Realities

Reality is a slippery concept. I hesitate to even mention it. Science fiction author Philip K Dick said, "reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away". Reality is that which has the quality of being real. However, "real" is only ever defined circularly. Real is actual, existent, true: each of these words defines the others. The word comes from Latin res, but this word has an uncertain origin. I'm going to try to avoid scare quotes, but in fact if any words deserves them all the time, then real and reality do. 

This essay will look at reality by beginning with experiences that people would say are not real. This is also an awkward proposition. The unreal experience can seem to be real, can seem to be more real than real. Aren't we always in the position of the Zen master who could not tell if he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was a man? And what do I mean when I emphasise that an experience is real or unreal as opposed to saying that we have an experience of something that is real? Can we have real experiences of unreal objects? Or vice versa? With these questions in mind, let's begin with hallucinations!

Hallucinations. 

What is an hallucination? At first, in the early 16th century, the word just referred to a wandering mind. Only in 1830 did French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne Esquirol use it to refer to what until then might have been called "apparitions". An hallucination is, generally speaking, a perception arising in the absence of any external stimulus. But crucially what distinguishes an hallucination from a misperception or imagination is that we believe that the perception does arise from an external stimulus. By this definition, hallucinations are difficult to distinguish from dreams. The world we interact with in dreams does seem external to us. However, except for a few strange circumstances, which we'll mention below, dreams only occur while we are asleep. Hallucinations are waking experiences. It is of course possible to mistake one state for the other, but seldom for long. If one resists the "Guru Effect", the Zen master sounds confused rather than profound.

Hallucinations occur across all the sensory modes of the human sensorium, though visual and auditory hallucinations are by far the most common. Very often hallucinations take on a human form. When we see things that are not there, we often see faces (see also the phenomenon called pareidolia), or people; when we hear things we hear voices or music. Another common hallucination is to feel the presence of another person. Hallucinatory perceptions vary in their clarity and intensity. Some are merely vague feelings, such as an indefinable sense of dread before a migraine attack for example. Other hallucinations seem as real as reality, or in other words are indistinguishable from reality and there is nothing to alert us that we are not simply experiencing what is there. At other times hallucinations can be preternaturally vivid and hyper-real. We may see colours more vivid than any in reality, like a heavily saturated or "high dynamic range" photograph; or we may see colours which seem not to have any real world analogue (and after all Newton invented the colour indigo when he named the colours of the rainbow). The level of similarity to reality has a huge influence on how we interpret hallucinations, but before going further into this topic, we need to say something about the circumstances under which we have hallucinations.

Causes

Because of taboos surrounding hallucinations they tend to be under reported. In the infamous Rosenhan experiment several researchers presented themselves at psychiatric hospitals and said that they had heard a voice say to them "a resounding thud", but had not heard any voices since. They did not feign any other psychiatric symptoms. But all were diagnosed with a serious mental disorder, usually schizophrenia, prescribed antipsychotic medications and hospitalised for a period of some weeks. We fear being judged mad if we admit to perceiving things that aren't there, except under special circumstances that I will outline in due course.

Hallucinations may occur with sudden loss of sight or hearing. In Charles Bonnet Syndrome for example those who lose their sight hallucinate people that move around but do not interact with them. The hallucinations are compelling at first, but the sufferer usually realises quite quickly that they are not real. Phantom limb pain is an hallucination associated with loss of a limb and the felt sensations associated with it. Though some people born without limbs, due to birth defects, may also feel phantom limbs. Nor need the loss of sensory perception be organic. Spending time in a sensory deprivation chamber can also stimulate hallucinations. It is quite common to experience auditory hallucinations in anechoic chambers (spaces which do not reflect sound). Some types of meditation involve training the mind to withdraw attention from the senses and this may elicit the "visions" that some people have in concentrated states.

Many hallucinations are caused by an illness of some kind. People with Parkinson's Disease can have hallucinations associated with taking the medicine L-dopa. People who suffer from epilepsy can have a wide range of hallucinations. Migraine suffers regularly have distorted sense perception before the onset of headaches, and this very often involves so-called auras - lights in the visual field, often in characteristic zigzag patterns. Some however have more drastic symptoms. It is thought by some that Lewis Carroll suffered from migraine and some of the visionary aspects of his Alice in Wonderland stories are attributable to his hallucinations. People who have high fevers frequently hallucinate, as do those with extreme starvation or dehydration. The austerities pursued by various religious orders often involve extreme physical stress designed to bring on 'visions'. Other kinds of stress or shock can also result in hallucinations, from the intrusive memories of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder to the very commonly felt presence of a loved one after they die. One study of the latter suggested that 50% of people felt the physical presence of the deceased, sometimes for weeks after the death. Stressful situations, such as accidents or surgery, can cause the common hallucination of being outside one's body. The so-called out of body experience is quite well studied. Another common category of hallucinations is the near death experience. These are less well studied in the sense of the mechanisms involved, but many of the narrative interpretations have been collected and published.

The other most obvious source for hallucination is altered states. Many drugs produce hallucinations and there are instances of humans using hallucinogens throughout recorded history and evidence stretching back into pre-history. Excessive use of a drug like alcohol can produce hallucinations, when moderate doses do not. Similarly suddenly stopping some drugs after heavy use can cause hallucinations. However there are other ways to disrupt the brain. We've already mentioned fever for example. Nowadays magnetic or electrical stimulation  have are used to disrupt brain functioning, sometimes producing hallucinations. Meditation is another way to get into an altered state, and as we've mentioned many people have hallucinations while meditating.

A major source of hallucinations is associated with sleep. These occur when dream states blend into waking states. Sleep related hallucinations may be hypnagogic or hypnopompic. The former occur in the transition from wakefulness to sleep, while the latter occur when going from sleep to wakefulness, though the distinction seems mostly semantic. One of the most common hypnopompic hallucinations is associated with sleep paralysis. While in a dream state the body is usually prevented from moving by a reflex - presumably it evolved to stop us falling out of trees when we dreamed. This is reflex is relaxed in sleep walking. In a classic sleep paralysis "nightmare" one wakes, but is unable to move or speak. And one feels the presence of someone or some thing. Very often because of being unable to move this feeling is accompanied by fear or even panic as the presence seem malevolent. Other kinds of dream type imagery can invade the waking state as well, especially with prolonged sleep deprivation.

Clearly there is a lot of scope for hallucinating and it seems likely that everyone experiences hallucinations at one time or another, without any suggestion of psychosis or mental ill-health. How we interpret these experiences seems to depend on a complex mix of factors including culture, religion, and the specific circumstances.

Interpreting Hallucinations.

Clearly from the medical perspective some hallucinations have valuable diagnostic value. If I have the visual disturbances typical of migraine then my doctor can make the appropriate diagnosis and recommend I avoid those foods known to trigger migraines and take specific medications either to prevent or mitigate them. Hallucinations make help to locate a brain tumour by their specific content - visual hallucinations might be caused by a tumour in the visual centre for example. Similarly for seizures. Persistently hearing voices may be a sign of psychosis (though many people who hear voices are not psychotic). And so on.

But the medical interpretation has its limitation both in applicability and attractiveness. For those who are not ill, the significance of their hallucination may range from a trivial annoyance, right up to a revelation from God. When hallucinations are particularly vivid or accompanied by feelings of bliss or well-being this might be more easily understood in religious terms. Hallucinations can be interpreted as windows onto another reality. The other reality may in fact seem more real than reality (hallucinations may appear hyper-real). 

How we interpret an hallucination will depend to some extent on how we think our testimony will be received. If I tell a doctor I hallucinated voices, I will most likely be diagnosed with some psychopathology or physical illness. If I tell my Buddhist friends I had a vision of the Buddha, I'll be encouraged and perhaps celebrated (my Buddhist Teacher's visions are celebrated as evidence of his holiness by some of his disciples). On the other hand, the person who believes that God speaks to them or that they were abducted by aliens is frequently a figure of fun.

However, we run into problems when we interpret private experience as public reality. When we extrapolate from private experience to public ontology we almost inevitably go astray. 

Towards Definitions of Realities

What hallucinations and other misperceptions show is that definitions of reality that depend on individual perceptions are weak because an individual can easily be fooled into perceiving things are we would not consider real. This points to the need for definitions of reality that are based on commonality. Indeed there seem to be two approaches to defining reality.

The first approach we can call "consensus reality". The image accompanying this essay is of a small blue glass sphere I've owned for many years. Most people, unless they are trained to think differently, are naive Realists. If I was a naive Realist I would take the perception of my blue glass sphere on face value. I would take my experience for reality. This approximation turns out to be a workable rule of thumb. Reality must be not too different from how we perceive it to be, or we would be constantly banging into things, falling over and getting lost. And in fact most of the time we avoid obstacles, stay on our feet, and navigate to the supermarket and back home without much trouble. Clearly the match is not perfect because sometimes our perceptions do mislead us, but most of the time we do pretty well.  I can toss my glass sphere from hand to hand quite easily and accurately (if I had three I could juggle them). For most people being a naive Realist is no great disadvantage. Now, when a bunch of naive Realists get together, because their maps of the world are pretty accurate, they can get a high degree of consensus about what the world is like, at least on a physical level. This is what I would call "consensus reality". It's real in the sense that it provides an accurate model for navigating the world. I'm not a believer in absolute reality in any case, but this consensus reality is contingent and relative. 

Things get more complicated if we are talking about culture - economics and politics are quite difficult to get agreement on. Britons are about to have a general election. Clearly public opinion is deeply divided in Britain at the moment. The likelihood is that no one party will have a majority in the House of Commons. Thus arguments about policies take on an added verve. Should we continue to have austerity in preference to all other economic approaches? Does it ring true that the proponents of austerity are currently throwing out uncosted election bribes every day, all of which contradict their so-called long term economic plan? Is Labour a credible alternative for those who want to remove the Tories from power? Does the fact that the former left-wing party now espouses Neoliberal economic policy put off traditional voters, or has everyone bought the Neoliberal propaganda? Given that no party will have a majority, what shape will the government take? Generally speaking once humans are involved then things get messy. Reality in this sense is more difficult to define. 

A feature of consensus reality is that it can be parasitised by beliefs that are based on psychological imperatives. For example almost all humans believe in life after death, not because they see regularly see people coming back to life, but because it seems preferable to the alternative (on the basis of this belief, some people have gone looking for evidence, but they set the evidentiary bar pretty low and suffer from strong confirmation bias). That said, belief in an afterlife is not trivial. People kill and die for their version of the afterlife; they create oppressive living conditions for themselves and others to try to ensure a good afterlife. The necessity of suffering in life is something that falls out of the metaphors we use to define the matter/spirit dichotomy (see Metaphors and Materialism).

The contingency of consensus reality is what makes it unsatisfactory, especially in an age where empiricism has lent clarity and accuracy to other domains. 

The second approach I'll call "empirical reality". If we come back to the blue glass sphere I own, and we apply scepticism and close observation we can come to somewhat different conclusions to naive Realism. Close observation for example shows that the light source and spatial relationship with the object affect how we see it. In the photo the sphere is lit from behind by an LED torch against white background. The dynamics of the camera lens and sensor, not to mention the Instagram processing, also affect how the picture comes out. We start to realise that the way the sphere looks is partly due to physical properties that are not obvious. For example, careful experimentation would show that because the glass has a high lead content (it is heavy for it's size) gives it a high refractive index compared to other transparent objects and this gives it a distinctive appearance. We might also discover that doping the glass with a small amount of some salt of copper or cobalt gives it that deep blue colour. We might discover the though it feels smooth the surface is minutely textured. And so on. 

One of the most important features of this approach is that it relies on confirmation. An empiricist looks for repeatability before announcing their discovery. And it is only accepted by the wider community once it has been confirmed by other empiricists. This is why the announcing of one-off results to the news media is so irksome to serious scientists - it undermines the process and since one-offs often turn out to be anomalies, it casts unnecessary doubt on empiricism as a method. Careful empiricism is the most successful knowledge generating activity we've ever known. It has transformed our understanding of the world and our place in it, though often with unforeseen consequences. Empirical reality is also less liable to parasitisation by beliefs. Empiricism has antibodies for false beliefs. False beliefs do sometimes take hold, but the practitioners of empiricism are motivated in various ways to disprove current beliefs and so false beliefs get rooted out eventually. 

What empiricism shows us is that although consensus reality is OK to be getting on with, there is a deeper reality, or perhaps that a deeper understanding of reality is possible. And over some centuries what we discover is that reality seems to have many such layers. Naive Realism is accurate enough on the human scale. But at the nano level we can talk about atoms and molecules to give a much more accurate picture. Atomic theory allows us to manipulate materials and invent new ones with great precision. On the appropriate scale atoms are real, it's just that on much smaller scales or at energy levels sufficient to break the atom into its constituent parts we find that a more accurate description involves sub-atomic particles. At a deeper level these particles are made up from quarks. And beyond that we think in terms of fields, which may well be the smallest scale reality in our universe. Going in the other direct we find that we can describe the universe pretty well until we start dealing with very large masses or very high velocities, then we must use relativistic descriptions to predict how matter will behave. 

Compared to consensus reality we may call these deeper realities, "empirical realities". The plural must apply because at the appropriate scales of mass, energy and length, for all intents and purposes they are real. For example one could never observe a quark in a kilogram of matter, taking up 1000cm³ of space, at 20°C. Quarks don't really exist as separate entities under these conditions. To get any evidence of quarks at all we have to change these conditions by many orders of magnitude, i.e. to smash single protons together at close to the speed of light and observe the decay products. It may be that the Standard Model of physics is accurate enough for most purposes, but we know that it cannot hold at time = 0 in the universe because it implies infinities that are impossible. Those infinities tell us that something else is going on at the moment of the Big Bang, something we have yet to understand, though there are several plausible conjectures being explored at present. 

All Together Now.

So is there are ultimate reality? It may be that there is, but as far as I know we've not found it yet, nor any evidence for it. Reality depends to some extent who is looking, what they are looking for, and how they look. The idea that there is one reality and that all else is unreal is a dichotomy driven by theological legacies that I would trace back to monotheism. Monotheism creates all or nothing situations. Either you believe in the one god or you don't. Traditionally you are either for god or against; destined for heaven or for hell. It's a hermeneutic that pervades the minds of those whose cultures are now, or were until recently, in the grip of monotheistic religions.  

So is my blue glass sphere real? If I threw it at your head you would certainly know it. It's dense and heavy enough that it would probably injure you. Thrown hard it might well kill you. That suggests a certain level of reality. Several times I've sat it on a table and asked a group to describe it. I've found that they all agree that it has certain physical qualities (spherical, blue, cool to touch etc). If it wasn't real at some level, then how would a group of people agree on it's description? If the qualities were not intrinsic to the object then how could multiple sensing subjects perceive the same qualities? If the object itself was not coordinating the shared perception by having intrinsic properties, we'd have to invent some other entity or force to explain the coincidence of perceptions. And that other coordinator would never be as simple or plausible as a real object.

Common or shared perceptions are typically left out of arguments about reality, especially by Buddhists. Buddhists will go to extraordinary lengths to assert that everything is connected, but then argue about perception as though there is only one person in the world. This is similar to the simplifying assumptions that macro-economists make so that they can use micro-economic concepts like supply and demand. Macro-models of supply and demand literally make the assumption that there is only one consumer and one product, selling for one price. In any other field, except Buddhism or economics, a requirement for an assumption as gross as this to validate the model, would contrarily be seen as falsifying the model. But all of Buddhist psychology argues as though there is a single mind, having sensory experiences one at a time, without reference to other minds.

In the Yogācāra context we often get the example of disciples arguing over where the flag moves or the wind moves. In thinking about this we must remember that in India "wind" (vāyu) is the principle underlying all movement. The master tells the disciples, "it is your mind that moves". Which on face value sounds profound, but points to a form of unhelpful Idealism that often ties unwary Buddhists in metaphysical knots. In terms of how to do meditation this is fine. But Buddhists often take it to be statement of ontological truth. The more interesting observation, for my money, is that all the disciplines and the master are agreed that there was a flag. This simple fact is something Idealism struggles to explain. If it was the minds of disciples that were moving, then what was it made them all see a moving flag at the same time? If it was not the flag itself, then what was it?

Of course perception is something that happens in our brains. In reality we do not see a blue sphere or a waving flag. What happens is that streams of photons are refracted, reflected, selectively transmitted and absorbed, and arrive in the retina where they are absorbed by light-sensitive cells that send electro-chemical signals to the visual centres of the brain, where a process we don't presently understand interprets the signals as shapes and colours in the world.

By comparing notes on the same object we get information about our sensory apparatus. And by comparing notes on different objects perceived by the same subjects, we get information about objects. Empiricism from multiple points of view produces knowledge about the world that is independent of observers as well as knowledge about how the observers produce knowledge.

However, while we can gain knowledge of the world, we have to question whether reality, in the sense of ultimate reality, is even a useful concept. We can certainly argue that atoms are more fundamental than macro-scale objects and quarks are more fundamental than atoms and fields more fundamental than quarks. But so what? We cannot normally perceive other scales and what happens on those scales does not affect our day to day decision making. Quantum mechanics is frequently invoked in this context, but quantum effects can only be observed in extremely unnatural circumstances. I can get to the supermarket and buy a loaf of bread without ever consciously invoking QM. It is true that computers have now automated the supermarket side of things, but it all worked before computers.


In Practice

Buddhists are often quick to point out that this kind of discussion about reality has no impact on practice. I think this is short sighted. Clarifying some of these details is vital for practice. Because at the very least it helps to clarify the object of our meditation. For example many Buddhists seem to believe that through meditation they will gain insight into ultimate reality. But thinking about reality makes this seem very unlikely. Ultimate reality is clearly not going to be understood through an individual's experience, since our ability to know anything is strictly limited. In order to have knowledge of reality as posited by Buddhists we would need a reality detecting faculty which is neither the five physical senses nor the mind. No such faculty is ever postulated by Buddhists. Nor is it conceivable. When we go back to the early Buddhist texts, they seem to agree that reality is nothing to do with the Buddhist goal. Buddhists look at and gain insight into experience rather than reality. Thus there is no need to postulate a special sense faculty required for knowledge conducive to liberation. 

This distinction is important in focussing the mind of the meditator. If we are examining experience then that it a relatively straight-forward task, we have methods for doing so, and the process can be undertaken systematically and deliberately. However if what we are looking for is insight into the nature of reality then this cannot be undertaken systematically. Somehow reality will make itself known to us, we just have to rely on a kind of grace (I'm paraphrasing narratives I've heard my colleagues and others use). Seeking reality through meditation is a very different activity from seeking to understand experience. In fact as a passive process it can hardly be called an "activity" at all. Some schools of Buddhism completely excise the possibility of awakening-directed activity. One can only rely on external agents and forces in some forms of Pure Land Buddhism for example.

A classic example of the difference is to be found in my forthcoming article in the Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies (due out in May 2015) on the first sentence of the Heart Sutra. Conze, the "modern gnostic" as he styles himself, has Avalokiteśvara floating above the world engaged in mystical practices that by mystical powers afford him insight into the reality of the skandhas. In fact, and the Chinese and Tibetan versions bear this out, what Avalokiteśvara is doing in the Sanskrit manuscripts, is examining his experience using a skandha reflection and he sees that experience is not reality at all, that experience is contingent on reality and the mind overlapping. There is of course nothing new in this observation since it pervades early Buddhist texts as well. 

The trouble with the mystical approach is that it removes Buddhism from the human sphere. Only a few individuals will ever be blessed by insight. The rest just have to take it on faith. On the other hand, if insight arises from the deliberate and systematic examination of experience, then this is literally open to everyone. When we invoke the concept of the "nature of reality" in the Buddhism we cut most people off from the goal of liberation. And we confuse many people about what the practices are and do. So in my view this is a discussion we urgently need to have.

One thing one often hears, especially from Baby Boomers who had access to LSD in the 1960s and 1970s (when tabs were much stronger!) is that their experience of tripping opened doors to another reality, or affected how they viewed reality. The psychedelic experience can certainly be a compelling one. But let us think for a minute what is happening. LSD is thought to interact and interfere with brain systems that use the neurotransmitter serotonin (migraine also does this). It's not that suddenly a new reality external to the mind comes into existence or that we gain access to it. This is at best a metaphor. Changes in the way the brain processes information alter the way users experience of the world. The fact that the changes feel profound is simply one of the changes. If we interpret an experience as being "profound" then the profundity is simply another aspect of experience. The sense of profundity may be ascribed an intrinsic value over and above the experience which accompanied it. But we know that a sense of profundity can be switched on and off. People with depression, another phenomenon associated with serotonin, often have the sense that nothing has meaning, that nothing is beautiful. That everything is the opposite of profound.  So too with bliss and all the other aspects of religious or mystical experiences. The mystic is not in touch with, not in, another reality. They simply interpret experience differently and it is peculiar to them (and thus fits the definition of an hallucination). In fact Aldous Huxley was right to refer to the "doors of perception" which is one way the Buddhist texts refer to the senses (i.e. indriya-dvara).

Once I was talking to a Buddhist teacher about his experience of the breakdown of subject/object duality. For him this was a more profound experience than insight into the contingency of self. I pointed out our perceptual situation, that I was sitting facing the door and that he had his back to it. He had to admit that even with no sense of subject/object that his point of view was unchanged - he could not see the door without turning his head. Thus we have to take the "breakdown of subject/object duality" as a metaphor. It's tempting to say that his experience is subjective, but in Buddhist terms all experience is by definition both subjective and objective.

Metzinger's model of the first-person perspective has three target properties:

1. mineness - a sense of ownership, particularly over the body.
2. selfhood - the sense that "I am someone", and continuity through time.
3. centredness - the sense that "I am the centre of my own subjective self".

As Metzinger's own work shows it is possible to interrupt these target properties and thus disrupt the first-person perspective. Meditation can do this too. But the resulting experience is not more real. It sounds as though it can be more satisfying, though of course sometimes the disruption of the first person perspective can be devastating and debilitating. In part the narratives about reality in this context are attempts to valorise experiences. By referring to religious experiences as more real, we raise the value of the experience and the charisma of the person who experienced it. In other words this kind of discourse about reality is highly motivated.


Reality is Over-rated.

Many religieux, especially Buddhists, seem excited by the idea that science proves their religious beliefs. Though this is usually accompanied by an excited rejection of science that disproves religious beliefs. Quantum Mechanics is invoked all too frequently - I've dealt with this fallacy on two occasions: Buddhism and the Observer Effect in Quantum Mechanics (2014) and Erwin Schrödinger Didn't Have a Cat. It reinforces the idea that religieux are only interested in proving what they believe, and not in truth per se. Religieux believe they know the truth already and simply want confirmation that they are so knowledgeable. Even if we exclude the blatantly mystical and fantastic from Buddhism, which many Western Buddhists do as a matter of course, we still find our beliefs challenged by science and even more so by history. But in fact Buddhists have no special insights into reality, let alone the nature of reality. Most of what Buddhists believe runs counter to the best explanations we have of reality. However this seems to me to be because we take insights about personal experience and try to use them as ontological theories. Buddhists are pretty good on the subject of experience. Buddhist practices are still useful for exploring experience. Used judiciously Buddhist theories are useful for understanding experience. Reality is not at all as Buddhists describe it, except that it is changeable, but then as I've said elsewhere: Everything changes, but so what?

So it seems to me that "reality" is a concept with limited value. To some extent we do need to discuss what we can agree on and what we cannot. To some extent deeper concepts of reality enable engineers and scientists to work more efficiently. I don't need a very sophisticated concept of reality to jump on my bike and head down to the shop to buy a loaf of bread. Arguing about the inflated price of housing in the UK might take a more sophisticated version of reality, although this discussion is highly polarised because of the influence of ideologies. Making a modern computer requires a very precisely specified reality. But when it comes to religion, our ideas about reality become inflated and speculative. As far as Buddhism goes, speculation about reality seems to be a distraction, a hindrance. If we are to encourage everyone to explore their experience, which seems a laudable goal, then we need to reframe our narratives of what Buddhism is about and how it works to reflect this. 

~~oOo~~

Further reading:

'The brain treats real and imaginary objects in the same way'. Science Blog. 6 Mar 2015.

Sacks, Oliver. (2012) Hallucinations. Picador.

Cima, Rosie. 'How Culture Affects Hallucinations'. Priceonomics.com. 22 Apr 2015.

6 Jan 2015. For an interesting account of the self-induced hallucinations encountered in meditation, see:

Eveleth, Rose. (2014). The Ancient, Peaceful Art of Self-Generated Hallucination. Nautilus, 19 Mar. 

Do We Have Freewill?

In the latter half of the 20th century a series of pioneering experiments by Benjamin Libet, a neuroscientist at the University of California in San Francisco, demonstrated a rather startling phenomenon. Libet was able to show that a conscious decision to flex one's wrist was preceded by brain activity which prepared to make the movement. It appeared that we decide unconsciously to make the move, the brain prepares to send the signal to move, and only then do we become conscious of having made a decision. This experiment and others like it have been interpreted by many as showing that freewill is "an illusion". In this essay I explore this argument and outline an important counter-argument by Patricia S. Churchland, Professor Emerita of Philosophy at UC, San Diego. I also look briefly at the determinist argument that some physicists profess. Freewill is not a particularly interesting problem, but since a lot of people talk about it, this is my two cents worth.

Is My Unconscious Part of 'Me'?

The first assumption to look at in the claims based on Libet is the idea that unconscious mental activity is somehow excluded from the freewill debate, even though it occurs in the same brain. But if my unconscious mental activity is not 'mine' then whose is it? The conclusion seems to be that when a decision is made unconsciously, even though it is our brain that makes the decision, that the decision does not count as freewill. Churchland sees this as a manifestation of matter/spirit dualism that separates out reason as a function of spirit. As I explain in my essay on this metaphor, having associated reason with spirit (arguing that reason itself is the essence of being human) it is entailed in the metaphor to then see reason as  "good" and the unconscious as more closely related to matter and therefore "bad". Additionally, reason appears to be under our control and the unconscious is not. Indeed part of the power of the Libet results is that it shows that reason is not under "our" control at all. It begins to look like a byproduct or an afterthought. However the general view of reason is in desperate need of an overhaul. 

I've gone over this material many times now: Damasio and others have shown that all decisions involve weighting of information via emotional resonances. In making a decision we defer to our emotions and find reasons afterwards (See Facts and Feelings). The practical demonstration of this is found in the advertising industry which, since the 1920s and the interventions of Edward Bernays, has appealed to desires rather than to reason when selling products and ideas. Bernays was able to apply his uncle Sigmund Freud's ideas to changing views. Most famously he convinced women to break the social taboo on women smoking by linking cigarettes with suffragettes. He did this by paying debutantes to pose smoking cigarettes during a parade, and alerting the press so they published the pictures under headlines touting cancer-sticks as "torches of freedom" and thus doomed several generations of women to horrible deaths from cancer and emphysema. (See Culture Wars, or The Society Pages) Sometimes taboos are good! In addition I've repeated cited the argument by Mercier & Sperber that in fact individuals are terrible at reasoning (An Argumentative Theory of Reason). We almost always fall into bias or fallacy when trying to reason on our own. They argue that this is not the case in small groups where different ideas can be kicked around and the group reasons collectively. Small groups are much better at reasoning. 

So it appears that the idea that conscious reasoning is what defines humans is long past it's use-by date. Any theory which even implicitly relies on this definition of reason ought to be discounted. Human beings make use of a range of faculties, including emotions and unconscious processes to make all decisions. Nor is it true to say that sapience is restricted to humans. We have now documented self-awareness and tool making in a number of species. Somehow the antiquated idea about reason being our highest and defining faculty still seems to be invoked, but we ought to be very wary of this. 

What Kind of Free Will are we Talking About?

Patricia Churchland makes a very important distinction about who means what by "freewill". Most philosophers and many scientists use freewill as a shorthand for "contracausal freewill". This is the kind of freewill described by Immanuel Kant. Churchland says contracausal freewill means that:

"... your decisions are not caused by anything at all—not by your goals, emotions, motives, knowledge, or whatever. Somehow, according to this idea, your will (whatever that is) creates a decision by reason (whatever that is)." (2013: 179; emphasis in the original)

When some scientist says, on the basis of Libet, that we have no freewill, this is what they appear to mean. They are arguing that we have no contracausal freewill, because conscious reason comes into play late in the decision process. Apart from the fact that this definition of freewill is counterintuitive and seems unlikely to non-philosophers, we've already undermined some of the key assumptions involved in it. As discussed above, Churchland sees that entailed in this view is the idea of a non-physical soul. By disconnecting the decision making process from our bodily processes (like emotions) and assigning it to "pure" reason, those who use this definition seem to be subscribing to a matter/spirit dualism in which reason is a function of spirit not of body. 

The more commonsense variety of freewill is less well defined partly because, like many commonsense definitions, we use it efficiently without fussing over the meaning. To make us more comfortable with the fuzziness of the definition Churchland invokes George Lakoff's ideas about categories being defined by relatedness to a prototype. In this view freewill is not an all or nothing proposition, but some actions are more free than others. Some acts are more typical of freewill than others. And people are somewhat free to choose which actions most represent freedom, since categories are what we impose on experience to help organise it. Most people intuitively understand that sometimes we have more choice than others, or that sometimes people are compelled to chose one option even though in theory they have a choice. This recognition of degrees of freedom seems vital to any sensible theory of how we make choices, especially moral choices. 

Churchland argues that:

"...if contracausal choice is the intended meaning, the claim that free will in that sense is an illusion is only marginally interesting, Because nothing in the law, in child-rearing, or in everyday life depends in any significant way on the idea that free choice requires freedom from all causes." (184)

In other words the freewill that is being denied by philosophers is not very interesting because, being divorced from experience, it's hardly credible anyway. Churchland likens the claim that contracausal freewill is an illusion to announcing that alien abductions are not real. The response is, "So what?", "Who cares?" or "Duh!" Those who deny freewill on the basis of the Libet experiments are not saying anything interesting, though of course at first glance it appears to be a controversial thing to say so the media covers it and the meme gets spread. This whole section of the debate about freewill can safely be shelved with other legacy ideas from philosophy that are no longer relevant. The question is not "Are we free?", but "How free are we now and how free can we be?"


Self Control

Even if there is some doubt about what freewill means, Churchland argues that there is a related concept about which there can be no doubt: self-control. She points out that self-control, the over-riding of impulses to act, takes conscious effort. And in terms of morality, self-control is often just as significant as conscious choice. Morality is very frequently defined in terms of refraining from actions: "thou shalt not..." (in a Christian context) or "I choose to refrain from..." (in a Buddhist setting). Libertarian secularists often complain about religious morality as just being a bunch of rules, but it might be a natural consequence of self-control being a much clearer concept. And although our laws are profoundly influenced by religious models, there has been no significant move away from prohibitive rules even in secular (or nominally secular) countries. 

Most of being a good group member would appear to be inhibiting impulses that go against group norms. Any sociable animal must at times repress selfish impulses in order to benefit the group. Social animals for example prosper by sharing food sources in a way that solitary animals do not. Our motivation for exercising this impulse control vary: fear of reprisal, shame, habit, altruism, and generosity can all come into play. Or we may feel that the "law is an ass" or decide that a small breach of the rules will draw attention to a greater breach (civil disobedience to protest government corruption for example). In other words we can be negatively motivated or positively motivated to follow established norms or to break them.

My reading of Churchland's account of the freewill debate is that for the most part it is poorly framed and thus does not produce interesting results. The reasons for considering contracausal freewill to be the best definition are no longer plausible if they ever were. It serves to confirm that the freewill debate, such as it is, is not particularly interesting. 

Making Moral Judgements

This is not to say that the matter of voluntary actions is unimportant. Social groups operate with norms and rules and when enforcing those norms it's important to know why breaches happened. This is why most legal systems make distinctions of degree in crimes like murder. A murder than is planned months in advance is always seen as a worse crime than one committed in the heat of the moment. A calculated crime is relatively more serious than an impulsive one. This is because consciously breaking the rules is a clear repudiation of those rules. In this case we have serious doubts about the willingness of the person to return to lawfulness. Part of any calculation to commit a crime is usually elaborate planning to avoid detection and punishment. Even if the rule-breaker shows remorse, we have reason to distrust them in the future.

The crime of impulse however is more likely to be understood as a momentary lapse and to be treated more leniently if accompanied by suitable remorse and a willingness to admit fault. Those who plead guilty tend to get lighter punishments. However if someone is prone to repeated crimes of impulse then we tend to treat them like the person who does calculated crimes, because we cannot trust them to keep the rules.

If someone sets out to injure a person and that person inadvertently die then this is less serious than if the assailant intended kill. It might still be considered murder depending on how we judge the risk involved. An attack with a weapon is more likely to kill than a fist-fight for example. This situation can be seen in the light of calculation and impulse also. If someone is killed purely by accident, with no intent to harm, we may still be found culpable for depriving them of life, but the consequences may be still less severe. For example neglecting our duty of care while doing an inherently dangerous activity, like driving a car, is still quite a serious crime. But if we were proceeding with due care and a pedestrian crosses the street without looking causing them to be knocked down and killed then we are not culpable even those someone has died.

On the other hand if we kill someone in the process of defending ourselves or our property we may not be culpable at all as long as the force we used is judged to be proportionate to the threat we faced. Police officers and soldiers are seldom held to be culpable of murder when they kill someone in the line of duty, even though the community may feel they should be held accountable. This is extremely controversial, but in a culture where murder is fairly routine the enforcement of law comes with severe risk. It's unreasonable to expect police to risk their lives when apprehending a suspect. Soldiers are not given carte blanche to kill. Under the modern rules of war, they may not purposefully kill civilians for example, though this is not a universally recognised restriction especially in asymmetric war where one side is far more powerful than the other. Soldiers may not only kill enemy combatants, but will be rewarded for doing so. In the Vietnam War, efficiency guru Alain Enthoven used the "body count" as a measure of how well the war was going (he subsequently was brought in to reorganise the British health service by introducing the "target culture").

People can be found not-guilty of even the most serious crimes if they do not have the ability to understand the consequences of their actions - either permanently or temporarily. We often detain such people purely on safety grounds. In making judgements about the severity of breaches of social norms we have to take many degrees of intentionality and self-control into account.

Thus an all-or-nothing freewill is not a very helpful instrument in thinking about morality. Moral judgements can be very complex indeed and always take in the motivations and the underlying mental and emotional state of the perpetrator (and often the victim as well). Thus contracausal freewill is fully irrelevant to how our laws operate and to how common sense morality operates (as already pointed out by Churchland). 

As an aside, it is interesting that the baby boomer counter-culture seemed to be all about allowing one's impulses free reign. From "free love" to "greed is good", sections of the post-war generations felt the need to stop restraining themselves and let it all hang out (as the saying goes). As it turns out the backlash against this call for loosening of social restraints has been a far more significant social movement. Neolibertarianism was driven primarily by conservative business people. They wanted freedom from government control on their collective ability to do business, and conceived of this within strong social boundaries which restricted what was acceptable behaviour. The irony is that Neolibertarians are often authoritarian control freaks. They saw increasing liberalism and individualism as a threat to their way of life and took steps to take back control. Now, ironically, we struggle to pass laws to curb the excesses of those same business people even in the face of global economic instability and catastrophic climate change. We can now talk openly about sex, and women have a great deal more social equality, but the businessmen own a great deal more of the wealth and have virtual control over governments. The ideology of the world's leaders is that nothing ought to restrain the creation of profits and that abstract markets are more efficient than governments (though every empirical fact shows this to be untrue). Conservative elements in society still allow liberalism to make gains, such as same-sex marriage for example, but only where it has no consequences for the wealth of the wealthy. At the same time the threat of terrorism continues to eat away at civil liberties and individual freedoms. So the disinhibition of the 1960s is a pyrrhic victory.

The question of who is responsible for actions has become obscured to some extent by determinist scientists. The media has shown itself time and again to be highly irresponsible when reporting science. Media companies are in the business of entertainment and so news streams are only secondarily about informing us and are primarily about distraction and sensory stimulation. Scientists with a controversial message are more likely to get the oxygen of media attention than those with the more sober message. However there is still an argument about freewill based on the view that the universe is deterministic. We turn now to this argument.

Are We Deterministic Robots?

The view that being able to frame regularities in the universe in mathematical expressions, means that the universe is therefore deterministic is popular amongst physicists. In a deterministic system if we had perfect knowledge of the starting conditions, the elements, and rules, then we could perfectly describe the behaviour of the system indefinitely far into the future. This kind of Determinism was espoused, for example, by Stephen Hawking in his last book The Grand Design:

"so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion." (32)

Sean Carroll has also expressed the view that we're all machines that think. This argument is related to the one I was exploring with regard to the afterlife. Life is made up of atoms and we understand the behaviour of atoms, so we understand the basis upon which life exists, even if we don't quite understand all the processes of life yet. But whereas the claim about the afterlife was strictly limited to the persistence of information about the person after death as governed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics (Entropy always increases in a closed system), this claim about a deterministic universe is unlimited. The unlimited nature of the claim trips it up.

It is true that we understand the behaviour of atoms at the energy, mass and length scales relevant to living things. But we also have to take into account the nature of complex systems. Even when a complex system is made up of simple elements following simple rules, the behaviour of the system is nondeterministic: we cannot predict it. When a system is made up of complex elements which combine according to complex rules and we get emergent properties at several different levels at once, then that system is decidedly not deterministic. An economy or the weather are not deterministic, not predictable.

As far as life is concerned we don't have perfect knowledge of the starting conditions and nor can we ever gain such knowledge. As far as the universe as a whole this also appears to be true. We can conjecture, but not have perfect knowledge. In fact because of random quantum fluctuations in space-time we can never be entirely sure about the elements in play. And the rules are sufficiently complex that to date no one understands them with anything like perfect knowledge (something acknowledged by Hawking, who goes so far as to say that he doubts we'll ever have a unified set of equations for the universe). The mathematics describing a single sub-atomic particle interacting with all the known fields has yet to be solved: it involves 7 or 9 extra dimensions of space that themselves at so small that they add nothing to the dimensionality we experience.

We can demonstrate the problem by considering a simple pendulum and then adding complexity. A simple pendulum vibrates in two dimensions, with one end fixed. The behaviour of this pendulum follows a simple law: the period of the vibration for small amplitude (θ << 1) is approximated by:

Where L is the length of the pendulum and g is the acceleration due to gravity. In fact for longer amplitudes the equation is more precisely:

This is complicated, but in fact not difficult to solve to an arbitrary level of accuracy (the factors in the series quickly become vanishingly small). For most large clocks only one or two members of the series are required for sufficient accuracy in calculations.

Intuitively we might think that adding a joint to the pendulum halfway along it's length, in effect a pendulum attached to the end of another pendulum, would complicate matters, but not so much. But in fact a double pendulum's motion is chaotic. Technically if we precisely specify the starting conditions we can predict it's motion, but we can only calculate the next moment, by precisely knowing what has happened from time = 0. For each moment in time the calculation gets longer until it very quickly becomes too difficult a problem for all the computing power inherent in the universe. If we start at an arbitrary time we have almost no chance of calculating what will happen next. A double pendulum is still technically deterministic, because it is theoretically possible to know the starting conditions, the precise details of the system, and the rules that must be followed.

If we conceive of an atom as being connected to other atoms by forces, then a system with two atoms would be like a double pendulum with no fixed end and instead of vibrating in only two dimensions they vibrate in three. The motions of these two atoms are chaotic and far more difficult to predict than a simple double pendulum, i.e. far more difficult than virtually impossible.

Now consider than there are of the order of 10¹⁰⁰ atoms in the universe and all of them are connected via forces to each other. And we need to keep in mind that atoms, themselves are in fact systems of smaller particles which are again all interacting with all the other particles, and that fundamentally all that we see as particles and forces are simply vibrations of interacting fields that extend throughout the universe. Conceived of as a pendulum the overall motion of the universe is essentially infinitely complex. Even if we could precisely define the first moment in the history of the universe (something we cannot yet do), then by the second moment the vibrations in the various fields would be impossible to calculate. By the time particles appeared on the scene as an emergent property of the cooling universe, the system is already impossible to predict on the lowest scales. A system like this cannot be considered deterministic, even in theory.


What Kind of Ordered Universe Do We See?

So an obvious question then is, why do we see ordered behaviour at all? The order we see emerging from this 3D pendulum with 10¹⁰⁰ moving parts is because of emergent properties when looking at different scales. Order, or quasi-order, appears in chaotic systems. Think of a hurricane. From space it looks like a relatively regular spiral, or a circle, even though at ground-level it can be chaotic. Also the intensity of the forces involved follow inverse square laws, or inverse fourth-power laws. In theory all fields extend throughout the universe, but the effects of forces are typically short range. Gravity is the only force with a very long range and that is mainly because the masses involved in cosmological phenomena are unimaginably large.

The characteristic ordering (or quasi-ordering) we see depends on the scale we adopt. For example 1g of pure carbon contains about 6 x 10²³ atoms. In a previous essay I pointed out that if each atom was one millilitre in volume, that gram of carbon would fill the western Mediterranean Sea. The atoms are in motion, but the motions are many orders of magnitude smaller than a human eye can see. When we look at this many atoms, the tiny motions of each atom are cancelled out by other atoms doing the opposite. Each atom is regular in a number of ways: each carbon atom has six protons and six electrons, and either 6, 7, or 8 neutrons (giving ¹²C, ¹³C, and ¹⁴C), the chemistry of carbon is very predictable and the shape of its molecules known very precisely. But a diamond, a single gigantic molecule of carbon atoms, does not behave like an individual atom. Crystals are macro-structures that exhibit different kinds of regularities than atoms do. Sit two diamonds together and they do not interact, do not behave as a system at all. Carbon macro-molecules have very different properties to individual carbon atoms. A carbon atom is highly reactive and can form millions of compounds. Diamond by contrast is one of the most inert naturally occurring substances.

Steven Hawking wants us to believe that people are just complex machines. But this is not credible either. Perhaps at some absolute level of abstraction this is true, but not in any meaningful sense. The most complex machines we can make are still less complex than a single cell in our body. We are made from atoms, but millions of billions of billions of atoms, following complex rules; built up from another system of simpler components, also following complex rules, itself the visible manifestation of fields. We could not specify all the atoms of a person and predict what was going to happen next without first calculating every vibration in every field in the entire universe from the first moment in time. With all due respect, Hawking might be a good physicist, but he appears to be a poor philosopher. This may be why he also wrongly claims that philosophy is dead. There is nothing deterministic about a human being, which is why philosophy is very much alive (if not entirely well).

Nothing we know about the emergent properties of collections of Septillions of atoms rules out freewill as an emergent property. Nor are consciousness, or for that matter life itself, ruled out as properties of these unimaginably complex systems. We are very far from having plumbed the depths of the complexity of the universe, despite the fact that the elements and the rules governing the system are quite clear. An analogy here is the chess board. There are 32 pieces on 64 squares and the game has clearly defined rules. We can calculate the theoretical number of different games, and the best computers are better than the best humans, and yet not once has a recorded game ever been the same as a previously recorded game. The difference is that our game has 10¹⁰⁰ pieces!

So, Do We Have Freewill?

The answer to the freewill question appears to be the one that is ascribed to the Buddha in last week's sutta translation and commentary. We unquestionably have some choice And at the very least we exercise self-control. Perhaps this is why the Buddhist precepts are phrased in terms of refraining from actions? 

The arguments against freewill that have emerged recently in the scientific community are simply poor philosophy. As Mary Midgley (1979) has said:

"There is now no safer occupation than talking bad science to philosophers, except talking bad philosophy to scientists."

That so many scientists are poor philosophers is of course deeply unhelpful. Midgley had Richard Dawkins firmly in her sights in making this comment. She considered his metaphor of the "selfish gene" to be very poor philosophy indeed (as do I). To be fair Dawkins and his followers thought Midgley completely misunderstood what he was getting at. From my point of view, Dawkins' idea is just a Neolibertarian reading of Darwinism. That's not science, it's not even philosophy really; it's ideology. What's more Neolibertarianism is rooted in the Utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham, which is really rubbish philosophy since it fundamentally misunderstands human beings. Many of these behemoths of popular science are in fact quite poor at philosophy and have created a legacy of poor thinking—especially in the form of unsuitable metaphors—that will continue to haunt intellectuals for many years to come. 

In many ways this debate about freewill is simply silly. It's a legacy of theological debates that were silly to start with. In order to deny freewill one must make a choice. In order to argue against free will, one must make a sustained effort. It's simply not credible. Of course one can choose not to believe in freewill, but that argument is self-defeating. Anti-free will campaigners must argue that they are compelled to believe what they do. This leaves them trying to explain why not everyone is compelled to the same conclusion. If we are not free, then we are apparently not free in a variety of different and conflicting ways. The different conclusions are a powerful argument against determinism if ever there was one. 

~~oOo~~

Churchland, Patricia S. (2013) Touching A Nerve: The Self as Brain. W. W. Norton & Co. 

Midgley, Mary. (1979) 'Gene-juggling'. Philosophy. 54(210): 439-458.

See also:-

Metzinger, Thomas. (2013) "The myth of cognitive agency: subpersonal thinking as a cyclically recurring loss of mental autonomy." Frontiers of Psychology, 19 December 2013 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00931. http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00931/full

The Logic of Karma

Disputes about how karma works are almost as old as Buddhism itself. Some epic intellectual battles were fought over it in India. The one thing that everyone in ancient India agreed on, was that karma as it is presented in the Early Buddhist texts did not work. The first iterations of Buddhist karma are inconsistent and incoherent. With no scriptural authority it was up to sects or even individuals  to work out their own ideas. Sometimes the disputes became quite heated. Vaibhāṣika expert Saṅghabadhra refers to his opponent Vasubandhu as, "that man whose theories have the coherence of the cries of a mad deaf-mute in a fever-dream." (cited in Anacker 1972: 252)

Time has almost completely obliterated these disputes. We no longer talk about them because, in the tumult of medieval India following invasions by various foreign powers (notably including Huns and Persians), most of the opposing voices died out. Indeed, broadly speaking we now have just two competing Buddhist theories of karma: Theravāda and Yogācāra. Arguably the Yogācāra philosophers did actually win their dispute with Nāgārjuna, whose own theory of karma is recorded but seldom, if ever, mentioned. They did not win the argument with, for example, the Vaibhāṣikas (aka Sarvāstivādins). Those sects whose opponents died out did not feel the need to keep the disputes alive, even when they are recorded in Canonical texts like the Kathavatthu. So nowadays Buddhists present one or other Theory of Karma as a given. And no one really expects Theravādins and Mahāyānists to agree on anything except the lowest common denominator, so arguments between them are of little interest.  Since there is no real challenge to Buddhist ideas, the presentations of karma tend to the formulaic and simplistic. Although some sectarians are still hawks, most moderns are doves who overlook the historical divisions and focus on common ground (i.e. the lowest common denominator) in order to portray Buddhism as one big happy family. 

Buddhist morality is rooted in a single, powerful idea that is found almost all human cultures: the universe is moral (cf A Moral Universe?). However, the Moral Universe Theory (MUT) is constantly challenged by unfair experiences: good that is (seemingly) punished, or at best ignored; and evil that is (seemingly) rewarded or ignored. This is a huge problem for all people who believe in a MUT and stretched to breaking by the idea of an omniscient and omnipotent God. First and foremost the Theory of Karma is an attempt to explain the Buddhist MUT, to show how the universe can be moral and morally fair, despite the ubiquitous experience of unfairness. In order to make a MUT workable, most cultures have invoked a post-mortem reckoning, sometimes literally a tally of good and bad deeds, sometimes a weighing of the soul, sometimes the judgement of a moral god, and in the case of Buddhism the impersonal integrator of deeds, karma. Morality is generally seen in accounting terms (See also Moral Metaphors).

Theories of Karma argue that a karma, an action with moral significance, occurs when one has an intention (cetanā) and acts on it (Cf AN 6.63). The final result (vipāka) of karma is experienced primarily as renewed being after death (punarbhava), also known as rebirth; or secondarily as a sensation (vedanā). I've already written a number of essays on the difficult problem of connecting actions to final consequences across time, what I call the Problem of Action at a Temporal Distance. This is usually achieved by a series of intermediate moments of mental activity, citta, that condition each other. The series persists until the initial impulse has achieved its aim (punarbhava or vedanā) or until the momentum has been exhausted. Alternatively the karma produces a kind of potential citta, which has the quality of vasana 'abiding' and is likened to a seed (bīja) that lies dormant until it is appropriate for it to ripen. Variations on these themes are found. 

Buddhist theories of karma specify certain axioms:

1. mental activity can only happen one citta at a time, though each citta may be accompanied by a number of concomitant cetāsikas.
2. The present citta is conditioned by the immediately past citta, and is a condition for the subsequent citta. 
3. Cittas can be either kuśala, akuśala or avyākata (wholesome, unwholesome, indeterminate)
4. A kuśala citta cannot directly follow an akuśala citta and vice versa.

We can diagram these axioms like this (below). The diagram shows that the result is a highly linear, serial process, with no provision for branching or changing the nature of the sequence.

These axioms do not all derive from experience. Meditators report that in the rarefied mental activity of samādhi, mental events appear to occur one at a time, although what applies to an altered state of consciousness does not automatically apply to ordinary waking consciousness. And what presents itself to awareness is not the whole of our minds. The axioms about conditions and sequence, by contrast, are a priori abstract principles which reflect theories about how the mind ought to work, but which are opaque to experience. Like ancient Indian knowledge of human physiology, these early attempts at psychology have mainly historical interest. Here, however we will attempt to take Buddhist arguments on their own terms. We are not subjecting ancient knowledge to modern validity criteria in this essay (I will be doing so in the next essay). In this essay we will stipulate these axioms and work through the logical implications of them.

Explanations of karma are overwhelmingly presented in terms of a simplified model in which there is a single karma giving rise to a single stream of cittas and a single result.† It is assumed that the model will naturally scale up and remain valid, though as I will show below this assumption breaks down as soon as we consider more than one karma. Sometimes an allowance is made for the accumulation of karmas, but even then the model is presented in such a way as to imply that the process is simple. We will begin with the simplest case and see where it leads.

Let us say that karma_a produces citta_a1, and then, in series, citta_a2, citta_a3 up to citta_a(n), where 'n' can be any number. The final citta_a(n) in the sequence, at time n, can be understood in two ways. Firstly it might be just another of the same kind of citta as all the previous cittas and we can see it as exhausting the last of the momentum of the karma. Secondly it might be that citta_a1 up to citta_a(n-1) are just placeholders (vasana) with no real world effects and all of the consequences are bound up in the arising of citta_a(n) which delivers the full impact of the karma. We take this to be true, for example, for all those karmas which contribute to rebirth, but do not have other consequences. Variations on both options have been adopted by different schools and almost all explanations of karma adopt some variation on this model.

A Two Karma System.

Consider what happens if we perform karma_b and set off a new stream, citta_b, while the citta_a stream is still active. Here we are assuming that we can ignore all other mental activity for the sake of argument, though this would not be a valid assumption, we will address this below. If, according to axiom 1, we can only experience one citta at a time, then the a. and b. streams of cittas must find a way to share our minds. The most efficient way of doing this would be to alternate a1, b1, a2, b2... and so on. In this case, however, it would not be possible to argue that the stream of a cittas still forms an unbroken conditional sequence: citta_a2 is not longer a direct condition for citta_a3 because citta_b2 has intervened. Therefore the model violates axiom 2 and has already broken down. It is vital for karma theory that no other citta intervenes in the conditioned process or the continuity is lost. The Theory of Karma does not survive scaling up from one to two active karmas. 

© 2006 by Sidney Harris

We might propose that the mind has a way of keeping track of different streams so that alternating cittas is allowed. This is not a very good argument. First, because it is ad hoc, i.e.  an arbitrary adjustment in response to a problem rather than emerging naturally from the parameters of the model. Second, because it introduces a black-box to the process, i.e. a complex mechanism that we can not see or understand, but which magically produces the precise result we need to save our theory. The black-box amounts to "then a miracle occurs" in the cartoon. Unfortunately Buddhist philosophy, especially karma theory, is very reliant of ad hoc rules and black-box processes.

For the sake of argument let us accept this possibility that the mind somehow keeps track of streams of cittas from different karmas (keeping in mind that we have accepted an unlikely and weak argument). What if karma_a is kuśala and karma_b is akuśala? The result would be alternating kuśala and akuśala cittas, which is forbidden by axiom 4. The Theravādins considered this possibility and added an ad hoc rule that if a kuśala citta is in danger of being followed by an akuśala citta then a non-sensory resting-state (bhavaṅga) citta must intervene. Bhavaṅga cittas are avyākata. Unfortunately, as the Sarvāstivādins pointed out, this was not a solution to the problem because there's no more reason to accept that an avyākata citta can follow a kuśala citta, than to accept that an akuśala citta can. The axiom boils down to "like follows like" and thus the ad hoc interposition of bhavaṅga citta is not a solution, because avyākata is unlike either kuśala or akuśala. So even if the mind can keep track of cittas associated with different karmas, there is no way to accommodate axiom 4. But without axiom 4, karma becomes incoherent: results might end up being unlike their conditions.

The Sautrāntikas also saw this problem. Their solution was to propose that karmas did not produce active cittas until the final moment in time when the karma manifested its results. Until that point the effects of the karma existed only in potential form (vasana), like a seed (bīja). Just as a seed only germinates when there is warmth and water, karma only ripens when the conditions are right. This agricultural metaphor was enormously popular in ancient India and is invoked in all kinds of contexts. Here it amounts to an ad hoc, black-box rationalisation. It begs many questions, not least of which is, if the karma is a metaphorical seed, then what is the metaphorical granary in which it is stored? There is no existing category of process or entity which has this kind of function so yet another ad hoc addition must be made to the theory. Early Buddhism seems to have lacked the metaphor: THE MIND IS A CONTAINER. Early Buddhists also treated mental activity as an entirely transient (anitya) phenomenon, and had a well developed critique of any entity which was considered to persist beyond the existence of the conditions for its existence. There was nowhere to store karma.

The ideal of a "potential citta" is deeply problematic. How does it exist beyond the conditions which gave rise to it (specifically the karma)? How can it have no real-world effects and then at the last moment suddenly have a real world effect? How does it know when to become active? If an entity has no real world effects, how does the real world have effects on it to make it ripen? Many Buddhists were content to have an apposite metaphor, but a metaphor is not an explanation, and in this case the metaphor explains nothing.

The passive/active distinction ought, by extension of axiom 4, prevent one from producing the other because active and passive cittas must be different by nature (svabhāva, used in the earlier sense of defining characteristic). This problem is solved in some karma theories by the ad hoc addition of another kind of conditionality. This special form of conditionality allows a potential-type citta to give rise to an active-type citta (we experience the latter as vedanā, but not the former). In Theravāda theory there is a special ad hoc category of mental activity which occurs at only at the moment of death (cuticitta) and performs the black-box function of transmitting, instantaneously across any intervening space, all of the information about our active karma-processes to the being experiencing punarbahava, via another ad hoc category—relinking mental activity (paṭisandhicitta)—so that the baby is conceived and born in a realm appropriate to the actions of the deceased. Those who believed in an antarābhava argued that crossing space takes time, and described an interim between death and rebirth (I have discussed at length in previous essays). The antarābhava is one massive ad hoc black-box add-on to karma theory, whose main purpose was to explain how karma survives death.

Amongst those who did not go down the 'series of cittas' route of solving the problems associated with karma the most prominent are the Vaibhāṣikas. The Vaibhāṣikas earned their nickname, Sarvāstivāda, because they proposed that a dharma (a broader category that includes citta) caused by a karma, exists and is efficacious as a condition affecting both mind and body only in the present, but beyond the present it exists in a form that can only be perceived by the mind as a resultant citta (this axiom replaces axiom 2). Thus they argued (vāda) that dharmas always exist (sarva-asti), but are only sometimes effective. Arguments immediate sprang up about what was meant by "the present". Like the Sautrāntikas, the Sarvāstivādins have not solved the problem, they have only shunted it down the track a little. The sarva-asti-vāda does not explain how dharmas remain inactive for long periods of time until fruition. The most pertinent response came from Nāgārjuna, who complained that any dharma that did not cease when the conditions for it ceased violated the more fundamental principle of conditionality. In the formula imasmiṃ sati idaṃ hoti... imassa nirodhā idaṃ nirujjhati, when the condition ceases the effect must also cease. Thus anything caused by a karma that persists after the karma has ceased is tantamount to a permanently existing entity. It was presumably this logic that sent the Theravādins and others down the route of a series of cittas.

Nāgārjuna's own solution is that actor, karma, vipāka and sufferer are all just illusions: there are just flows of phenomena, and entities are like foam on water etc. On a relative level (saṃvṛti-satya) we see entities as existing, but at the ultimate level (paramārtha-satya) they do not exist (aka The Two truths). This highly abstract approach to karma satisfies many of the objections we've seen, but as Nāgārjuna's critics pointed out, on the basis of his own favourite text (Kātyāyana Sūtra), to argue that these things don't exist is no more appropriate than arguing that they always exist. Buddhaghosa agreed to some extent that no actor, but only actions could be found. What neither man managed to explain, was how morality made any sense whatever in an illusory world, filled with illusory 'beings', doing illusory actions, and reaping illusory consequences. Such a world is simply nonsensical and Nāgārjuna seems to have lost the argument over karma in pretty short order, so that despite the persistence of Madhyamaka sects into the present, most Mahāyāna Buddhists do not cite Nāgārjuna as an authority on karma, they cite Vasubandhu. 

Vasubandhu is responsible for the most famous of all ad hoc black-boxes in Buddhist, the 'storehouse' for storing karmic potential: the ālayavijñāna. Commentators seem to think that Vasubandhu himself, following his Sautrāntika inspirations, considered the ālayavijñāna as a metaphor, but apparently his successors hypostatised the metaphor and came to believe that it represented an entity. As an entity it breaks the fundamental Buddhist axiom disallowing permanent entities. Even as a metaphor it fails, precisely because it is ad hoc and a black box, and as such explains nothing. The ālayavijñāna comes to be associated with tathāgatagarbha, which quite openly equated with ātman in some late Buddhist texts. And thus some Buddhists simply capitulated to the need for an enduring entity to make sense of karma and the afterlife, despite the deep contradictions entailed. We've seen that such is also the case for arguments about the interim realm (antarābhava), mind-made bodies (manomayakāya) and gandharvas.


Multiple Karma Systems

However, so far we have only talked about a system of two citta streams. Consider that in each moment we are capable of forming an intention and acting. Theoretically we are capable of 1000s of karmas in an hour, 10's of 1000s in a day, and millions in a year. Of course not every action is karmic, and we don't produce karmas in every moment. Many moments are taken up with vipāka rather than karma. But potentially we can produce many millions of karmas across a life-time, most of which persist until our death when they exhaust themselves as conditions for a new being. It is very likely that an adult human will have millions of concurrent karma-initiated citta-streams operating at any given time.

In this diagram a new karma is successively added after the second moment of each citta stream. Each stream must continue to generate new cittas of the same kind in a connected stream, but in order that all the streams can be accommodated they occur in the mind in an arbitrary sequence. Because each citta is a condition for the next, it's less and less likely that the subsequent citta will be in the same stream and not a parallel stream. The sequence here is:

In order to work out the precedence and order of cittas demanded by this situation (which is forced on us by the axioms of karma) we would have to add more ad hoc rules, since there is no order inherent in the model (the order shown above is entirely arbitrary).

In a two citta system the time duration between cittas of the same stream doubles (on average). From citta_a1 to citta_a2 is on average two moments. For every new karma we add to the model, the time between two cittas of the same stream increases geometrically. If a million karmas were active, which is easily conceivable, then the average time between moments of the same citta-stream would be a million moments. Depending on how we count moments this might be as long as two weeks, and the chances of two cittas related to the same karma occurring in succession would one in a million. If there are two weeks and a 999,999 other cittas between two cittas of the same stream, then their relationship as conditioner/conditioned has become purely notional. And, as Nāgārjuna correctly points out, any delay might as well be forever, because it violates pratītyasamutpāda.

Imagine a mind in which millions streams of cittas were competing to manifest: the result would surely be random mental activity with no relation to what was happening in the present. The world would be utterly confusing, since very few of our cittas could possibly relate to present sense experience. Everything would be disjointed. It would be impossible to make sense of the world, or for the contents of our minds to consistently reflect the world around us. Or if the bulk of the cittas were inactive, then our minds would be blank for weeks on end as our minds churned through inactive cittas one at a time. However we look at this, there would be no way for a Buddhist Theory of Karma, operating on an appropriately human scale, to logically connect intentions, actions and consequences and the rationale for our morality would be lost.

Another problem is that now a citta is conditioned by two previous cittas on most occasions: one in order to allow karma to work, and one to ensure strict sequence is obeyed. This contradicts the axiom that only one citta can be active at a time. In the diagram above, at time moment 11, citta a4 arises on the condition of citta d1 (which is immediately previous in temporal sequence) and citta a3 (which is the most recent in the karma sequence), but the latter is now operating from three moments of time from the past. As time goes on the cittas associated with a particular karma must bridge more and more time: minutes, hours, days, weeks, perhaps years, perhaps life times. We've seen that the Sarvāstivādin solution was to allow this, but that Nāgārjuna pointed it out that it is tantamount to eternalism to allow a citta to exist beyond the moment when its conditions have ceased. There's no way to make past cittas be conditions for present cittas beyond the immediately preceding moment. And if we allow two cittas, then why not three, or arbitrary many? What is to stop karmas producing infinitely many results? Why would the experience of vipāka bring an end to the consequences of any given karma?

A way around this is a form of cummulative conditionality. The Theravāda Abhidhamma proposes that a citta is able to condition the next citta in 24 ways. Note that two pairs of the 24 conditions are identical, but have different names, which is a sure sign of the model being unsystematic and ad hoc. If we allow this, then it's not necessary to preserve the identity of the streams. The main objective of this scheme is to have a weighted average of karma active at the time of death, which acts as the main condition for one's next rebirth. This eliminates the problem of breaking axiom 1 (one citta at a time). On face value it explains how the information about our actions is carried forward and our rebirth is appropriate to our most recent lifetime of actions.

However this is a lossy process, because as soon as the moment is past, the link between consequence and action is lost: cummulation destroys information about individual karmas, just as a water drop loses its identity if it falls into the ocean. Although in some texts we are taught not to expect one-to-one correspondences between actions and consequences, in others there is a precise relation between them, and such correspondence is necessary especially for karma which ripens in this life. As above, we have to be able to logically connect actions and consequences in order to be moral. It must be completely obvious to anyone who looks, that being good leads to benefit and being evil leads to harm. For this to happen we must be able to identify the consequences of actions in this life. Else morality is simply an article of faith. This is the much misunderstood lesson of the Kālāma Sutta for example.

This version of karma certainly explains how karma can accumulate and affect rebirth, but it destroys the direct link between action and consequence. Only sums-over-time and averages count. Being good on average results in a good rebirth, and being bad on average results in a bad rebirth. This loss of connection also eliminates the possibility of karma ripening in this lifetime, unless it is as the immediately subsequent citta (instant karma). In terms of the metaphysics of karma, this is a workable solution. The loss of karma ripening in this lifetime is probably a good trade off for preserving karma more generally (especially at death/rebirth). However in terms of morality it opens the door to calculations and trade offs: I can kill this kitten and, as long as I make appropriate offerings to the monks, I can still come out ahead. Since traditionally Buddhists mostly aim at a better rebirth, they can now consciously do evil and as long as it is balanced out, not expect any painful consequences. Generally speaking Buddhist moralists like to emphasise that we are responsible for all of our actions, that all our actions count, and that all our actions ought to be good. So while workable, in fact this solution is a moral disaster. What's more it undercuts the idealism which fuels the intense practice necessary for liberation.

So when we scale karma models up they fail spectacularly, at multiple points, and across the board. None of the simple models that Buddhists offer as explanations for karma are able to achieve their stated goal. All subsequent attempts to rescue the Theory of Karma have failed. On its own terms karma does not work.


Conclusion

The axioms that Buddhists use to define and delimit the theory of karma mostly derive from of an ideological program rather than resulting from careful study of nature. These axioms force Buddhists into incoherent or self-contradictory positions on karma that can only be addressed by ad hoc extensions and black-box processes. Those that were traditionally added, brought new metaphysical problems and beyond a certain point these are not addressed by the Buddhist tradition.

Simplistic models of karma break down when we add real-world complexity. What holds for one karma does not hold for two, let alone for a realistic number. This is not just poor abstract philosophy. People base their actions and their life choices on these ideas. If the argument presented here is correct, then karma is a poor basis for decision making because it doesn't make sense and doesn't explain how morality works. Furthermore karma is at the heart of Buddhism. As I have shown in previous essays, where there was a conflict between karma and the highly esteemed idea of dependent-arising (pratītyasamutpāda) it was always the latter that was altered to preserve the functionality of karma. Karma is primary. Without karma Buddhism unravels.

From the beginning there were at least two karma stories. One in which everyone is responsible for their actions and through observation of action and consequence can learn to be a better person. The promised reward of good behaviour was esteem and happiness, both in this life and the next. This message was delivered through folk tales, especially in the form of stories of the past lives of the Buddha and his companions and family: the Jātakas. The second story sought to ethicise the afterlife, i.e. to make morality hold over multiple lifetimes, without breaking the axiom of impermanence. This story gave rise to increasingly sophisticated metaphysical speculation. The two were never successfully reconciled, and the metaphysics became a mess of ad hoc extensions and black-box processes that in practice end up obscuring the link between action and consequence.

Initially the problems stimulated debate and doctrinal innovations amongst different Buddhist sects (as we find ample evidence for in our literature). The records of the debates leave us with the impression of a rich diversity of opinion and a lively critical atmosphere. They also supply us with pre-formulated critiques of all the existing models of karma. However, it seems that the impetus for new and better explanations ran out before the problem was solved.

The old question was always, "Karma must work, but how does it work?" Now we find ourselves asking, "How can karma possibly work, and what happens if it doesn't work?" 

~~oOo~~

† This simplifying assumption of a single karma giving rise to a single stream of cittas and a single result is very similar to the simplifying assumption made by macro-economists trying to apply the micro-economic theory of supply and demand to a whole economy. They literally assume that the whole economy can be modelled by assuming a single product and a single consumer paying a single price. Clearly this is nothing like reality and as Prof Steve Keen has shown in his book Debunking Economics, this assumption has been repeatedly shown to be untenable. 

Bibliography

Anacker, Stefan. (1972) Vasubandhu's Karmasiddhiprakaraṇa and the problem of the highest meditations. Philosophy East and West. 22(3): 247-258.

Hayes, Richard P. (1989) Can Sense be Made of the Buddhist Theory of Karma. [Paper read at the Dept of Philosophy, Brock University]. http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes/karma_brock.pdf

Other observations are drawn from previous essays which can be found under the afterlife tab at the top of the page.