Experience and Reality

"Our relation to the world is not that of a thinker to an object of thought"

—Maurice Merleau Ponty. The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences.

Introduction

In this essay and some to follow, I want to look an an error that many philosophers and most meditators seem to make: the confusion of epistemology and ontology; i.e., the mixing up of experience and reality. This essay will outline and give examples of a specific version of this confusion in the form of the mind projection fallacy.

I agree with those intellectuals who think that we do not ever experience reality directly. This is where I part ways with John Searle who, for reasons I cannot fathom, advocates naïve realism, the view that reality is exactly as we experience it. On the other hand, I also disagree with Bryan Magee that reality is utterly different from what we experience and we can never get accurate and precise knowledge about it. He takes this view to be a consequence of transcendental idealism, but I think it's a form of naïve idealism.

The knowledge we get via inference is not complete, but we can, and do, infer accurate and precise information about objects. This makes a mind-independent reality seem entirely plausible and far more probable than any of the alternatives. So, we are in a situation somewhere between naïve realism and naïve idealism. 

This distinction between a mind-independent reality and the mind is not ontological, but epistemological. The set of reality includes all minds. However, the universe would exist, even if there were no beings to witness is. The universe is not dependent on having conscious observers. So by "reality" I just mean the universe generally; i.e., the universe made up from real matter-energy fields arranged into real structures that have emergent properties, one of which is conscious states. And by "mind" I specifically mean the series of conscious states that inform human beings about the universe. 

What I don't mean is reality in the abstract. I'm deeply suspicious of abstractions at present. For the same reason, I avoid talking about conscious states in the abstract as "consciousness". Things can be real without there necessarily being an abstract reality. Reality is the set of all those things to which the adjective "real" applies. Things are real if they exist and have causal potential. Members of this set may have no other attributes in common. Unfortunately, an abstract conception of reality encourages us to speculate about the "nature of reality", as though reality were something more than  a collection of real things, more than an abstraction. Being real is not magical or mystical.

I'm not making an ontological distinction between mental and physical phenomena. I think an epistemological distinction can be made because, clearly, our experience of our own minds has a different perspective to our experience of objects external to our body, but in the universe there are just phenomena. This is a distinct position from materialism, which privileges the material over the mental. What I'm saying is that what we perceive as "material" and "mental" are not different at the level of being.  

When we play the game of metaphysics and make statements about reality, they arise from inferences about experience. There are three main approaches to this process:

• we begin with givens and use deduction to infer valid conclusions.
• we begin with known examples and use induction to infer valid generalisations.
• we begin with observations and use abductions to infer valid explanations.

We can and do make valid inferences about the universe from experience. The problem has always been that we make many invalid inferences as well. And we cannot always reliably tell valid from invalid.

For example, we know that if you submerge a person in water they will drown. That tells us something about reality. However, for a quite a long time, Europeans believed that certain women were in league with the devil. They believed that witches could not be drowned. So they drowned a lot of women to prove they were not witches; and burned the ones who didn't drown. The central problem here being that witches, as understood by the witch-hunters, did not exist. The actions of some women were interpreted through an hysterical combination of fear of evil and fear of women, and from this witches were inferred to be real. It was a repulsive and horrifying period of our history in which reasoning went awry. But it was reasoning. And it was hardly an isolated incident. Reasoning very often goes wrong. Still. And that ought to make us very much more cautious about reasoning than most of us are.

One of the attractions of the European Enlightenment is that it promised that reason would free us from the oppression of superstition. This has happened to some extent, but superstition is still widespread. Confusions about how reason actually works are only now being unravelled. And this meant that the early claims of the Enlightenment were vastly overblown. If our views about the universe are formed by reasoning, then we have to assume that we're wrong most of the time, unless we have thoroughly reviewed both our view and our methods, and compared notes with others in an atmosphere of critical thinking, which combines competition and cooperation. The latter is science at its best, though admittedly scientists are not always at their best. 

Into this mix comes Buddhism with its largely medieval worldview, modified by strands of modernism. Buddhists often claim to understand the "true nature of reality"; aka The Absolute, The Transcendental, The Dhamma-niyāma, śūnyatā, tathatā,  pāramārthasatya, prajñāpāramitā, nirvāṇa, vimokṣa, and so on. Reality always seems to boil down to a one word answer. And this insight into "reality" is realised by sitting still with one's eyes closed and withdrawing attention from the sensorium in order to experience nothing. Or by imagining that one is a supernatural being in the form of an Indian princess, or a tame demon, or an idealised Buddhist monk, etc. Or any number of other approaches that have in common that seem to take the approach of trying to develop a kind of meta-awareness of our experience.To experience ourselves experiencing.

It's very common to interpret experience incorrectly. As we know the lists of identified cognitive biases and logical fallacies, which each have over one hundred items. From these many problems I want to highlight one. When we make inferences about reality we are biased towards seeing our conclusions, generalisations, and explanations as valid, and to believing that our interpretation is the only valid interpretation. This is the mind projection fallacy.

The Sunset Illusion

An excellent illustrative example of the mind projection fallacy is the sunset. If I stand on a hill and watch the sunset, it seems to me that the the hill and I are fixed in place and the sun is moving relative to me and the hill. Hence, we say "the sun is setting". In fact, we're known for centuries that the sun is not moving relative to the earth, but instead the hill and I are pivoting away on an axis that goes through the centre of the earth. So why do we persist in talking about sunsets?

The problem is that I have internal sensors that tell me when I'm experiencing acceleration: proprioception (sensing muscle/tendon tension) kinaesthesia (sensing joint motion and acceleration) and the inner-ear's vestibular system (orientation to gravity and acceleration). I can also use my visual sense to detect whether I am in motion relative to nearby objects. A secondary way of detecting acceleration is the sloshing around of our viscera creating pressure against the inside of our body.

My brain integrates all this information to give me accurate and precise knowledge about whether my body is in motion. And standing on a hill, watching a sunset, my body is informing me, quite unequivocally, that I am at rest.

I'm actually spinning around the earth's axis of rotation at ca. 1600 km/h or about 460 m/s. That's about Mach 1.5! And because velocity is a vector (it has both magnitude and direction) moving in a circle at a uniform speed is acceleration, because one is constantly changing direction. So why does it not register on our senses? After all, being on a roundabout rapidly makes me dizzy and ill; a high speed turn in a vehicle throws me against the door. It turns out that the acceleration due to going moderately fast in very large circle, is tiny. So small that it doesn't register on any of our onboard motion sensors. The spinning motion does register in the atmosphere and oceans where it creates the Coriolis effect.

Everyone watching a sunset experiences themselves at rest and the sun moving. It is true, but counterintuitive, to suggest that the sun is not moving. Let's call this the sunset illusion.

I'm not sure where it comes from, but in the Triratna Order we often cite four authorities for believing some testimony: it makes sense (reason), it feels right (emotion), it accords with experience (memory), and it accords with the testimony of the wise. Before about 1650, seeing ourselves as stationary and the sun and moving, made sense, it felt right, it accorded with experience, and it accorded with the testimony of the wise. The first hint that the sunset illusion is an illusion came when Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter in January 1610.

Even knowing, as I do, that the sunset illusion is an illusion, doesn't change how it seems to me because my motion senses are unanimously telling me I'm at rest. This is important because it tells us that this is not a trivial or superficial mistake. It's not because I am too stupid to understand the situation. I know the truth and have known for decades. But I also trust my senses because I have no choice but to trust them.

The sunset illusion is sometimes presented as a 50:50 proposition, like one of those famous optical illusions where whether we see a rabbit or a duck depends on where we focus. The assertion is that we might just as easily see the sun as still and us moving. This is erroneous. Proprioception, kinesthesia, the vestibular organ, and sight make it a virtual certainty that we experience ourselves at rest and conclude that the sun moving. It takes a combination of careful observation of the visible planets and an excellent understanding of geometry to upset the earth-centric universe. If some ancient cultures got this right, it was a fluke.

The sunset illusion exposes an important truth about how all of us understand the world based on experience. Experience and reality can be at odds.

And note that we are not being irrational when we continue to refer to the sun "setting". Given our sensorium, it is rational to think of ourselves at rest and the sun moving. It's only in a much bigger, non-experiential framework that the concept becomes irrational. For most of us, the facts of cosmology are abstract; i.e., they exist as concepts divorced from experience. Evolution has predisposed us to trust experience above abstract facts.

Mind Projection Fallacy

The name of this fallacy was coined by physicist and philosopher E.T. Jaynes (1989). He defined it like this:

One asserts that the creations of [their] own imagination are real properties of Nature, and thus, in effect, projects [their] own thoughts out onto Nature. (1989: 2)

I think it's probably more accurately described as a cognitive bias, but "fallacy" is the standard term. Also, instead of imagination, I would argue that we should say "interpretation". The problem is not so much that we imagine things and pretend they are real, though this does happen, but that we have experiences and interpret them as relating directly to reality (naïve realism).

The sunset illusion tells us that reality is not always as we experience it. 

We all make mistakes, particularly these kinds of cognitive mistakes. We actually evolved in such a way as to make these kinds of mistakes inevitable. However, reading up on cognitive bias, I was struck by how some of the authors slanted their presentation of the material to belittle people. I don't think this is helpful. Our minds are honed by evolution for survival a particular kind of environment, but almost none of us live in that environment any more. So if we are error-prone, it is because our skill-set is not optimised for the lifestyles we've chosen to live. 

This fallacy can occur in a positive and a negative sense, so that it can be stated in two different ways:

1. My interpretation of experience → real property of nature
2. My own ignorance → nature is indeterminate

David Chapman has pointed out that there has been considerable criticism of Jaynes' approach in the article I'm citing and has summarised why. He suggests, ironically, that Jaynes suffered from the second kind of mind projection fallacy when it came to logic and probability. But the details of that argument about logic and probability are not relevant to the issue I'm addressing in this essay. It's the fallacy or bias that concerns us here. 

Interpreting Experience

A problem like the sunset illusion emerges when we make inferences about reality based on interpreting our experience. For example, when we make deductions from experience to reality, they invariably reflect the content of our presuppositions about reality. For example, a given for most of us is "I always know when I am moving". In the sunset illusion, I know I am at rest because motions sensors and vision confirm that it is so. The experience is conclusive: it must be the sun must be moving. My understanding of how the universe works and my understanding of my own situation as regards movement are givens in this case. We don't consciously reference them, but they predetermine the outcome of deductive reasoning. This means the deduction is of very limited use to the individual thinking about reality.

If I watch a dozen sunsets and they all have this same character, then I can generalise from this (inductive reasoning) that the sun regularly rises, travels in an (apparent) arc across the sky and sets. All the while, I am not moving relative to earth. What's more, I've experienced dozens of earthquakes in my lifetime, so I also know what it is like when the earth does move! From my experiential perspective, the earth does not move, but the sun does move. Given our experience of the situation, this is the most likely explanation (abductive reasoning).

So here we see that a perfectly logical set of conclusions, generalisations, and explanations follow from interpreting experience, which are, nonetheless, completely wrong. I am not at rest, but moving at Mach 1.5. The earth is not at rest. The sun is at the centre of our orbit around it, but it also is moving very rapidly around the centre of the galaxy. Our galaxy is accelerating away from all other galaxies. The error occurs because our senses evolved to help us navigate through woodlands, in and out of trees, and swimming in water. And we're pretty good at this. When it comes to inferring knowledge about the cosmos, human senses are the wrong tool to start with!

A common experience for Buddhists is to have a vision of a Buddha during meditation. And it is common enough for that vision to be taken as proof that Buddhas exist. But think about it. A person is sitting alone in a suburban room, their eyes are closed, their attention withdrawn from the world of the senses, they've attenuated their sense experience to focus on just one sensation and have focussed their attention on it. They undergo a self-imposed sensory deprivation. They've also spent a few years intensively reading books on Buddhism, looking at Buddhist art, thinking about Buddhas, and discussing Buddhas with other Buddhists. We know that sensory deprivation causes hallucinations. And someone saturated in the imagery of Buddha is more likely to hallucinate a Buddha. This is no surprise. But does it really tell us that Buddhas exist independently of our minds, or does it just tell us that in situations of sensory deprivation Buddhists hallucinate Buddhas? 

The Buddhist who has the hallucination feels that this is a sign; it feels important, meaningful, and perhaps even numinous (in the sense that they felt they were in the presence of some otherworldly puissance). They are immersed in Buddhist rhetoric and imagery, as are all of their friends. As I have observed before, hallucinations are stigmatised, whereas visions are valorised. So if you see something that no one else sees, then your social milieu and your social intelligence will dictate how you interpret and present the experience. If you mention to your comrades in religion that you saw a Buddha in your meditation, you are likely to get a pat on the back and congratulations. It will be judged an auspicious sign. And all those people who haven't had "visions" will be quietly envious. If you mention it to your physician, they may well become concerned that you have suffered a psychotic episode. On the other hand, in practice, psychotic episodes are rather terrifying and chaotic, and not all hallucinations are the result of psychosis. 

Not only do we have the problem of our own reasoning leading us to erroneous inferences, we have social mechanisms to reinforce particular interpretations of experience, especially in the case of our religiously inspired inferences. Our individual experience is geared towards a social reality. One of the faults of humans thinking about reality is to think that reality somehow reflects our social world. A common example is the nature of heaven. Many cultures see heaven as an idealised form of their own social customs, usually with the slant towards male experiences and narratives. Medieval Chinese intellectuals saw heaven as an idealised Confucian bureaucracy, for example. If we take Christian art as any indication, then Heaven is an all male club. The just-world fallacy probably comes about because we expect the world to conform to our social norms in which each member is responsive to the others in a hierarchy where normative behaviour is rewarded and transgressive behaviour is punished.

So, given the way our senses work, given the pitfalls of cognitive bias and logical fallacies, given the pressure to conform to social norms, the mind projection fallacy can operate freely. As we know, challenging the established order can be difficult to the point of being fatal. And understanding the power of something like the sunset illusion is important. Facts don't necessarily break the spell. Yes, we know the earth orbits the sun. But standing on a hill watching the sunset, that is just not how we experience it (our proprioception and vision tell us a different story that we find more intuitive and credible, even though it is wrong). And this applies to a very wide range of situations where we are reasoning from experience to reality.

If I Don't Understand It...

The second form of this fallacy was rampant in 19th century scholarship. In the first form, one erroneously concludes that one understands something and projects private experience as public reality. Mistaking the sunset as resulting from the movement of the sun, because our bodies tell us that we are at rest. This leads to false claims about reality.

In the second case there is also a false claim about reality, but in this case it emerges from a failure to understand and the assumption that this is because the experience or feature of reality cannot be understood. This is a problem which is particularly acute for intellectuals. Intellectuals are often over‑confident about their ability to understand everything. These days it is less plausible, but 150 years ago it was plausible for one intellectual to be well informed about more or less every field of human knowledge. So, if such an intellectual comes across something they don't understand, then they deduce that it cannot be understood by anyone. 

A common assertion, for example, is that we will never understand consciousness from a third person perspective (leaving aside the problematic abstraction for a moment). Very often such theories are rooted in an ontological mind/body dualism, which may or may not be acknowledged. Many Buddhists who are interested in the philosophy of mind, for example, cannot imagine that we will ever understand conscious states through scientific methods. They argue that no amount of research will ever help us understand. So they don't follow research into the mind and don't see any progress in this area. On the other hand, they hold that through mediation we do come to understand conscious states and the nature of them. Many go far beyond this and claim that we will gain knowledge of reality, in the sense of a transcendent ideal reality that underlies the apparent reality that our senses inform us about. In other words, meditation takes us beyond phenomena to noumena. 

Another common argument is that scientists don't understand 95% of the world because they don't understand dark matter and dark energy. People take this to mean that scientists don't understand 95% of what goes on here on earth. But this is simply not true. Scale is important, and being ignorant at one scale (the scale that effects galaxies and larger structures) does not mean that we don't understand plate tectonics, the water cycle, or cell metabolism, at least in principle. The popular view of science often seem to point towards a caricature that owes more to the 19th century than the 21st. Criticism of science often goes along with an anti-science orientation and very little education in the sciences. 

The basic confusion in both cases is mistaking what seem obvious to us, for what must be the case for everyone else, either positively or negatively. 

The Confusion

"It's not that one gains insight into reality, but that one stops mistaking one's experience for reality"

The basic problem here is a confusion between what we know about the world (epistemology) with what the world is (ontology). In short, we mistake experience for reality. And this problem is very widespread amongst intellectuals in many fields.

The problem can be very subtle. Another illuminating example is the idea that sugar is sweet. We might feel that a statement like "sugar is sweet" is straightforward. Usually, no one is going to argue with this, because the association between sugar and sweetness is so self-evident. But the statement it is false. Sugar is not sweet. Sugar is a stimulus for the receptors on our tongues that register as "sweet". We experience the sensation sweet whenever we encounter molecules that bind with these receptors. But sweet is an experience. It does not exist out in the world, but only in our own conscious states. Sugar is not sweet. Sugar is one of many substances that cause us to experience sweet when they come into contact with the appropriate receptors on our tongue. Equally, there is no abstract quality of sweet-ness, despite the effortless ease with which we can create abstract nouns in English. Sucrose, for example has nothing much in common with aspartame at a chemical level. And yet both stimulate the experience of sweet. Indeed, aspartame is experienced as approximately 200 times as sweet as sucrose, but this does not mean that it contains 200 times more sweetness. There is no sweet-ness. The experience of sweet evolved to alert us to the high calorific value of certain types of foods and the enjoyable qualities of sweet evolved to motivate us to seek out such foods. 

For Buddhists, the application of this fallacy comes from experiencing altered states of mind in and out of meditation. Meditators may experience altered states of mind that they judge to be more real than other kinds of states, causing them to divide phenomena into more real and less real. And they manage to convince people that this experience of theirs reflects a reality that ordinary mortals cannot see -- a transcendent reality that is obscured from ordinary people. 

The problem is that an experience is a mental state; and a mental state is just a mental state. No matter how vivid or transformative the experience was, we must be careful when reasoning from private experiences (epistemology) to public reality (ontology) because we usually get this wrong. I've covered this in many essays, including Origin of the Idea of the Soul (11 Nov 2011) and
 Why Are Karma and Rebirth (Still) Plausible (for Many People)? (15 Aug 2015), etc.

Most of us are really quite bad at reasoning on our own. This is because humans suffer from an inordinate number of cognitive biases and easily fall into logical fallacies. There are dozens of each and, without special training and a helpful context, we naturally and almost inevitably fall into irrational patterns of thought. The trouble is that we too often face situations where there is too much information and we cannot decide what is salient; or there is too little information and we want to fill the gaps. 

Our minds are optimised for survival in low-tech hunter-gatherer situations, not for sophisticated reasoning. The mind helps us make the right hunting and gathering decisions, but in most cases it's just not that good at abstract logic or reasoning. Of course, some individuals and groups are good at it. Those who are good at it have convinced us that it is the most important thing in the world. But, again, this is probably just a cognitive bias on their part. 

Conclusion

The whole concept of reason and the processes of reasoning are going through a reassessment right now. This is because it has become clear that very few people do well at abstract reasoning. Most of the time, we do not reason, but rely on shortcuts known as cognitive biases. A lot of the time our reasoning is flawed by logical fallacies. Additionally, we are discovering that most mammals and birds are capable of reasoning to some extent. 

In this essay, I have highlighted a particular problem in which one mistakes experience for reality. Using examples (sunset, visions, sweetness) I showed how such mistakes come about. Unlike others who highlight these errors, I have tried to avoid the implication that humans are thereby stupid. For example, I see the sunset illusion because my senses are telling me that I am definitely at rest, because they tune out sensations that are too small to affect my body. Social conditioning is a powerful shaping force in our lives, and visions are valuable social currency in a religious milieu.

In terms of our daily lives the sunset illusion or the sweetness illusion hardly matter. It's not like the mistakes cost us anything. Such problems don't figure in natural selection because our lives don't depend on them. We know what we need to know to survive. Although our senses and minds are tuned to survival in pre-civilisation environments, we are often able to co-opt abilities evolved for one purpose to another one. 

But truth does matter. For example, when one group claims authority and hegemony based on their interpretation of experience, then one way to undermine them is to point out falsehoods and mistakes. When the Roman Church in Europe was shown to be demonstrably wrong about the universe, the greater portion of their power seeped away into the hands of the Lords Temporal, and then into the hands of captains of industry. For ordinary people, this led to more autonomy and better standards of living (on average). Democracy is flawed, but it is better than feudalism backed by authoritarian religion.

But as Noam Chomsky has said:

“The system protects itself with indignation against a challenge to deceit in the service of power, and the very idea of subjecting the ideological system to rational inquiry elicits incomprehension or outrage, though it is often masked in other terms.”

In subjecting Buddhism to rational inquiry, I do often elicit incomprehension or outrage. And sometimes it's not masked at all. There are certainly Buddhists on the internet who see me as an enemy of the Dharma, as trying to do harm to Buddhism. As I understand my own motivations, my main concern is to recast buddhism for the future. I think the urge of the early British Buddhists to modernise Buddhism and, particularly, to bring it into line with rationality was a sensible one. However, as our understanding of rationality changes so Buddhism will have to adapt to continue being thought of as rational. But also we have to move beyond taking Buddhism on its own terms and to consider the wider world of knowledge. The laws of nature apply in all cases.

Whilst Buddhism is largely influenced by people who mistake experience for reality, Buddhism will be hindered in its spread and development. This particular error is one that we have to make conscious and question closely. Just because it makes sense, feels right, and accords with experience doesn't mean that it is true. The sunset illusion makes sense, but is wrong. It feels right to say that sugar is sweet, but it isn't. It accords with experience that meditative mental states are more real than normal waking states. But they are not. The testimony of the wise is demonstrably a product of culture, and varies across time and space.

~~oOo~~

Doctrine & Reason III: Madhyamaka Karma

4.4 Multiple Versions of Karma

In a recent online discussion with members of the Triratna Buddhist Order I discovered that we have no common narrative when it comes to karma. A majority believe in karma of some kind, but very often the kind of karma an Order member believes in is mutually contradictory with the kind that another Order member believes in. "Actions have consequences" is a relatively common way of expressing karma, but as we have seen (Part II), it is inadequate. The traditional idea of karma leading to rebirth is supernatural by its very nature, but encouragingly, a sizeable minority are reluctant to commit to any supernatural version of "actions have consequences". There is certainly no explanation to be found for karma in nature.

In a sense, the Order reflects the confused history of karma in Buddhism. Different versions emerged from time to time, presumably in response to perceived needs, and many of them were incompatible with others. More or less the only common features are the word karma and the notion that willed actions are somehow significant.

I've critiqued some of the main versions of karma, especially in an essay called The Logic of Karma (16 Jan 2015). So, for the purposes of this argument, I will focus on my critique of the Madhyamaka version of karma, particularly as set out in Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. I don't think I've given a detailed critique of this version before and it turns out to be the one most resistant to reasoned argument and is thus the view most in need of effective refutation.

5. Madhyamaka

5.1 Nāgārjuna the Nihilist

The most difficult version of karma to argue against is the one that begins with Nāgārjuna and comes down to us via various groups that have assimilated elements of his metaphysics (including those various schools that claim the label madhyamaka). It took me many years of  losing arguments with pseudo-intellectual mādhyamikas to work out what is wrong with Nāgārjuna's explanation of karma. As Nāgārjuna says, near the end of his chapter on karma:

karma cen nāsti kartā ca kutaḥ syāt karmajaṃ phalaṃ |
asaty atha phale bhoktā kuta evan bhaṣyati || MMK 17.30 ||

If action and agent don't exist, how would an action produce a consequence?
And if the consequence does not exist, who would suffer it? 

Ultimately, for Nāgārjuna, there is no action (karma) and no agent (kartṛ), thus there is no consequence (phala), no one who experiences it (bhoktṛ), and thus no rebirth, either. At best, they are like an imaginary city in the sky, like a mirage, or a dream (MMK 17.33). So Nāgārjuna rejects the idea of actions having consequences.

I've read a number of explanations of Nāgārjuna's approach to karma and they all baulk at accepting his dismissal of karma and restate the mainstream Buddhist assertion that actions have real consequences. For example, Kalupahana concluded:

"The most significant assertion here is that the rejection of permanence and annihilation and the acceptance of emptiness and saṃsāra (or the life-process) do not imply the rejection of the relationship between action (karma) and the consequence." (1986: 55)

But, clearly, Nāgārjuna does reject the relationship between action and consequence and, what's more, he rejects the more fundamental notions of action, consequence, and relationship per se. To Nāgārjuna, these concepts are not part of paramārthasatya or ultimate truth. How should we read a statement like Kalupahana's which is echoed in other academic work? It seems that Nāgārjuna's rejection of karma and rebirth does not sit well with anyone who identifies with more mainstream Buddhist ideas. To say that agent, action, patient, and consequence are all just illusions is a form of nihilism.

My sense of Nāgārjuna is that he is trapped by his own articles of faith. In maintaining that nothing persists in the face of plentiful evidence to the contrary, he is left with no choice but to obfuscate and distract us from his dilemma. Ironically, we know this because we still have his actual words. They, at least, have persisted for some eighteen centuries. Mādhyamikās (those who follow madhyamaka ideology) are apt to point out that this is not what commentators have understood him to be saying. However, when the text is clear and the commentary contradicts it, we have little choice but to reject the commentary as driven by motivations unrelated to those of the author.

Nāgārjuna's view is a pernicious one, because it destroys the basis of morality. If actions do not have consequences at all, let alone appropriate and timely consequences, the observation of which allows us to modify our behaviour in the future to obtain different results, then morality is simply not possible. If there is no definite relationship between action and consequences, then there could only be chaos. The view appears to be based on a fundamental confusion.


5.2 Arguing Against Madhyamaka

However, this is also a view that is extremely resistant to rational argument, because part of the madhyamaka ideology, at least in its modern versions, is that rational argument has no place in the Buddhist system. Only personal experience counts towards knowledge and experience, by definition not susceptible to logic. Here we see medieval Buddhist folly meshing with Victorian Romantic folly to produce a persistent delusion. Mādhyamikas further stretch the credibility of a critic through the structure of their rhetoric. In the typical conversation about karma, the mādhyamika asserts their view (some variation on MMK 17.30) as though it were ultimate truth (pāramārtha-satya). If one disagrees on any grounds, they assign those grounds to relative truth, which is simply an illusion and can be safely ignored. Thus, any argument against the asserted view is defeated solely on the grounds that to dissent against the ultimate truth is always wrong. One cannot argue with ultimate truth. The use of reason to undermine the assertion of ultimate truth is dismissed or even mocked, because the ultimate truth allows no role whatever for reason. Having declined to recognise the validity of any objection, the mādhyamika will often emphatically restate their view and then refuse any further discussion.

The view itself is irrational, but the defence that any dissent can only be a manifestation of ignorance is potent. It allows the believer to summarily reject any argument without ever having to consider it. One cannot win an argument with a mādhyamika on their terms, so one must shift the terms and one way to do this is to undermine the foundations; i.e., to point out Nāgārjuna's fundamental errors and argue that the framework itself is flawed.


5.3 The Two Truths

The two truths doctrine is completely absent from the early Buddhist suttas. This suggests that the problem which the two truths were supposed to solve did not exist earlier. I see this problem emerging from the confusion of experience and reality. This happened partly because Buddhists took a description of experience and tried to use it to describe reality. At the same time, they singled out certain rarefied meditative experiences and thought of them as reality.

The early texts are fairly clear that the domain of application of Buddhist practice is experience. There is no word that conveys anything like our word "reality", no discussion of the nature of existence, the nature of objects. The focus is on the nature of experience. As Bodhi has said:

“The world with which the Buddha’s teaching is principally concerned is ‘the world of experience,’ and even the objective world is of interest only to the extent that it serves as that necessary external condition for experience.” (Bodhi 2000: 394, n.182

This is highlighted in the Kaccānagotta Sutta (SN 12:15), a text which Nāgārjuna appears to cite, but completely misunderstand. The importance of this text is emphasised by Kalupahana when he suggests that MMK is a commentary on KS. What KS says is that existence (astitā) and non-existence (nāstitā) do not apply to the world of experience (loka). This means that the usual way of looking at objects doesn't apply to experience. When we have an experience, nothing comes into being; when the experience stops, nothing goes out of being. The ontology of experience, especially in Iron Age Ganges Valley, is difficult to pin down, in a way that the ontology of objects is not.

Experience is what it is, fleeting, insubstantial, and unsatisfactory. This was important at the time because Buddhists were in an argument with Brahmins about the possibility of experiencing absolute being (brahman/ātman). The Buddhist argument was that, since absolute being is unchanging, ever-changing experience could not allow access to it. We could not perceive something unchanging, because experience is always changing. So, even if an object was existent in this absolute sense, our experience of it would constantly change.

The classical texts say nothing much about the world of objects, except that they do acknowledge that some objects (particularly our bodies) persist through time. So the world of experience and the world of objects have a different ontology for early Buddhists (to the extent that they have any awareness of ontology). It is only experience that is governed by pratītyasamutpāda. Also, there seem to be no Pāḷi texts that seek to explain karma in terms of dependent arising, but by the early medieval period when Nāgārjuna was writing this distinction had been lost. By then, everything was understood to be governed in the same way. The description of mental events arising in the meditative mind was taken to be a universal principle. And this means that nothing whatever in the world might persist even for a second. And this in a world where objects do persist for years, decades, centuries, and millennia (the universe is currently thought to be 13.7 billion years old and will continue expanding indefinitely).

So Nāgārjuna's task was to explain away the ubiquitous evidence of persistence in favour of a reality in which nothing persists, based on an Iron Age theory of how experience works. He had to allow for persistence, because all the evidence of our senses tells us that external objects persist, while not allowing for persistence because dependent arising applied universally ruled it out.

By this time the Brahmanical arguments about absolute being seem to be a distant memory to Buddhists, which is puzzling because Brahmanical influence is seen everywhere in the development of Buddhism. The problem of absolute being is still present, but it is seen as a mistake that everyone makes with respect to their own experience. Some Buddhist groups were struggling to explain the connection between karma and phala. A Sanskrit term exists for this problem, i.e., karma-phala-saṃbandha, where saṃbandha means "connection".

Since it was completely implausible to assert that the world did not exist (or that existence did not apply to the world), Nāgārjuna was forced to accept that the world does exist. But he argued that this existence is saṃvṛti, a word meaning 'concealing, covering up, keeping secret'. Saṃvṛti-satya is often translated as "relative truth", but a Sanskrit speaker would be alive to the connotation of "concealing reality". In defiance of early Buddhists' reactions against absolute being, Nāgārjuna contrasted the world with an absolute reality: paramārtha-satya, translated as "ultimate reality", or "ultimate truth".

Both saṃvṛtisatya and paramārthasatya are not true. They are mistaken views that come about when we try to shoehorn dependent arising into everything. This is not to say that the experience of emptiness (śūnyatā) is not profound and transformative, only that it is an experience. It changes the way we perceive the world, which is an epistemological change. Ontology is unaffected by meditation.


5.4 The Confusion of Experience and Reality

Nāgārjuna's method is thus the theory tail wagging the evidence dog. And this methodology is one of the reasons his followers are locked into irrational positions. Evidence is made to fit the theory, not the other way around. And since this requires deprecating reason, rational arguments find no purchase. Compare this to the Pāḷi texts were rational arguments are part and parcel of Buddhism, alongside myth, legend, and inner monologues.

Nāgārjuna's worldview was one in which all domains are governed by dependent arising. He appears to see no alternative to this, despite being familiar with and valuing the Kaccānagotta Sutta. But this creates many problems for him, precisely because the persistence of the world and objects in the world is self-evident. Even something as simple as perceiving movement or change become problematic for Nāgārjuna. And, frankly, his task is not made any easier by composing his answers in metered verse.

The central problem with karma is what I have been calling action at a temporal distance, but which Indian commentators called karmaphalasaṃbandha. Karma requires consequences to manifest long after the condition for them have ceased. And this is forbidden by the formula of dependent arising.

Knowledge that we get by reasoning about experience is useful (i.e., an accurate and precise guide to interacting with the world), as long as we are actually reasoning rather than relying on a bias. Accurate and precise ontology requires careful comparing of notes and critical questioning of which assumptions in our worldview are valid. We have to switch to using abduction and eliminate all the impossible premises.  We did not begin to get this right until after 1543 when Nicolaus Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres). The critical comparing of notes about experience is what enables us to understand the world. Unless we make a strict distinction between experience and reality, and have a very critical eye out for bias, we are apt to come to erroneous conclusions.

Nāgārjuna's fundamental mistake was to mix up epistemology and ontology, which is to say that he mistook experience, especially meditative experience, for reality; and the nature of experience for the nature of reality. Meditators I know continue to make this same fundamental error. Buddhists are constantly talking about the "nature of reality", but nothing about how we go about seeking insight could possibly tell us about reality.

It is entirely possible that we might gain insights into the workings of our minds, seen from the inside; that we might gain insight into the nature of experience. And this kind of knowledge is certainly very useful for avoiding misery. And even though reality is an over-arching super-set, which incorporates the mind and experience, as I have tried to show in my previous essays on reality, it is layered, and descriptions that work on one scale of mass, length, energy or complexity, may not work on another scale. So a perfect description of experience may still be a faulty description of other kinds of phenomena. In fact, the classical texts were wrong about the persistence of mental states - these do persist for short periods of time beyond the stimulating sensory contact, else we could not perceive the passage of time or any kind of change. Language and music both depend on this extension in time.

Nāgārjuna's description of reality is copied from a description of experience. Unsurprisingly, he comes to false conclusions about reality. He takes it as axiomatic that nothing persists. Indeed, he says that if anything were to persists that would contradict dependent arising (MMK 17.6). Note again that the classical Pāḷi texts don't have this problem, because they do not take dependent arising as a description of the world, only of experience (i.e., they take it to be an epistemology, not an ontology). In order to accommodate these obviously false conclusions, he has to bifurcate the truth into two domains, apparent and ultimate, because, for example, it is self-evident that our bodies and identities do persist over time. Nāgārjuna accommodates this by saying that it is true, but only relatively true (saṃvṛti-satya); i.e., true only in the sense that we perceive it to be true. In the ultimate view it is not true. Again this mixes up ontology and epistemology.


5.5 Compatibility with Reason

Ironically for modern Western mādhyamikas, our own intellectual tradition, from Heraclitus onwards, tells us that all existence is impermanent. At no point do we assume that if something exists, it is permanent and unchanging, except in the case of God. And since God no longer features in mainstream Western thought, even he is not a problem. For the Western tradition, persistence is not a problem per se because, unlike Buddhists, we do not associate all being with absolute being. We are not forced into the position of explaining away persistence as an illusion, because temporality is built into our notions of the world. We say quite explicitly that we live in a temporal world.*

* Pedants may be tempted to point out that quantum physics theorists are now suggesting that time might be an emergent property. 1. There is no consensus on this speculation. 2. Even if there were a consensus, descriptions of the quantum level are not relevant to the macro-world that was the whole world until the invention of the telescope and microscope in the early 17th Century. 

Rather than the classical position—that neither existence or non-existence apply to any experience—Nāgārjuna is forced into the bizarre assertion that both existence and non-existence apply to everything. Thus, the obviously false conclusions that his philosophy leads to are rationalised away. This is a philosophy in which obviously false conclusions have to be tolerated; the irrational is valorised, and logic is deprecated in favour of a religious ideal. Paradox becomes the sine qua non. And these conditions fit perfectly with the Romantic threads of modernism. The nihilism also fits the zeitgeist in which people feel that they don't matter and have no influence in the world, despite being bombarded with information about events in the world.

However, in our Western tradition, paradox usually suggests a deeper flaw in our understanding, which has led us to make false assumptions, or to frame the problem ineptly. Or they are curiosities. For example, "this sentence is not true" is a trivial example of a paradoxical sentence that is both grammatically and semantically well formed, but is logical impossible. All it tells us is that there is more to language than grammar and syntax. A glance at anyone's eyebrows as they speak could have told you the same.

For all these reasons, the Mādhyamikā view of karma is not compatible with reason. It's not a rational view. Nor, I argue, is it resolved by insight, because those with insight seem to be beset by the same confirmation bias as all of us: they seek and find confirmation of their pre-existing views. Most meditators spend many years absorbing the rhetoric of Buddhism before making any significant progress in developing insight. Thus when insights arise, confirmation bias prompts us to see them as proof of our view.

My best informant on the process of having insights suggests that each insight both shatters existing views, but tends to set up an alternative view. One finally sees the truth and is prepared to settle down with it. However, if we persist in practising, the next insight shows the flaws in this new view and points to another view. One has to go through this "Aha... Oh. Aha... Oh." process many times before one stops taking the views seriously and realises that all views are just different perspectives on experience. It's not that one gains insight into reality, but that one stops mistaking one's experience for reality.

However, Buddhists tend to treat Nāgārjuna as a god -- someone who had infallible omniscience. His words, or at least the interpretations of his words by commentators, are seen as ultimate truth. I notice that some people are puzzled that I would argue against Nāgārjuna. It seems to cause cognitive dissonance, because they accept what he says as gospel. To dissent from the "ultimate truth" is almost unimaginable to many Buddhists. It is akin to blasphemy, and they often respond the way theists to do blasphemy: with hostility.

So why do modern scholars not take Nāgārjuna to task as someone who mistook experience for reality? After all, they are supposed to bring a certain objectivity to their work, aren't they? Buddhist Studies is all about accepting Buddhism on its own terms, rather than taking a critical stance. So in the 21st Century we still find scholars trying to elucidate Nāgārjuna on his own terms and he is still hailed as probably the greatest Buddhist philosopher. To me, Nāgārjuna is the greatest disaster in Buddhist philosophy because his mistake continues undetected and his influence is pervasive (it goes far beyond Madhyamaka). This is partly because the mādhyamika rhetoric is impervious to reason, but partly also because Buddhists don't use reason when thinking about their views anyway: they only seek confirmation, they do not seek falsification. Of course confirmation bias is a feature of argument production, but religious argumentation discourages doubt and scepticism.

This critique will most like not make any impact whatever on the way people see Nāgārjuna or the way his disciples see the world. The way Madhyamaka is set up employs several cult-like features that make adherents particularly hard to reach. Those who do not simply reject the argument out of hand, will condescendingly explain that I have simply misunderstood the ultimate truth. I'm with Richard Feynman however, "I'd rather have questions that cannot be answered, than answers that cannot be questioned."

This concludes the central argument of this essay. It remains to sum up and conclude.

6. Compatible With Reason?

I set out in this essay to explore the idea that the Buddhist belief in karma is compatible with reason. I argued that both karma and reason are complex subjects on which authorities disagree about almost every detail. Karma has few common features across Buddhist sects apart from the proposition that actions cause rebirth. Also, reason and our ability to employ the methods of reasoning have been widely misunderstood. Reasoning is, more often than not, subverted by cognitive biases and logical fallacies. Even so, I tried to set out a coherent account of how reason works and how we might use it to think about karma in general terms. I then critiqued a particular Buddhist view about how karma is supposed to work, by showing how the reasoning in that view is flawed.

The question I posed in Part I of this essay was, could we come up with the doctrine of karma from first principles. That is, based on experience, can we infer—using deduction, induction, and/or abduction—a doctrine in which our actions lead to rebirth; or the watered down version that our actions infallibly lead to appropriate and timely consequences.

Based on observations across many species of primate, Frans de Waal is able to deduce that we all experience empathy and understand reciprocity. From reciprocity we can induce an understanding of fairness and justice. And from this we can construct a highly plausible, bottom-up theory of morality that has broad applicability and explains a great deal. In this view, morality can be understood as a principle in which the social consequences of actions are appropriate and timely.

To get to a doctrine of karma however, we have to go beyond experience and observation, and make a number of unsupported assumptions. Firstly, we have to assume a just world. This assumption is so common that it has its own name: the just-world fallacy. Secondly, we have to assume that a supernatural afterlife exists, in defiance of the laws of nature. Thirdly, we have to assume that this afterlife is cyclic or a hybrid between cyclic and linear. Many religions have a linear eschatology, a single destination afterlife. There is no credible evidence that we cite to help us choose which is the true version of events. In fact, the way the world seems to work rules out all these possibilities. Fourthly, we have to assume that some mechanism connects our actions to our post-mortem fate.

None of these assumptions is compatible with reason, since none of these assumptions is based on inferences from evidence or experience; i.e., they were not produced by reasoning. They are assumptions that we make so that our doctrine works in the way that we wish it to. All the evidence suggests that these assumptions are simply false (an afterlife is demonstrably false). So assuming that they are true is certainly not compatible with reason. And yet, without these assumptions, there can be no karma doctrine. So karma doctrines, as a class, are not compatible with reason.

Forms of morality in which the social consequences of our social interaction are appropriate and timely are at least possible, even if our social groups seldom attain the ideal. Beyond this, reason, fails.

In my critique of Madhyamaka karma I tried to show that the problem of continuity (saṃbandha) remains unsolved and that it seems insoluble within the traditional Buddhist metaphysics. A completely different approach to ontology would be required because the description of mental-states arising does not work as a general description of the world. In other essays I have proposed such an approach. In my proposed ontology all existence is temporary, both substance and structure are real, and structures (such as our bodies and minds) persist over time, for a time. Morality is explained by bottom-up manifestations of empathy and reciprocity, but karma is ruled out because there is no afterlife, no supernatural, and no just-world.

karma is not
compatible with
reason

Belief in karma fails to meet the standard set in Subhuti's essay (cited in Part I). So, the major conclusion of this long essay is that karma is not compatible with reason. By this I mean that no existing Buddhist version of the doctrine of karma is compatible with reason. I also infer that any theory of karma that involves logical fallacies (such as the just-world fallacy) or supernatural elements (such as an afterlife) cannot ever be compatible with reason. Since no logical fallacy or supernatural element is demonstrable, karma also appears to fail Subhuti's verifiability criterion.

~~oOo~~

Post Script. 29 Jan 2017. Someone wrote in to say that my understanding of Nāgārjuna's approach to karma was "obviously false", because he talks about karma in more conventional ways in other texts, such as the Ratnāvalī. But the fact that a Buddhist talks about karma in different ways in different contexts is completely consistent with the trend I first identified in 2013. In contexts that emphasise morality, Buddhists maintain a narrative that emphasises continuity between actions and consequences; for example, in the Jātakas, the personal continuity of people across lifetimes is normal; while in contexts that emphasise metaphysics this continuity is denied, and the idea of any persistence of any kind is rejected. And these two narratives co-exist. Buddhists switch between them without even noticing that they are doing so. Our metaphysics denies the possibility of morality; and yet morality is clearly very important to all Buddhists and karma is maintained in defiance of our metaphysics, without even achieving resolution. So the fact that Nāgārjuna exhibits this same kind of duplicity is not evidence that he does not deny the reality of karma in Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. 

Bibliography

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Barrett, Justin L. (2004). Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Altamira Press.

Bodhi. 2000. The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: a Translation of the Saṃyutta Nikāya. Boston: Wisdom Publications.

Kalupahana, David J. (1986) Nāgārjuna, The Philosophy of the Middle Way: Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. SUNY.

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