varela, Pachoud, & Roy, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1999, p. 27323 ibid. p. 27424 ibid. p. 27525 ibid.26 ibid. p.27727 ibid.
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However, the narrative sense of self emerges at the third time scale, which integrates
streams of moments of nowness into, “…broader temporal horizons in remembrance and
imagination.”28
Varela argues that the temporal dimensions of the self that he has just identified
do not, however, constitute a linear temporal sequence. Rather, he concurs with Merleau-
Ponty that they constitute a “network of intentionalities.”29 He would also agree with my
assessment of Clark’s theory that while dynamic systems theory is essential to understand
how these time scales emerge in the brain and interact with the rest of a person’s
environment, the underlying biochemistry of the brain is essential to understanding how
this works, not irrelevant. For, the neurons, at the 1/10 scale constitute the component
level of analysis, and it is their oscillations that become synchronous at the 1 scale.
Further, at the 10 scale, the global behavior is “not an abstract computation, but an
embodied behavior subject to initial conditions,”30 which are provided by the neuronal
rhythms. Biological systems, unlike mechanical ones, are unstable as part of their normal
functioning, and so are capable of forming trajectories that generate new percepts out of
the chaotic behavior of the neuronal phase-spaces of cell assemblies. Varela argues that
gestalt phenomena such as the necker cube illustrate the capacity of mental organization
across the various temporal scales of mental functioning to generate multi-stability of a
type that operates in complex non-linear and chaotic systems.31
Varela attributes a Husserlian form of double-intentionality to the non-linear
relationship among the scales of temporal awareness that he has identified. He identifies
the two forms of intentionality as a) retentional or transverse intentionality, which is 28 ibid.29 ibid. p. 28130 ibid. p. 28331 ibid. pgs. 286-291
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static, and b) longitudinal or integrative intentionality, which he cites Husserl as calling
“the unchanging substrate from which the flow emerges.”32 He agrees with Husserl that
the retentional level of intentionality is primarily linguistic or imagistic, and claims that
this level of intentionality corresponds to his level three time scale. Husserl’s
longitudinal level of intentionality is more basic, and will correspond to Varela’s level
two time scale, the “nowness” of existence. While Varela believes that the two forms of
intentionality interact in ways that intertwine them, he also thinks that the affectively
informed, longitudinal sense of nowness should be identified as “the self, pure ego or
basic consciousness,”33 rather than the retentional level of intentionality.
To summarize my argument so far for a more primordial, biologically based
conception of consciousness to this point; consciousness must be something that operates
at a basic level of neuronal cell assemblies interacting rhythmically, or of brain stem
capacities to innervate activities as basic as temporal coordination, intentions rooted in
nowness, seeking, fear, rage and nurturance activities and basic orienting and motor-tone
interactions with the environment. The method of operation of the interactions may be
non-linear, and are certainly dynamical, but these operations can not be understood in
abstraction from the biological base of which they are constructed. In the next section I
will show how emotions must also interact with this basic form of consciousness and
inform it.
c) For creatures with a limbic system, consciousness is emotional.
Traditional western philosophers, such as Plato, Descartes and Kant considered
consciousness a matter exclusively of conception, as Descartes’ “I think, therefore I
32 ibid. p. 294, emphasis added33 ibid. p. 295
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am,”34 so well epitomizes. Empiricists, such as Locke, Berkeley and Hume arguing
against the rationalists, entertained the possibility the perception might be more
significant than cognition for thought. Contemporary cognitive science is undermining
the exclusivity of the ‘rationalism vs. empiricism,’ ‘cognition or perception’ paradigm for
mental operation by showing that emotions, which have long been considered
impediments to clear mental operation, are in fact, essential components of consciousness
as well as of cognition and perception.
Jaak Panksepp and Antonio Damasio, for example, have pointed out the centrality
of emotions in thinking. Far from being a noisome distraction from pure rationality, as
Plato35 characterized them, emotions are the essential motivators for both action and
thought, and play key roles in perception, as well. Damasio tells the story of Phineas
Gage36 to point out that once the planning area of the pre-frontal lobe of the brain has
been destroyed, as Gage’s was by a railroad construction accident, personality, character,
planning activities, and social skills were destroyed along with that section of the brain.
Thinking and perceiving can not be used effectively independently of the emotionally
valent felt sense of one’s existence, which is prior to either thinking or perceiving,
according to Damasio. Patients lacking in emotions are also abysmal failures at decision-
making, despite ability to perform normally on tasks that test only cognitive
functioning.37 Sociopaths, Damasio points out, are persons with very low levels of
emotional arousal. But far from being Plato’s paradigms of rational moral perfection,
34Rene Descartes, Meditations, in Readings in Modern Philosophy, vol !, ed. Roger Ariew and Eric Watkins, Hackett Publishing Co, Indianapolis, IN, 2000 , p.3035 Plato, the Republic, especially book IX,571a-577, where the tyrannical man is described as one who operates with emotion rather than pure reason, in Classics of Western Philosophy, ed. Steven M. Cahn, 6th ed, Hackett Publishing Co,.Indianapolis, IN, 2002, pgs. 161-16436 Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error, Harper-Collins/ Quill Press, New York, NY, 1994, pgs. 3-1437ibid. p. 221 ff.
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they are immoral or criminal in the decisions they make.38 High levels of intellectual and
perceptual ability render a sociopath more effective at accomplishing evil, not more
moral.
Jaak Panksepp also concentrates on the centrality of emotions in life. Panksepp
argues that basic emotions, such as seeking, rage, fear, nurturance and play arise in the
reticular formation of the brain stem, and motivate all actions in creatures with brain
stems. Even snakes and frogs experience these drives, and while they become more
sophisticated in mammals, possessing limbic systems, and still more sophisticated in
humans, who moderate the basic brain-stem and mammalian emotions through higher
cortical areas of the brain, such as the pre-frontal cortex areas that were destroyed in
Phineas Gage, Panksepp argues that the primordial sense of self exists even for the
primitive creatures,39 as I have already argued. One of the main functions of the SELF
system, according to Panksepp is intrinsic motivation which arises from “neuro-
physiological properties of genetically ordained subcortical emotive systems.”40 His
argument for this point of view, again, is based on the neuro-biochemistry of the linkages
in the brainstem, which have not altered much in the course of evolution from creatures
with only a brainstem through those mammals endowed with limbic systems or humans
endowed with cortical areas.
All consciousness is orienting, motivating and equipped with an emotional tone,
on Panksepp’s view. He argues,
…[A] primitive neuro-dynamic of self-awareness…may have been achieved by an ability of the SELF-map to establish a characteristic resting tone within the somatic and visceral musculatures. The establishment of such a tone
38 ibid. p. 178-179.39 Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, the foundations of human and animal emotions, Oxford University Press, NY 1998, pgs 55-5740 ibid. p. 123
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throughout the body and brain, along with a variety of reafferent processes may have provided each organism with a feeling of individuality, of “I-ness”41
Although the pre-frontal cortex clearly plays a major role in controlling emotions,
for humans, Panksepp makes clear that the lower rather than the higher mental functions
pull rank in the SELF system. He claims that the primary sense of self is more intimately
connected to motor than to sensory or cognitive cortices, agreeing with Varela that
embodied senses of emotionally lit action are more basic than either perception or
cognition in human consciousness. “Action-readiness” is the goal of the entire conscious
system, for Panksepp, and that is what stabilizes both the perceptual and cognitive
systems of the SELF.42 Panksepp would concur with Buddhists who recommend
deference not only for other human lives, but for all conscious life, which, both would
insist, extends quite far down the biological chain.
I think at this point in this paper that I have articulated a conception of
consciousness, based in Neuroscience, that places primacy in some very biological and
very low-level action-intention sequences, rather than in the more conceptual or
perceptual cognitive areas of human functioning that have been preferred by
philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists in the past. In the next section of the
paper I will examine why Buddhists would say that the way to learn about consciousness
is to “Drop off body and mind,”43 as Dogen advised.
3. The Self as Anatman: an unsubstantial interaction of actions, intentions, perceptions, cognitions, emotions, physical forms and background consciousness.
41 Panksepp, p. 31342 ibid.43 Zen Master Dogen, Enlightenment Unfolds, ed. Kazuaki Tanahashi, Shambala Press, Boston, MA, 2000, p. 32
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I have argued so far that, some functionalists and neuro-phenomenologists are
drawn to relational conceptions of the self, which feature a network of interactions
among neurological brain events, action-intention sequences developed interactively with
an environment, and, in the human case, social interactions with other humans. In this
section of the paper I will further develop a conception of mental architecture that
informs these insights with the work of Buddhist Philosophers, especially:
a) Fa Tsang's Hua Yen-Ti'en Tai view of reality as pratitya samutpada,
b) Nishida Kitaro’s view of consciousness as a homeground of pure experience out of which both cognition and sensation flow, and
c) Thich Nhat Hanh's conception of self, reality and social relations as Interbeing.
These three Buddhist philosophers interpret the self and mind as systems of relations
which are inter-penetrable both with each other and with the environment, paralleling the
descriptions of the neuroscientists. The result is an organic view of a self as part of an
eco-system, that is less essentialist and less autonomous than the typical western
conceptions. This conception of self is, however, responsive to cognitive science
discoveries about how functional modules of the brain interact with parts of the body and
aspects of the environment.
a) Pratitya Samutpada: Fa Tsang’s Dynamical interaction view of World and Mind
Fa Tsang was a teacher of the Hua Yen school of Buddhism that followed the
Tien Tai School in the development of Chinese Chan. He is famous for the story of the
Golden Lion, in which he is trying to convince a princess of the truth of the Mahayana
Buddhist claim that mind and world co-dependently arise through a dynamical interaction
called pratitya samutpada. Fa Tsang and the princess are on the porch of her palace. She
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walks up to a huge golden lion and kicks it, insisting that the lion is there, material, and
independent of her consciousness of it, in a spirit reminiscent of contemporary western
reductivist materialism. Fa Tsang responds as follows.44
1. The lion, as shape, has no real character. The gold is real, but the lion comes into and goes out of existence every moment, depending on the perspective, experience, focus and attention of the perceiver. Technically speaking, Fa Tsang and the princess, though standing next to each other, experience different lion-shapes.
2. The dharmas (phenomenal percepts) of the lion produced through dynamical causation between the percipients and the lion are each without self-nature. They are no-things which ultimately are absolute emptiness.
3. Although there is absolutely only emptiness, this does not prevent the illusory dharmas from being clearly what they are (phenomenal percepts). The two characters of coming into existence through causation and dependent existence co-exist.
4. These two characters eliminate each other and perish once the attachment to false causation and dependent co-origination has been released. Without attachment, the illusory dharmas have no power. Recognition of this truth can bring Sudden Enlightenment.
5. When the feelings have been eliminated and true substance revealed, all becomes an undifferentiated mass. Perfect reality and pure function then arise.
The interrelations among the parts of the (phenomenal) lion are the interrelations
of one-to-all and all-to-one described in T'ien-T'ai, also reminiscent of Andy Clark’s
dynamical account of actions of parts causing a whole while the actions of the whole
cause the parts. Fa Tsang points out that each hair on the lion contains and implies an
infinite number of lions and each lion contains and implies and infinite number of hairs.
Dharmas, as emotionally driven cognitions and perceptions, multiply in all directions in
an infinite geometrical progression, like the jewels in Lord Indra's net.
44paraphrased from A Soucebook in Chinese Philosophy, by Wing-Tsit Chan
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In terms closer to those of western cognitive science, Fa Tsang is claiming in
Kantian style, that the entire phenomenal world has only a relational existence. If it were
not the case that creatures like us name, identify, perceive, inter-act with, and emotionally
valence gold statues of lions, the gold would exist only as an undifferentiated noumenon.
To put the matter in terms of Varela’s distinction between retentional and longitudinal
intentionality, it is only the retentional (language and image) level of intentionality for
which the Golden Lion exists. If the princess can quiet the intellectual, emotional and
perceptual grasping that exist at the retentional level of intentionality, the linguistic and
imagistic ‘objects’ that co-dependently arise from her dynamic interaction with the
environment will subside, will stop being generated. At Varela’s 1 time-scale, or the
longitudinal level of intentionality, the relationships that generate the percepts do not
exist. Consciousness may not be linguistically driven, as I have been arguing here, but
greed certainly is, if Fa Tsang is correct. The Buddhist insight on the matter observes
that although it is natural and normal for humans to interact with our environment by
forming cognitive, perceptual and emotional dynamical relationships and attachments, it
is not necessary that we identify with Varela’s intentional time scale of 10, at which these
relationships form. We have a deeper level of self, the longitudinal intentionality at time
scale 1, to which we can retreat for at least temporary escape from grasping. Buddhists
will agree with Panksepp and Varela, that the more basic and primordial sense of a self is
more truly a self. But it is also a no-thing, a non-thing, for things as entities are generated
by perception, cognition and emotional valence.
The Buddha alerted his followers to the dangers of identifying themselves with
the five skandas; five illusory karmic waves that we mistakenly take to be our substantial
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selves. The five skandas are cognitions, emotions, perceptions, physical forms and
background consciousness. As I have presented Fa Tsang’s argument above, and
interpreted it in terms of contemporary neuroscience, it is an argument for banishing the
illusions of the first four of the skandas.
b) Pure Experience: Nishida Kitaro’s view of ‘homeground’ consciousness
Nishida Kitaro concurs with Fa Tsang, Varela and Panksepp that the self is not to
be found in the emotionally-lit perceptual or cognitive functions of mind. His analysis of
the relationship between time and a sense of ‘nowness’ is strikingly similar to Varela’s
analysis of longitudinal intentionality, as this passage reveals.
There is always a certain unchanging reality at the base of the mind. This reality enlarges the development of consciousness from day to day. The passage of time is the continuous change of the unifying center that accompanies this development, and this center is always “the present.”45
Kitaro uses the word ‘intuition’ to describe an alternate mode of relation to reality that
operates out of this deeper sense of self. Pure experience, he maintains, is not the every-
day experience that differentiates between a subjective sense of self and an objective
sense of a world that exists independently of the self. Rather it is what he calls an
intuition of the ultimate unity of reality. He says of this intuition,
Mainstream psychologists may argue that it is only a habit or an organic activity, but from the standpoint of pure experience it is actually the state of oneness of subject and object, a fusion of knowing and willing. In the mutual forgetting of the self and the object, the object does not move the self and the self does not move the object. There is simply one world, one scene…[in]…a state that has transcended subject and object. 46
45 Nishida Kitaro, An Inquiry into the Good, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 1990, p. 6146 ibid. p. 32
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Kitaro is referring to the complete absorption in activity that can occur when one is lost in
say playing music, dancing or painting. This type of absorption is one in which time
seems to stand still, there seems to be no distinction among ones body parts, mind or will,
one’s medium of expression and the object or space in which one is acting. All flow
together in a happy state of unity, perhaps reminiscent of Aristotle’s conception of
eudaimonia. In terms of the neuroscientists that we have been examining in this paper,
again, it would be Varela’s intermediate time scale at which this type of unity of activity
would take place. Profound experiences of unity, whether aesthetic or religious, are often
described as ineffable, perhaps because they take place at levels of mind-world
integration that are distinct from those of typical cognitive and perceptual distinctions.
Kitaro’s homeground of pure experience is, for him the real sense of self, from which
cognition, perception, willing, and other ‘adjuncts’ of consciousness arise.47 To know the
real self is to dwell in the pure experience. Subject and object are not distinguished there
because this linguistic and logical manner of making distinctions is not available there.
c) Thich Nhat Hanh on Interbeing
Thich Nhat Hanh explains the life of a Buddhist as the life of one who “interbes.”
He says,
Too many people distinguish between the inner world of our mind and the world outside, but these worlds are not separate. They belong to the same reality. The ideas of inside and outside are helpful in every day life but they can become an obstacle that prevents us from experiencing ultimate reality. If we look deeply into our mind we see the world deeply at the same time. If we understand the world we understand our mind.48
For Hanh, not only the subjective and objective worlds, but also the social and individual
worlds relationally co-dependently arise. Hanh argues that it is pointless to try to be
47 ibid.48 Thich Nhat Hanh, Interbeing,3rd ed. Parallax Press, Berkeley CA, 1998, p.4
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happy in the future, because the only time or place one has in which to be happy is the
here and now,49 stressing, once again, the centrality and importance of the specious
present as articulated by Varela. Socially, also, children deprived of productive
interaction with other ‘selves’ do not develop a sense of themselves. The social as well as
the physical environment is essential to develop a functioning ecological self-system.
To summarize my Buddhist sources and their relevance to this paper, Buddhism
contains a conception of the self, as relational, as primordial, as rooted in a specious
present, as neither cognitive nor perceptual, and as deeper than the ordinary sense of self
that develops from a perceptual or cognitive account of mind, which is emotionally
valenced. In this Buddhist conception of the self the self is not an ego, but a field of
interactive relations, or a form of pure activity and situated experience. The Buddhist
view of a self is compatible with the new conception of a self as a dynamical rhythm that
is emerging in contemporary cognitive and neuroscience. Although my conclusions
about language should be fairly apparent by now, I will now turn to a more explicit
summary of why this sense of self cannot be a linguistically defined or driven entity.
4. The self is ineffable Anatman, not Multiple Drafts of Narrative.
In using the distinction between the retentional and longitudinal levels of
consciousness in my argument, I have agreed with Varela, Husserl, Kitaro, and,
ultimately, William James, in identifying phenomenal experience with the specious
present, the nowness of dynamic interaction with the environment. I have also argued for
the ineffableness, the orientating function and the primal nature of this most basic
integrating biological rhythm. In this section of the paper I will continue the argument
for why this basic animal sense of self should be considered more fundamental and more
49 ibid.p.6
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important than the ‘higher level’ and more restrictedly human conceptions of self that
most researchers in the area prefer. Varela is of course, correct to point out that in the
human case at least, these two forms of consciousness rarely occur in isolation from one
another. Meditation practice attempts to isolate the more primal sense of self, while, I
speculate, autism might signal someone who is lost in the cognitive and higher functions
at cost to the basic capacity to integrate and orient.
Dennett argues, as I quoted previously, that
Our tales are spun, but for the most part we don’t spin them: they spin us.50
He insists that this spinning is a purely mechanical process that does not require
consciousness,51 claiming against authors such as David Chalmers52 that there is no such
thing as an ‘explanatory gap’ between a behavioristic third-person analysis of someone’s
mental operation and a first-person phenomenal account of the same event, because there
is no phenomenal “what it is like” to be anything, whether a person or a bat, over and
above the behavior, instincts, and physical acts that the person exhibits. Not only are
there not two levels of consciousness for Dennett, there is not even one. A meme
machine does not require a point of view any more than a computer does, and according
to Dennett, we meme machines do not have one.
Focusing specifically on language, I argue in this section of the paper first that an
evolutionary account of language, to which Dennett is sympathetic, must build on more
primitive biological detection devises which must be, as Ruth Garrett Millikan argues,
consumer-oriented intentional orientation and action enabling devices. Second, I argue
that the AI account of language as mechanical information transfer cannot account for the
50 Consciousness Explained, p. 41851 ibid. p.38352 David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, Oxford University Press, 1996
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rootedness of language in embodied biological expression of actions, orientation, and
experience. Third, I argue that no language can be truly free of phenomenal “what-it-is-
like-to-be”-ness and its basis in primary consciousness.
a) The evolution of language
Ruth Garrett Millikan argues that representations cannot be simply neutral
information processing items that exist in a vacuum, as AI claims they are. Rather they
must have consumers-systems for which the information rates as a representation.53 She
argues against causal and natural-sign theories of information processing that intentional
interpretation of a sign is more important than its causal connections:
Anything the signs may indicate qua natural signs or natural information carriers then drops out as entirely irrelevant; the representation producing side of the system had better pay undivided attention to the language of its consumer. The sign producer’s function will be to produce signs that are true as the consumer reads the language.54
I gave a similar argument against Dretskian accounts of information flow55 in The
Structure of Thinking, in which I argued that whether a creature intentionally connects the
sign to the feature signified is more significant for communication that whether the
feature actually is so connected, or not.56 There could be failures of intentional
connections on both consumer and producer sides of a representation, on a Dretskian
view. As I argued,
…[S]imple correlation on the mind-to-world side of the relationship is not strong enough to establish a semantic identity. For semantic identity the perceiver must be applying an attentive point of view to the object selected. …[O]n the world-to-mind side of the relationship…correlation will not do the job of seeing to it that the experience in question is of the thing. “Ofness”
53 Ruth Garrett Millikan, “Biosemantics,” in White Queen Psychology and other Essays for Alice, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993, p. 8654 ibid. p.8855Fred Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of Information, MIT Press, Cambridge MA 1981 56 Laura E. Weed, The Structure of Thinking, Imprint Academic, UK 2003,
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[requires] experiential impact, [not] mechanical transfer.57
This observation of a need for intentional identification for a language system to work
ties the functionality of a language back into the intentions of a self-system, from which
behaviorists, reductivists and Dennett were so keen to divorce languages. Indeed,
Millikan argues that evolution could not produce a language system in any other way.
She accuses the AI and causal philosophers of being committed to the efficacy of
language resulting from a “freak accident” rather than from a form of biological design in
which intentional actions are linked to behaviors to fulfill the intentions, all of which are
connected to desires, survival skills, and proliferation.58 Again, the dynamics of action-
intention sequences tied to an environment must inform language and its use as much as
they inform all other aspects of Panksepp’s SELF. Language may be a uniquely human
and clearly higher-level activity, featured at Varela’s 10 scale of retentional
consciousness. But it cannot have utterly lost its connections to its biological source. In
the next section I will say more about this source.
b) The embodied biological origins of language
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have argued that language originates in
embodied basic level concepts which “…use our perceptual, imagining and motor
systems to characterize our optimal functioning in everyday life.”59 These concepts are
originally expressions of basic bodily processes and movements, which emerged
evolutionarily as ‘primary metaphors,’ neurologically linked expressions that tie sensori-
motor and subjective domains together.60 Some of Lakoff and Johnson’s examples of
57 ibid. p. 5158 Biosemantics, p.9659 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, Basic Books, New York, NY, 1999, p. 55560 ibid.p.46-47
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neurally based metaphorical linkages that would form basic linguistic concepts are
“Happy is up”, “Important is big”, “Difficulty is burden” and “Help is support”61 These
metaphors occur cross-linguistically in many languages, and they are inevitable given the
way that language develops through evolution. Lakoff and Johnson explain as follows.
Our enormous metaphorical conceptual system is … built up by a process of neural selection. Certain neural connections between the activated source and target-domain networks are randomly established at first and then have their synaptic weights increased through their recurrent firing. The more times those connections are activated, the more the weights are increased, until permanent connections are forged. 62
Lakoff points out that these neural linkages result in the formation of primitive
categorization schemas that are found in most human languages. He lists the variety of
types of categorization schemas the research ( by Roach et. al.) has discovered;
--In the Conceptual system there are four types of cognitive models: propositional, image-schematic, metaphoric and metonymic. Propositional and image-schematic models characterize structure; metaphoric and metonymic models characterize mappings that make use of structural models.--Language is characterized by symbolic models, that is, models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system….--Cognitive models are embodied, either directly or indirectly by way of systematic links to embodied concepts. A concept is embodied when its content or other properties are motivated by bodily or social experience. This does not necessarily mean that the concept is predictable from the experience, but rather that it makes sense that it has the content (or other properties) it has, given the nature of the corresponding experience. Embodiment thus provides a non-arbitrary link between cognition and experiencei
Note that the link established through propositional, image-schematic, metaphoric and
metonymic categorization models are non-arbitrary, according to Lakoff. They depend
61 ibid. p. 50-51.62 Ibid. p. 57i
? George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987) 154
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very much on the underlying neural structures and the underlying experience. I would say
that these linkages depend essentially on Nishida Kitaro’s pure experience, and Francisco
Varela’ sense of nowness, as well. They form the linkages that connect Varela’s level 1
longitudinal phenomena to level 10 retentional phenomena.
So, to briefly summarize what I have said so far on the issue of the connection
between language and experience; not only can language not be an externally imposed
collection of memes that imposes a ‘narrative draft’ mind on an otherwise mindless
creature, autonomously of any experiences that the creature probably doesn’t have
anyway, but also language cannot develop without a neural and experiential base to
which it is essentially indexed. Evolution could only produce language in this way,
through experience. Without basic concepts there could be no narrative drafts, and
without the embodied connections through experience, through nowness, there could be
no basic concepts. I will now conclude this paper with a brief commentary on the reality
of phenomenal experience, both as it informs language, and as it exists ‘ineffably’ or
independently of language.
c) What it is like to be a language user?
Dennett has engaged in a long-standing debate with David Chalmers over Thomas
Nagel’s claim that there is something it is like to be a bat.63 The ‘something that it is like’
implies a sense of phenomenal presence, and Chalmers has followed Levine in claiming
that there is an explanatory gap between explanations of mental events in third person
scientific terms and explanations of the same events in first person experiential terms, as
the person (or bat!) experiencing the event would describe them.64 Dennett, for his part,
63 Thomas Nagel, “What is it like to be a bat?” The Philosophical Review, vol 83, 1974, pgs. 435-45064 The Conscious Mind, Oxford U Press, 1996, p. 47
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takes himself to have disqualified Chalmers’ qualia65 I can’t summarize the volume of
literature that has contributed to this debate, here, but I will briefly summarize what the
results of this paper are for this discussion.
If language is as strongly rooted in basic phenomenological experience as I have
argued in this paper, it follows that artificial languages, such as computer or logical
languages are, as John Searle argued,66 simulations of language, not the real thing.
Experience in biological creatures creates language, and not the other way around, as
Dennett would have us believe. Humans are not meme-collections, but meme-producers,
who can, if they are sufficiently disciplined in Buddhist or other centering and
detachment activities, quiet the noise of the memes. This is done, neurologically, through
a volitional retreat from operating at the normal 10 temporal scale of retentional
consciousness to operating at the more basic 1 scale of longitudinal consciousness. We
share the longitudinal consciousness with most animals, although the retentional level of
consciousness is more uniquely and characteristically human. We should not look for
consciousness exclusively in the uniquely human functions, however, because, as
Buddhists have long taught, the present is the only place where experience is available to
us. This sub-cognitive and sub-perceptual level of awareness is also the location
eudaimonic flow, in which subject and object are not distinguished, there is no grasping,
and happiness is possible. Far from being products of multiple drafts devised by cultural
memes, we are anatmans, relational beings that delude ourselves if we think we are the
substantial subjects of the stories we tell.
65 Consciousness Explained, chap 1266 John Searle, Minds, Brains, and Science, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1984
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So, yes, there is something it is like to be a language user. The phenomenal or
relational self is a center of activity that is aware of itself as an agent, and as an
experiencer. Computers, memes and narrative drafts do not have the right structure and
are not the right types of creatures to engage in the neurological and biochemical
activities that produce rhythms in cell assemblies that produce a sense of a specious
present. We share this ineffable sense of a SELF system with animals, but become
language users through emotional, cognitive and perceptual articulations of that
experience, that achieve much more than animals can in cerebral functioning. In the
process of using the higher-level retentional aspects of consciousness, we can loose sight
of their bearings in an evolutionarily deeper SELF system, but our happiness requires that
we reacquaint ourselves with the source. In a well-integrated person, narratives connect
the specious present to a retained past and a projected future, richly entwined with one
another through embodied metaphors, emotions, images, and concepts. And that’s what
it’s like to be a language user.
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