KARMA, REBIRTH, AND MENTAL CAUSATION
By Christian Coseru
PART 2
Christian Coseru
Department of Philosophy
College of Charleston
Read in first
– Part 1
It is important to understand that mind as currently understood in the scientific
literature is, in Thompson’s own words, “an abstraction from, and hence
presupposes, our empathic cognition of each other.” Operating with a model of
the mind that departs from the standard cognitivist-computational model, Varela
and Thompson view mental processes as “embodied in the sensorimotor activity
of the organism and embedded in the environment.”14 This is what Varela and
Thompson refer to as the embodied and enactive model of the mind, a model
relying on the following three principles:
- “Embodiment. The mind is not located in the head, but is embodied in the
whole organism embedded in its environment. - Emergence. Embodied cognition is constituted by emergent and selforganized
processes that span and interconnect the brain, the body, and
the environment. - Self–Other Co-Determination. In social creatures, embodied cognition
emerges from the dynamic co-determination of self and other.”15
An embodied and embedded consciousness in which the patterns of codetermination
are operative at both ends raises the issue of causal powers from
the direction of conscious will. However, whether consciousness is regarded as
having causal powers or not, the most difficult problem remains that of
adequately specifying the criteria under which brain states can be interpreted as
aspects of cognitive processing. Apart from the difficulties inherent in any attempt
to close the explanatory gap, whether from the direction of experience or from
that of neuroscience, a naturalized account of consciousness and its pragmatic
efficacy is also confronted with what the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, quite
aptly, terms the “semantic amalgamation”.16 Ricoeur is inclined to adopt what he
calls a “semantic dualism,” which plays a useful heuristic function. He further
observes that “[t]he tendency to slip from a dualism of discourses to a dualism of
substances is encouraged by the fact that each field of study tends to define itself
in terms of what may be called a final referent.”17 This referent, which for
philosophers is the mind and for neuroscientists is the brain, is also in some way
defined “as the field itself is defined.” Ricoeur warns thus of the risks of collapsing
these two referents:
- It is therefore necessary to refrain from transforming a dualism of referents into a
dualism of substances. Prohibiting this elision of the semantic and the ontological
has the consequence that, on the phenomenological plane … the term mental is not equivalent to term immaterial in the sense of something noncorporeal. Quite
the opposite. Mental experience implies the corporeal, but in a sense that is
irreducible to the objective bodies studied by the natural sciences.18
I draw attention to this “semantic amalgamation” partly as a criticism of the usual
“the brain thinks” or the “amygdala feels” modes of discourse currently in use in
neuroscientific literature, and partly to emphasize the inherently linguistic nature
of knowledge representation in which both phenomenological and neuroscientific
accounts of cognition find their expression.
This is evident in the fact that the body, as the medium where lived experience
takes place, is part of the continuum of life, of what Husserl called the life-world
(Lebenswelt). In the Buddhist context, the problem of embodiment finds
expression in discussions concerning karma and rebirth. More specifically, for the
Buddhist philosophers the problem of embodiment is framed by the dispute over
the relationship between cognition and the body. This issue is addressed in
detail, for instance, in Dharmakīrti’s refutation of materialism in his dispute with
the Cārvāka philosopher Kambalāśvatara, where he defends a thesis that is
somewhat contrary to modern views of biological determinism:
- Nor are the senses, or the body together with the senses, the cause of cognition,
for] even when every single one of the senses is impaired, the mental cognition is
not impaired. But when the mental cognition is impaired, their (i.e., the senses’)
impairment is observed.19
The gist of Dharmakīrti’s argument here is that an impairment caused to any of
the senses does not impact on the overall cognitive capacities of an individual but
only on his ability to communicate his inner states via that sensory modality.
However, the reverse is not true, as any fundamental impairment to one’s mental
capacity renders the senses useless. This corresponds approximately to what
modern psychology calls agnosia, a state in which one is unable to recognize
and interpret objects, people, sounds, and smells, despite the fact that the
primary sense organs are intact. Ostensibly, Dharmakīrti’s argument in favor of
taking rebirth as axiomatic in the discussion of cognition (expanded at great
length by Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla in their own refutation of materialism in
the Tattvasaṃgraha) is simply an extension of his theoretical commitment to the
Yogācāra psychology and, indirectly, to the Buddhist principle of the momentary
nature of all phenomena. That this focus on cognition as a lived experience and
on the phenomenology of the present moment finds a distant echo in Husserl’s
phenomenology comes as no surprise, given the common premise on which both
Yogācāra and Phenomenology operate, namely the primacy of the moment as given in direct experience. This convergence in clearly illustrated by Dan
Lusthaus:
- We note as a point of interest that for both Husserl and Yogācāra the present
moment alone was real, and yet the present is never anything other than an
embodied history. Phenomenology reached history through the moment by an
innovative method of reflection on and description of that moment. Conversely,
Yogācāra arose out of a history, namely, Buddhist tradition that carried a karmic
theory of historical embodiment. The primacy of the moment was bequeathed to
them through that history; and they reinterpreted that history in the light of an
epistemology that, like Husserl, scrutinizes the structure of a moment of cognition
in order to recover its context and horizons. For both Husserl and Yogācāra
understanding involves a leap from the present as mere presence to embodied
history, to the uncovering and reworking of habitual sedimentations — and in the
case of Yogācāra, the ultimate elimination of habit (karma) altogether.20
Developments in the sciences of cognition in the past few decades have greatly
enhanced our understanding of the adaptive nature of human cognitive functions.
We now know for instance that the operation of our perceptual systems is
functional only within a certain register of experience. In addition, we have
learned that the richness of our perceived world is the result of top-down
interpretive and imagistic processes, responsible for fusing together in a coherent
manner the perceptual input. Some of the best evidence in this direction comes
from the analysis of perceptual illusions. Illusions are the result of stimuli that
operate “at the extremes of what our [perceptual] systems have evolved to
handle.”21
This idea that perceptual illusions are indicative of limits within our
sensory systems, despite our still incomplete knowledge of their underlying
mechanisms, is relatively new. Proposals by Herman and Mach in the nineteenth
century that illusions could have a neural basis traceable to lateral interactions
between cells in the visual cortex have been confirmed by recent research. It is
now commonly understood that beyond the retina, connectivity between
neighbouring neurons results in a complex pattern of excitation and inhibition,
which results in enhancing contrast between various regions in the visual field. It
seems thus that the visual system has evolved to respond to change rather than
constancy and while this is a beneficial adaptive function, in some peculiar
instances leads to illusory percepts.22
The lesson from research in perceptual illusions, is that perception is not a
passive relaying of input from the natural environment to the mind/brain but an
active process of selection and construction that serves a specific pragmatic function: survival in the natural world. Perception is active in the sense that the
senses give us an image of the world that is largely the result of adaptive
evolutionary changes hardwired in their dynamic structure. The world of sensory
experience is not the same as that described by physics but only a resultant
projection by the mind/brain based on selective processing of sensory input.
Thus the rich texture of our experience reveals not only our creative/synthesizing
capacities but also our ability to overwrite or at least withstand conditioning
factors in our environment. In addition, psychophysical studies seem to indicate
that it is mainly our ordinary perception, which makes the world appear
seamless. It also shows that perceptual objects as they appear are not entirely
independent of the functioning of our sensory systems. Perceptual illusions
appear as conflicting interpretations that fail to reconcile our assumptions about
the world, as it should normally be, to new psychophysical circumstances.
The co-dependence of various cognitive functions and their action oriented
embeddedness in the natural and social environments reflect a view of human
agency that is very much in tune with the notion of karma. Operating on the
assumption that human beings are inherently good, the Buddhist tradition is less
concerned with how the social and biological forces condition and constrain
human behavior and more with how, given this conditioning, it is possible to
attain freedom. On such a view it is precisely the pattern of co-dependent arising
of phenomena, including subjective states of consciousness, that holds the
promise for release. Knowledge of the pattern of causation at work in the
phenomenal world is of course not sufficient for an individual to follow a course of
action that will be morally beneficial. Disciplined practice is necessary to reverse
human habituation, where such habituation is not conducive to positive human
experiences.
Source Journal of Buddhist ethics
