גלות רוחנית : spiritual exile

The first monograph that considered the interaction between Buddhism and the new emerging cognitive paradigm was Shifting Worlds Changing Minds (Hayward 1987). Though the author admits that it is an account of his personal view rather than a fully blown academic research (p.3), it contains some pointers to where the dialogue between Buddhism and cognitive science goes. The main issue in the book is the examination of the relations between the observer-self and the observed world. It argues that both arise in the process of perception, and are dependent on each other. Hayward challenges the view that a detached mind somehow represents objective reality, and suggests a more dynamic model that is informed by both the Buddhist understanding of the mind-world coupling, and the available (to date) scientific evidence. By doing that he aims at contextualizing the relations between Buddhism and science within the breakaway from the Cartesian dualistic viewpoint.

As one may expect, much of the Buddhist perspective on the cognitive process is derived from the abhidharma – the Buddhist tradition of systematically analyzing reality into components and processes. However, at the very outset, Hayward presents substantial misconception about abhidharma: he understands the analysis to be directly derived from experience (p.57), not from philosophical considerations. The scholarly view, however, is that the content of the abhidharmas is based on philosophical speculations, rather than on meditative experiences (Gal 2003; Sharf 1995; Williams 1981; Williams & Tribe 2000). For example, the Buddhist interest in dharma analysis is not so much a scientific method that uncovered the non reality of the soul/self, but the other way around – it is a direct response to the preexisting Buddhist concern with the ontology of the soul/self (Williams & Tribe 2000 p.113). This misconception goes hand in hand with the view that “Buddhist mindfulness-awareness meditation” is a scientific tool for investigating experience (Hayward 1987 p.192-94). However this too is inaccurate, as can be seen from Hayward’s own argument. Comparing meditation to the work of the naturalist who impartially observes the animals in the field (p.192) reminds us that mere observations is perhaps the least practical and probably the most unsystematic scientific method existing. It surely has a place within science, especially when wishing to achieve higher ecological validity or develop an intuition about how things seem to work. But ecological validity compromises reliability. When, as in meditation, the ‘field’ is the very cognition that seems to observe, the issue becomes infinitely more complicated, and it is questionable whether getting reliable ‘results’ by mere observation is at all possible. In general, methods in science rely less on nature-gazing and more on control-testing of well defined refutable hypotheses (Popper 1959/1972). Meditation is surely not scientific in this sense.

Hayward’s enthusiasm for ‘scientific Buddhism’, which covers his view on Buddhist mindfulness meditation, echoes Jayatilleke’s outlook (p. 17 above). His arguments can be classified under the similarity/identity category, including the two apologetic variants identified by Payne: Buddhism already discovered what science knows today (Hayward 1987 p.68, 80, 90 105 & 08), and Buddhism, especially meditation, agrees with scientific methods (Hayward 1987 p.192-94).

Having said this, the contribution of Shifting Worlds Changing Minds to expanding the debate in cognitive science is valuable. It endeavors to show that mind in both cognitive science and Buddhism is not understood as a static mirror of nature, but as an active participant in shaping the perceived world. In cognitive science this idea is found even in representational approaches to cognition (i.e., Fodor in p.100), and more so in non-representational approaches that explicitly reject anything that remotely looks like homunculus or the ‘inner eye’ (Dennet and Haugeland in p.104-5). In Buddhism the same idea is expressed in the abhidharma analysis of the perceptual process into its momentary units that are combined in a causal sequence. The (wrong) idea of a stable and unchanging self emerges from this process, but each unit, as well as their coming together in the causal sequence, is devoid of selfhood (Hayward 1987 p.61 & 148-52). Hayward thus concludes that in cognitive science and in Buddhism perception is “an active process in which what we think of as the ’outside world‘ is, like the ’self‘, a conceptual, symbolic fabrication” (Hayward 1987 p.163).

The most interesting consequence of this analysis is that both ‘self’ and the ‘outside world’ cease to be seen as concrete entities. It challenges the tendency, found also in science, to think about reality in terms of concrete ‘things’ that somehow relate to each other (Hayward 1987 p.226-32). This of course is not new and Hayward refers to Whitehead, Flanagan and others who argued against the ‘thing thinking’. The image of reality made of ‘things’ is then replaced by an image of reality as interconnected patterns of energy, or dynamic systems.

However, at this point, Hayward makes an unexpected turn that counteracts his own project. He argues that because “patterns are observer-dependent” (p.245), their perception is “just a continual forming of guesses”, not true knowledge of reality (p.246 italics added). If this is the case, is the “pattern viewpoint” any better than the “thing view point”? The answer must be ‘no’ and indeed Hayward indicates that the purpose of his describing the alternatives was to show that alternatives existed, not that this particular alternative was the final truth (p.237). Nevertheless, the anxiety caused by realizing that reality is groundless –– that its ‘representation’ is cyclical and cannot be fully trusted –– is short lived. It terminates with introducing a controversial remedy of a (Tibetan) Buddhist make. The idea of primordial consciousness (Tibetan: rigpa) is called upon to save groundless reality, and provide a singular point of reference. This consciousness is the only thing that is not part of the appearances, but casts the light that allows appearances to appear (Hayward 1987 p.257).[1] The problem with this pseudo-solution is that primordial consciousness, by definition, cannot be found by the methods of “dualistic science” but is verifiable only through the method of meditation (p.260).

Despite its faults, the book spells out for the first time one direction that is relevant for this thesis, namely, the parallels between the Buddhist orientation to the current breakaway from the Cartesian conceptual framework. It works against the cognitivist idea that consciousness is emergent but useless phenomenon.