Mind

Science and Buddhism VIII: Conclusion

Science and Buddhism are distinct.  They have their own projects, they have their own attitudes.  I’d love to see them influencing each other in the future.  They agree in many ways — they are both trying to see clearly the way things connect together, what patterns there are in life and the world.  Scientists notice, like Buddhists, that nothing is fixed or isolated — everything is involved in a dance of mutual interaction. They agree with Buddhists that the so-called Self is a convenient fiction — there are just mental processes.  Scientists are very aware that perception is vulnerable to illusion and delusion, and that we need other ways to find out what’s going on, because our senses are not reliable.  And as for God, 200 years ago, the French astronomer Pierre Laplace said: ‘I have no need of that hypothesis’.  

Both Buddhism and science are aware of an enormous, vast universe, probably with many inhabited places at inconceivable distances from each other, but with the same laws applying everywhere.  Science also agrees with Buddhism that animals are basically like us, and that we can find animal drives pushing us along from deep within.  There are even some very mysterious parallels between Buddhist understandings and the way that science understands the whole of the cosmos, and quantum mechanics.

At its best, science is very cautious, taking nothing on trust, wanting everything to be checked in experience, and double checked by others as well.  I feel that Buddhism adopts the same approach.

I would love to see Buddhism having more influence here in the West, and to do so, I think it needs to take the West’s greatest achievement — science — very seriously.  It can ask Science for help: science can help the Buddhist project in its specialities — the first two niyaamas, the inorganic and the organic.  In the third order, the citta niyaama, the techniques of science can greatly contribute to the understanding of the mind. Buddhism has the project of alleviating suffering — science can help greatly with this, through medical and technological advances.

But I think that Buddhism can return the favour — it can help science in many ways.  Its global vision of reality can help provide a more effective philosophical standpoint for science; it has an experimental technique, as it were, for intuitively grasping the way that phenomena fit together. Thus through Buddhist wisdom the meaning and the significance of our experience can become more apparent.  We need that technique — contemplation of one’s experience within a quite space of meditation — to simplify the tangle of conditions, and to make them less misted over by our own hopes and fears and needs.  So I sense that Buddhism, neuroscience and psychology can work cooperatively together to gain a deeper sense of the way that the mind works.  Finally, Buddhism can help science through its realisation that the way that one lives — ethics — affects one’s ability to be realistic about one’s experience.  Science does not at present have a trustworthy source of ethics, and if scientists do not know how to be ethical, we cannot trust them to be basically benevolent.  I think that Buddhism can help with this.

Imagine how the Buddha might have responded if he had encountered modern science.  He might have said: “these scientists are suffering — they need the Dharma.  Their work is often undirected and clumsy, and gives rise to unforeseen sufferings, sometimes even deliberate sufferings.  Help them encounter the Dharma, help them see its relevance first to them, and then to their work”.

I think that the universes of science and Buddhism can merge — perhaps they will merge — in a more comprehensive worldview for the centuries to come — a worldview that draws on the creative geniuses of millions of men and women who have contributed to the cultures of the East and the West — but also a worldview that tackles conflict and poverty far more effectively than we seem to be doing at the moment. 

Image is Vairocana, from the Walters Art Museum

    Science and Buddhism II: Understanding One’s Mind

    Scientists themselves have increasingly seen the importance of ‘the observer’.  Science is for human beings, so it needs to understand what it is to be human, what self-awareness is, and what the range of human needs are (scientists tend to stop at the survival (medicine), and material (technology) needs.)  But above all because immediate experience is all we have!  All else is inferred, models, theories, assumptions, attempts at communication etc.

    So take mental processes seriously.  And take seriously the mental processes of others — there is a real possibility of empathy.  (Note how primitive Western philosophy and psychology can be here, without ‘contemplative’ disciplines.)

    Can consciousness be studied scientifically (i.e. objectively)?  Of course it can.  But one can miss what it actually is — and think that consciousness is a thing, rather than it being ‘actual awareness’ – a ‘light’ you and I are immersed in now, in a rolling present.  The structures that I use to make sense of the ‘contents’ of this illumination (which ‘I’ think of as partly inner, partly outer) can be studied.

    Real empathetic communication implies different people’s described worlds can be compared.  One can even construct highly simplified circumstances amenable to careful measurement (experimentation) as in brain imaging, and correlate measured variations with reported mental states, and with observable body responses or actions.

    Actual experience and the states of the brain act reciprocally upon one another, so that it is incoherent to say that brain states simply cause mental events.  Perception (says the Buddhist neuroscientist Francisco Varela) can be regarded as subsidiary to the mental function of imagination.  Perception refers to what is present, imagination to what is not present, and the two mix so that in every moment they are emerging into awareness from an unconscious background, as a living present. 

    It is still the case that the dominant view among neuroscientists is, in effect, that processes in the body cause the mind.  But neuroscientists such as Varela have shown that one’s state of mind can access local neural processes, so that neither can be reduced to the other.  The mental state corresponds to a particular neural state, and actively incorporates or discards any contemporary neural activity in the relevant brain region, evaluating many potential neural states, “until a single one is transiently stabilised and expressed behaviourally”[1].  Mental states (says Varela) require both a phenomenological and a biological account.  The neural elements and the global cognitive subject are co-determined; the subject is emergent, not just from the brain, but also from preceding mental states.  Buddhism extends this account by offering its pragmatic consequences, showing how the living present, with imagination active, is a means for human transformation. 

    [1] Varela and Depraz, in Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground, B. Alan Wallace (editor), Columbia University Press, New York, 2003. 213.  See also Varela, Thomson, and Rosch, The Embodied Mind (MIT press, 1993), 22.