Buddhism & The Limits of Transcendental Idealism

Arthur Schopenhauer

In one chapter of his book on the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Bryan Magee mounts a vigorous defence of Transcendental Idealism. In doing so he seems to me to sum up a good deal of what is wrong with philosophy both in terms of starting assumptions and in terms of method. Schopenhauer, and in particular Magee's account of Schopenhauer, has been very influential on some of my colleagues in the Triratna Buddhist Order, so in this essay I'll highlight some of the problems with Magee's approach to reality.

Magee's first task is to clearly distinguish Transcendental Idealism from Idealism more generally. Idealism is a form of substance monism, a kind of polar opposite of Materialism. Both views are arguments about what is real, which is to say they are ontologies. Idealists argue that everything is just the mind, that nothing exists outside the mind. Clearly this entails a particular view of the mind that is very different from how a materialist sees it and makes it hard to explain other minds. It's a view that appeals to some Buddhists who are influenced by Yogācāra or Advaita Vedanta. But Magee is quick to point out that his is not what Kant had in mind when he coined the term Transcendental Idealism. In trying to bridge the gap between Hume, who argued that we can know nothing, and Newton, who demonstrated that we can know a great deal, Kant reasoned that in understanding sense impressions we superimpose structure onto experience in the form of what he called "a priori judgements". These include our concepts of space, time, and causation. These concepts are metaphysical. In this way Kant was able to embrace the knowledge derived from empirical methods, while accommodating Hume's critique of knowledge. Because a priori judgements enable us to make sense of experience, we cannot have experiences without them, but they come from our side, not from the world. At the same time Kant was able to embrace Newtons' practically derived knowledge. It is not that reality itself is created by our minds (Mono-substance Idealism), but that the world that we discern is a creation of the mind (hence "Idealism"), while reality itself remains beyond what we can discern (hence "Transcendental").

It was partly learning about this Kantian distinction between the world as we experience it (phenomena) and the world as it really is (noumena), that helped to clarify my own views about the Buddha's focus on experience. The early Buddhists use of language suggests that they were concerned only with the world of experience, the world that arises from the conditions of sense object, sense faculty and sense cognition. They were not concerned with reality. The early Buddhists seem to have understood that this world of experience (ayaṃ loko) was not "the world" (idaṃ sarvaṃ) as perceived by some of their contemporaries, but that it only emerged where our sense faculties were impinged on by the world. They did not explicitly place reality beyond our knowledge, but they had nothing to say about that reality, so we don't know what, if anything, they thought about it. A variety of inferences might be drawn from this silence, the most neutral is that they were disinterested in the question. This silence however is very significant in light of later Buddhist claims to understand reality through introspection.

Magee goes further however and argues that because the world of our experience is a creation of our mind, based on sense experience overlaid with a priori judgements, that reality must be utterly different from what we experience.

"... while it is possible for us to perceive or experience or think or envisage only in categories... determined by our own apparatus, whatever exists cannot in itself exist in terms of those categories, because existence as such cannot be in categories at all. This must mean that in an unfathomably un-understandable way whatever exists independently of experience must in and throughout its whole nature different from the world of our representations." (73) 

Now as I understand Kant, he was saying that reality is beyond knowing; whereas as Magee is saying that it is beyond comprehension, i.e. not simply that we can never know anything about a mind-independent reality, but that we lack the capacity to begin to understand it. I will offer two responses to this metaphysical speculation: what I call the "navigation argument" (which is a variety of the argument Johnson made against Berkeley), and the "other minds argument".


The Navigation Argument

Magee argues that both Kant and Schopenhauer differentiate themselves from either Realism or Idealism. In Magee's words:

"... [Kant and Schopenhauer] say, our perceptions and conceptions cannot be all there is, but cannot be 'like' what exists in addition to them, so what else there is cannot consist of an independently existing world which corresponds to them; however, since they constitute the limits of what we can envisage, we cannot form any notion of what there is besides." (74)

In the first place we can undermine Magee's assertion by pointing out that we navigate the world pretty well. If reality were utterly different from how we experience it, then we would certainly fall over, bang into things, and get lost a lot more often than we do. Effectively if the world were utterly different from how we experience it, we would not be able to navigate it. Experience would inevitably lead us into gross errors as though we were acting at random. But this is not what happens. So the world that exists independently of our minds must at the very least, on the human scale, be somewhat like the way we perceive it. Or more accurately the mental model we make of the world must be not unlike the world. As Justin Barrett observes:

"Nonreflective beliefs often correspond nicely to reality. This reliability comes from the observations that the mental tools responsible for these beliefs exist in large part because of their contribution to human survival throughout time." (2004: 9)

All too often we find the philosopher isolated from this kind of practical observation. Magee argues from an abstract perspective and does not take the time to check whether his conjecture is consistent with what we observe in practice. And in this case he seems to be wrong. But it emerges that Magee believes himself to be arguing with other philosophers, not with scientists.

Magee mentions "empiricist philosophers" several times (e.g. 73-74) and sets about refuting their views on this subject:

"After two hundred years, empiricist philosophers still usually give the impression of proceeding on the assumption that, by and large, reality must roughly correspond to our conception of it." (74)

This seems to be typical of Magee. He seems not to have gotten over his bad experiences of philosophers at Oxford University in the 1950s and is always arguing against them. In this case he may well be accurately portraying the attitude of empiricist philosophers, I wouldn't know. But he seems to have overlooked the attitude of scientists who are, generally speaking, not philosophers. Most scientists in the last century or so have been aware that scientific knowledge have undermined the idea that reality corresponds to experience. Einstein showed in 1915, for example that time is not absolute, but dependent on the frame of reference. Most scientists take the world described by quantum mechanics to be more fundamental than the physics of scales of mass, energy and length relevant to human experience, and thus more real. Most people in the know seem to hold the view that the quantum world is not only counter-intuitive but incomprehensible. So in fact the average scientist is probably more sympathetic to Magee's view than Magee is to that of empirical philosophers. Whether the quantum scale world is more real is moot and I'll come back to this point.

Some people may be wondering what a real philosopher of science sounds like. What kinds of problems are they interested in and what kinds of approaches do they take. Serendipitously I found a relevant, short (21:21) YouTube video recently. In this video, Eleanor Knox gives an overview of the field of philosophy of science with respect to theories of quantum gravity in her talk The Curious Case of the Vanishing Spacetime. She provides a brief definition of the philosophy of physics. Knox is particularly interested in theories of quantum gravity in which spacetime is not fundamental, i.e. where spacetime is not one of the starting assumptions of the theory, but may emerge as a  special property under certain conditions. If the criteria for reality is that a quality is fundamental rather than emergent, then such theories seem to say that spacetime is not real. What I'm getting at here is that Magee's characterisation of empirical philosophy seems completely divorced from the actual practice of Empiricism by scientists and from modern philosophy of science. I'm pretty sure that my colleagues who cite Schopenhauer don't realise this. It's not simply because the book is now 20 years old. A good deal of the theory that requires us to reconsider our notions of reality were in place long before he started writing. Magee is not even arguing with the most up-to-date notions of his own time, let alone our time. It seems that he still imagines himself to be in a combative relationship with his former (now long dead) professors.

The most serious problem with Magee's speculations about reality is that if there were a world that existed independently and was utterly unlike the experiences we have, it is questionable whether we could have experiences. If reality is utterly unlike experience, then surely it would produce experiences that are utterly incomprehensible. And by this I do not mean the kinds of experience usually associated with the supernatural, since we find these difficult to explain, but they are inevitably like something we know. An experience of something utterly incomprehensible would literally defy comprehension. We would not be able to parse the experience as an experience. Indeed one might argue that such experiences could be happening all the time and that we are unable to comprehend them so we don't comprehend them, at all. Such a reality would not impinge on our phenomenal world at all. Magee would then be forced to bifurcate reality into that part of reality which does correspond to experience (at least to some extent) and that part which was utterly unlike experience. However, any claim to knowledge based on something unknowable is ipso facto a false claim, since claims to knowledge must rest on something knowable. Magee has gone beyond the limits of valid epistemology. There's simply no way for him to know anything at all about the reality he posits. To say that it is incomprehensible is still a definite statement, a claim to knowledge where by his own definition no knowledge can be obtained. There is literally nothing that could be said about a reality that is completely unlike experience. The concept is nonsensical at it's root.

The other side to this is our old friend "comparing notes". I previously wrote about this in 2014, inspired by Physicist Sean Carroll's quip - "If the blind dudes just talked to each other, they would figure out it was an elephant before too long." (Is Experience Really Ineffable?, 4 Jul 2014; Carroll has since changed his Twitter bio). Magee's philosophy tacitly dismisses the possibility of comparing notes. I'm not sure why philosophers think like this, but Buddhist philosophers do it too. It's like the whole system of thinking about the world has to work without anyone ever having a discussion about what they are experiencing. As if every philosopher is too caught up in their own mind to acknowledge that they are not alone. But other minds are vitally important to how we think about the world, which brings us to my other argument.


Other Minds

If we eliminate Idealism, as we must, then we are forced to accept that there are other minds that also experience the world and with whom we can compare notes. To illustrate the relevance of this, we can use the example of a tennis game. It is one thing if I am alone at Wimbledon watching Novak Djokovic play Roger Federer. My head turns this way and that watching the ball. We cannot really generalise from this observation - I might be fantasising or hallucinating. I might observe accurately, but still come to false conclusions about the situation. It is something else again if a second person joins me and they move their head and eyes in the same way that I move mine. Our observations must be coordinated by something. And because it effects both of us at once, cannot be dependent on either of our individual minds. In other words the simplest case of comparing notes establishes objects that are external to our minds. If that coordinating factor is not reality itself, then we have to go in for some convoluted arguments to explain this coordination. Like epicycles to explain the motion of the planets in an earth centred model of the solar-system. If, as Magee argues, reality were utterly different from experience, one would have to add a coordinating factor separate from reality by being comprehensible to account for the fact that two of us appear to be tracking the same object at the same time. Again we get back to the two tier reality and we add the problem of the relation between reality and the post-hoc coordinating factor that we have invented.

Now fill the Wimbledon stadium with thousands of people, all of whom follow the ball back and forth simultaneously in a coordinated way, while looking at it from a range of angles. And add the millions who watch the TV coverage. This coordination is incredibly difficult to explain if reality is completely different from experience. By comparing notes on experience we can make inferences about what reality is like, at least on any scale that we can observe it at (there may be scales at which we cannot observe reality). And such observations are the business of the physical sciences. To be sure this is not the same as direct knowledge of reality; the knowledge is only inferred. But with care we can construct theories which reliably, accurately, and precisely predict how reality behaves within the margin of error inherent in all observations. The recent detection of the Higgs Boson and gravity waves are astounding examples of such predictions. Reality is still transcendental, it is still beyond our individual ken; but it is empirically real in the sense that through comparing notes and repetition we can infer what it is like.

In these kinds of arguments philosophers seem to be looking to make a true/false or real/unreal distinction. The scientist on the other hand wants to know whether the theory about reality makes accurate and precise predictions. Newton's theory of gravity is strictly speaking false, so a philosopher might say that it is uninteresting. But it does make accurate and precise predictions for all of our earth bound activities, and even for sending a spaceship to the moon. The first inaccurate prediction of Newton's theory was the precession of the orbit of Mercury which is affected by conditions not accounted for by Newton. This failure refutes Newton's theory in a relativistic frame and this lead to rethinking how we conceptualise gravity away from forces of attraction between masses towards a theory in which mass bends spacetime and bent spacetime constrains how masses move. We are not attached to the earth by an attractive force, but instead follow curved paths through bent spacetime whenever we try to escape the earth. However, the scientist doesn't see this as the end of the story, they see Newton's theory as a partial expression of a more accurate theory, which is accurate when certain conditions apply. When we look at the world in a non-relativistic frame, it behaves as though masses exert an attractive force on each other and Newton's gravity equation accurately and precisely describes how masses behave within the margins of error that we can measure them. The true/false dichotomy puts unhelpful limits on how we can proceed to better know our world and discourages inquiry.

The scientific method of knowledge seeking has revealed more and more about the universe we live in at different scales. We have learned that some of those scales are difficult, if not impossible, to imagine. The human mind struggles at both the largest scales and the smallest. At the largest scale for example we have the universe beginning with a big bang that no one yet understands and a universe filled with mass we cannot see and governed by a force which is accelerating the expansion of the universe that we cannot measure directly (aka dark matter and dark energy). The mainstream theories as they stand are incomplete, even though they are still accurate and precise at other scales - the solar system for example. The Big Bang involves infinities - an infinitely small universe with infinite energy density. One of the basic rules of thumb in physics that I learned in high-school is that if you do a sum and the answer is infinity, then you've made a mistake. Something like a big bang must have happened, but it cannot be exactly as current theories describe it, because of the infinities. The theory is incomplete and with any luck it will turn out to be like Newton, a description of a special case that is encompassed by a more general theory. At the other end of the scale, the nano-scale and beyond, some of us are capable of understanding the maths developed to describe the behaviour of matter/energy, but the underlying reality is impossible to understand. So in this sense Magee is correct. But scale is hugely important in these discussions.

If we look at atoms we do not see the dark energy that is accelerating galaxies away from each other. If we look at quarks we do not see the way that electrons around atoms make them hang together and form compounds. If we look at galaxies we do not see quantum behaviour. If we simply look at the world with our human senses we see the world on a particular scale. How and where we look at the universe has a huge impact on what kind of universe we see. This is important for Buddhists to remember as well. The Buddha was only commenting on the universe as it can be observed with the naked senses, i.e. on the world of experience. Buddhist doctrine has nothing to say about the universe on the cosmic, the micro- or nano- scales. It has nothing to say about the Big Bang, galaxies, microbes, atoms, quarks or fields. All these are beyond the scope of ancient Buddhism. These are important limits that Buddhists need to acknowledge. One cannot understand reality on different scales through introspection! There are no insights into Relativity or quantum mechanics to be had in meditation. It is past time that we stopped fooling ourselves on this score.

This brings us back to the question of the relationship between the scales. Is one scale more real than another? Is either the cosmic- or the nano-scale more real than the world we observe with our senses? Many scientists would argue that quantum mechanics is a more accurate description of reality. This is a problem of reductive explanations. If something can be explained in terms of other simpler things (all of chemistry in terms of 96 elements, electrons, and the electro-magnetic force) then the assumption is that the simpler thing is not just more fundamental (hence "fundamental particles"), but somehow more real. Is it accurate? The acme of a reductive approach is to find the most basic entities and forces with which one can describe reality. But this does not take into account either the effects of scale or the effects of complexity. Consider for example that it is not possible to predict the weather any more accurately based on quantum mechanics or relativity, than it is using classical mechanics. Despite having near perfect knowledge of the molecules of the atmosphere and the energy in the system, our understanding falls short. Therefore a reductive knowledge of chemistry and physics does not constitute knowledge of reality where weather is concerned. Nor for any other complex system with emergent properties (like a living being).

Chemists can be deceived by the simple systems we set up in the lab. If you fill a balloon with hydrogen gas and oxygen gas and apply a flame to get a big bang, a fireball, and some water (I've done this many times). This is accurate as far as it goes. As is the equation 2H₂ + O₂ → H₂0. But only as far as it goes. A simple system like this is a very narrow window into reality. For a start a gram of hydrogen gas contains about 60,221,412,900,000,000,000,000 molecules of hydrogen! This number, the Avogadro Constant, is unimaginably large. In order to understand the processes that are involved and formulate general laws, we have to do many experiments like this, burning many different fuels with oxygen, using many different oxidisers with hydrogen, many different combinations, under many different conditions of temperature and pressure. And even then, pure hydrogen and pure oxygen never exist in nature, so even if we know how these two elements react, we have to take into account the constant presence of other molecules and how they react. For example it turns out that in the balloon experiment the visible fireball is caused by carbon atoms in the rubber of the balloon. Hydrogen itself burns with a colourless flame (or more accurately emits light that is not visible to the human eye when it oxidises).

Nor does quantum mechanics give us a better understanding of celestial mechanics, because on the cosmic scale the individual effects of so many quanta interacting are lost in the smearing of probabilities. A one gram object, say a very pure diamond made only of sextillions of carbon atoms, does not behave in the same way as a single carbon atom, or a single election, or a quark, or a perturbation in the quantum fields. Behaviour and properties are scale dependent. Under these constraints what does "real" even mean?

To understand what reality is like, reductive explanations have to work alongside holistic explanations, each element must be seen in context. And in a sense this is why philosophy can be so frustrating - it sometimes seems as though humans, and in particular, the human mind, is seen by philosophers as operating in isolation. And yet humans are social. Taking one human in isolation may tell us something about humans, but blinds us to the nature of humans, because we are adapted to living in large groups with layers of intimacy (the Dunbar numbers: 15, 50, 150, 500, 1500, 5000 ...). Our nature really only becomes apparent in interactions at these different scales: in relationships of varying intimacy. A quirk of history has made us fascinated by individual psychology, when in fact we ought to pay a great deal more attention to social psychology. The intellectual shape of Imperialist Europe has emphasised individualism, selfishness, competition, and ruthlessness, because these qualities are what justify Imperialism and Mercantilism. This often blinds us to the importance of collectives, empathy, cooperation and altruism. Nothing about nature, for example, suggests that the former are more important than the latter. Indeed it seems that we see cooperation and symbiosis at all levels of life. The "selfish gene" is Neoliberalism applied to biology. We could describe life in terms of "altruistic molecules" such as ATP which exists to facilitate other life sustaining reactions. The metaphor is no less accurate and perhaps more apt.

Our lives are all about shared experiences. Which is why people like me write essays like this! It's not so much a matter of if we compare notes, but that we are constantly communicating about our experience and our disposition towards it and processing what other people are telling us about theirs. Just as pure hydrogen is never found in nature, an individual human is only a theoretical construct. We are all social, all of the time. Even misanthropes and hermits must be understood in relation to social norms. The contents of our minds are constantly influenced by our environment, both in the sense of the social situation (long term and present) and by non-human external influences.

Psychology and philosophy wrongly prioritise the individual and their point of view. Philosophers like Magee try to argue what reality is like based on the individual's point of view, when they ought to be thinking in terms of how collectives of humans work together to understand their experiences. Shared experiences define us and our world. And they allow us insights into what the world is really like beyond the way that we discern it through our sensory faculties.


Conclusion

I understand Kant's Transcendental Idealism to be a truism, for individuals. It is unavoidable that we, as individuals, are virtually always describing our experience, rather than the world itself. The limitation may not apply to someone capable of close and repeated examination of experience. Newton plainly made some enormous strides in understanding reality through his observations of light for example. And we think also of Galileo with his telescope; Hook with his microscope; and so on. But even then, if others had not succeeded in making the same observations at some point, we might not remember these names. We don't usually notice this distinction between experience and the world, largely because our models of the world are so very successful at allowing us to navigate the world. However the world is, it cannot be so different from how we experience it, or this would not be so. Samuel Johnson's dismissal of Berkeley's Idealism is actually quite powerful.

"After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- 'I refute it thus.'" Boswell: The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791) 

Philosophers dismiss this (Magee explicitly dismisses it) as though Boswell did not see Johnson kick that stone and the two of them had not shared an understanding of what happened when he did. As though a third party would not have seen something too. As though thousands of people watching a tennis ball flying back and forward between two players were not seeing the same ball. In denying that this is happening, they also fail to propose any other mechanism for coordinating experience which would be required if it were not reality that was doing it. Why anyone find this kind of philosophy interesting is a mystery to me.

The fact is that we are not alone. We can combine our observations to make inferences about the world that are accurate, i.e. that lead to beliefs that yield expected results when one acts upon them. We do this all the time. So a form of collective and/or inferential Realism also seems to me to be useful. Mercier and Sperber have tried to show that reason itself is a collective activity. Collectively we overcome the limits of the individual mind, we can accurately infer knowledge beyond the barrier of experience and can understand how things really are, though how things are depends to some extent on what scale we are looking at. The kind of universe we see depends on scale at which we examine it.

The other point to make about this way of looking at reality, is that it demystifies and disenchants the notion of the noumenal. Yes, to some extent it is true that there is a noumenal world which underlies the world of phenomena, the world as we experience it. But it is far less mysterious than some would like us to believe. The counter-intuitive aspects of quantum mechanics aside, the world at the scale we experience it is quite comprehensible as the very accurate and precise laws of classical physics and chemistry show (c.f. Sean Carroll's blog The World of Everyday Experience, in One Equation and related essays). It's not that the noumenal world is some kind of "higher" reality that gives the phenomenal world meaning or explains God or anything of that nature. The noumenal world is simply the mundane facts of how our universe operates: it boils down to the way that fields interact and couple to produce matter and energy as we experience them. There's no succour in the noumenal for the longings of the religious and/or Romantics for a higher purpose for human life. God is not in the gaps.

If we Buddhists accept this definition, and accept that introspection does not lead to insight into reality, it leaves the field clear for the physical sciences to describe reality and leave us to continue to work with the domain of experience. And thus allows for a great deal of compatibility between Buddhism and Science. And this is not a compatibility that rests on bogus claims of similarity between ancient and modern knowledge. It's a compatibility based on clearly demarcating who has expertise where. What might be unnerving for Buddhists is that our expertise on experience is now under a strong challenge from scientists who've begun to take an interest in experience itself. They are beginning to describe phenomena like our sense of self in the kind of detail with could only dream of. Many Buddhists (traditional and modern) are too weighed down by intellectual baggage to ever break free. Buddhism is due a radical intellectual make-over. But we have core competencies that will continue to be relevant for the foreseeable future. We just have to get over ourselves and get on with doing what we do best.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

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

Magee, Bryan. (1997) The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. 2nd Ed. Clarendon Press.

Self, Continuity, and Morality

Buddhists make a big deal about how disadvantaged people are by having the illusion of self. The rhetoric implies that having a sense of self is a severe disability. Since it is axiomatic that it is up to each of us to make progress on the path, it's further hinted that those who still have a sense of self are culpable for their own disability, as though we are simply not making enough effort. I find this a rather unattractive version of Buddhism. To my knowledge, the breakthrough to non-self has always been the preserve of a few who have the temperament for intensive practice and the opportunity to pursue it. No doubt some genetic and environmental factors are also involved, but this only reinforces that it always was and always will be a minority who make that kind of breakthrough. The idea that we all might make this breakthrough is a quaint dream.

On the other hand, this view overlooks the good that people with selves do, the great art that they have created, and the general advancement of humankind from science and technology (better health, longer life, lower infant mortality, less violence, etc). Buddhism implemented on a national scale, on the other hand, has almost always led to repressive, authoritarian politics, rigidly stratified societies, and entrenched privilege, along with poor standards of living, especially for the poor. So if we were looking for ways to save all beings from suffering, or at least reduce suffering for all beings, then the evidence suggests that Buddhist rhetoric is vastly overblown: basic education and healthcare is probably more effective. The eradication of polio has done more for the reduction of suffering in the world than Buddhism ever did.

This kind of discourse which sees self as a a disability is more prevalent now that it was when I became a Buddhist twenty years ago, partly because of the rise in prominence of Advaita Vedanta in Western countries or at least people who employ Vedantin methods of undermining the sense of self. Those who do this, like to refer to it as "Advaita" (non-dual), but I prefer to use Vedanta to keep it clear what kind of religious ideology underpins the methods and worldview associated with the approach. A Vedantin is typically seeking the non-duality between soul and God, two concepts foreign to Buddhism. While self-enquiry seems like a good idea, we also ought to be enquiring into the worldview espoused by Vedantins and asking why the Vedantin who claims to have no self talks about it in such different terms to the Buddhist.

Despite the popularity religious rhetoric around the evils of selfhood I remain deeply suspicious of it. I wrote a few essays on this theme in late 2009, including:

• None Dearer than Myself (04 Sept 2009).
• Why do we suffer? An alternate Take. (28 Aug 2009)
• Why do we have a sense of self? (21 Aug 2009).

In these essays I expressed some of my doubts about the negative rhetoric around self. I tried to show how vital the development of a healthy ego is. One might, perhaps, transcend one's ego, but the idea that we could develop from scratch as human beings without an ego seems fanciful. A whole raft of behavioural and cognitive problems emerge from the lack of a well-defined sense of self. If the sense of self fails to develop in a person, or is compromised by disease or accident, then (contra the religious narratives) that person really is disabled. However good it might seem to lose your ego as an adult, having no ego to start with is uniformly disastrous. This seems never to be acknowledged or discussed by advocates of non-self.  I've argued that the problems ascribed to "egotism" seem more often to be the result of an under-developed ego rather than too much ego. I've also expressed doubts about the possibility of a functioning morality in the absence of a self (Ethics and Nonself in Relation to the Khandhas, 21 Mar 2014). I want to return to this last theme in this essay.

The different attitudes of Buddhist and psychological models partly relate to different definitions of what is meant by ego or self. Which definition we use is notoriously dependent on context and each context requires us to redefine the word. From the psychological side we may say that without what psychologists call an ego, no social interaction or learning is possible. Without a clear sense of self and other we do not develop empathy, for example. Without empathy we could not be moral because morality requires us to see our actions from another person's point of view and feel what they feel (or at least to imagine how they might feel). We also know that people who have personality disorders or other psychiatric problems can get into real difficulty if they take up meditation, particularly the kinds of meditation that undermine the sense of self. Generally speaking Buddhists have been quite reckless in seeing meditation as a panacea and not cognizant of how mental health problems manifest and how they affect a person's experience of meditation (I addressed this to some extent in my essay  Rumination, the Stress Response, and Meditation, 22 Jan 2016).

So what can Buddhists and Vedantins mean? How can we understand the no-self discourse in the context of contemporary knowledge about the brain and its role in what Westerners call "consciousness". The scare quotes are employed because I'm not sure that there is a cross-over between ancient Indian theories of cognition and modern theories which treat consciousness as an entity rather than a function or process. In other words I am inclined by my Buddhist studies to see consciousness as something we do, rather than something we possess.

Traditionally Buddhists use concrete nouns like "mind" (manas) or "thought" (citta), and action nouns like cognizing (vijñāna) "thinking" and "remembering" (smṛti) but they don't seem to use abstract nouns with respect to the mind. So even if a word like vijñāna can be made to mean "conscious", there is no equivalent abstract noun vijñānatva, no conscious-ness. So there is no abstracted faculty of mind under which concrete functions can be groups. In Buddhists texts the functions of the mind are most often grouped under a concrete noun "citta" rather than an abstract noun. These observations often seem trivial, but they point to a radically different worldview that separates us from the authors of the earliest Buddhist texts. They did not think like us at all.

Another big difference in how early Buddhists and Westerners understand the mind is metaphorical. In an earlier essay I tried to show that the MIND IS A CONTAINER metaphor, which is almost inextricable from the Western understanding of mental phenomena, is absent from Buddhist texts. Pre-modern Buddhist authors did not conceive of cognition as happening in the mind; nor thoughts, memories etc in the mind. Again, rather than being something we have, consciousness seems to be something that we do. For example it's might be phrased that the Buddha dwelled with a particular state of mind (iminā vihārena viharato) not in it.  Hence, I've also argued that where we might be tempted to translate "consciousness" in a Buddhist text, the phrase "mental activity" is almost certainly better (Manomaya: Background to Mind-Made Bodies. 28 Nov 2014).

Since my first forays into this field I have discovered the work of Thomas Metzinger, in which I find a very useful paradigm for thinking about selfhood. For example I wrote Origin of the Idea of the Soul (11 Nov 2011) and First Person Perspective (29 Apr 2011) exploring Metzinger's work and how I think it applies to contemporary Buddhism.

Metzinger draws on work by Antonio Damasio, amongst others, who I also refer to directly. Damasio has put forward the idea that what the brain does, in the first place, is model the internal milieu of the body for the purpose of maintaining optimal conditions for life. The inputs include information about blood pressure, blood sugar levels, hydration, hormone levels, balance and other forms of internal physical senses, and the state of the gut. The brain integrates these internal inputs with information from the senses about the environment and produces behaviour as a result. The view that this is all that the brain does is called Behaviourism. Behaviourism was a briefly popular theory of consciousness in the mid 20th Century. 

In a simple animal like the round-worm C. elegans (see Reflections on Living Things. 13 Nov 2013), Behaviourism may well be a sufficient account of the animal's behaviour. Though in a brain with only 302 neurons, it is still not entirely clear yet how it produces behaviour, and attempts to model the brain in a way that does produce behaviour are in their early stages. In more complex animals with millions or billions of neurons something more sophisticated is going on. As brains become more complex, with layers of organisational sub-units, emergent properties become apparent that cannot be predicted from the physiology of neurons. Sophistication of behaviour is correlated to some extent with brain complexity. Generally speaking more neurons with more connections, correlates to more complex behaviours. Though the relationship also has to take into account what subsystem the neurons are in. Neanderthals for example had significantly bigger and more complex brains than their ancestors, but most of the gain was in the visual cortex not in the neocortex. The increase went to improved eyesight, especially night vision, not to improved cognitive abilities generally. In anatomically modern humans, the gain in complexity was in the neocortex which does correlate with improved cognitive abilities. In particular Robin Dunbar has famously showed that there is a correlation between the ratio of neocortex to the rest of the brain and the size of social group an animal lives in. Out of this research came the famous Dunbar Numbers.

From the mapping of our internal milieu and via emergent properties we get the most basic sense of consciousness that all reptiles, mammals and birds seem to have. At least this seems to be the most plausible explanation. In fact we still do not know much about what consciousness is or how it is created by the brain. But neuroscience is a relatively young science (a few decades) and consciousness is a big problem. Consciousness, as neuroscientists generally conceive of it, is mainly concerned with moving around and seeking food and mates, but also forward thinking, learning from past experience, and social interactions. In some animals and birds the basic level of consciousness is the basis for an even more sophisticated simulation—a sense of being aware of what is happening, of ownership over the actions that result, of having a point of view—in other words a sense of self. Many animals, for example, recognise themselves in a mirror. One of the tests is to surreptitiously paint a dot on the forehead of the animal and see how they respond. The self-aware animal will look in a mirror, see the dot on their forehead, and try to touch their own forehead to feel what is there. 

One of the important findings from recent neuroscience is that when we study the many ways in which our sense of self can be compromised by disease, accident, surgery or even perceptual tricks (such as the rubber hand illusion or the virtual reality) we are led to the conclusion that our sense of self can only be a simulation or what Metzinger calls a virtual self model. If the self were "hardwired", i.e. if there were a definite structure or architecture associated with selfhood, such as there are for say visual processing or memories, this would be inconsistent with what we see in neurology cases.

The evidence also tells us that the sense of self cannot be divorced from the brain. For brain damage to affect the self the way it does, the self and the brain must be intimately associated. Because of this intimate association of the brain and the mind, physics at the mass, energy and length scales relevant to the functioning of the brain can now rule out other forces or types of matter than those already described. Of course other forces and types of matter may and do exist at other scales, but not on this scale. If there were such forces and they could interact with matter at this scale we'd be able to "see" that interaction and describe it. The fact is that we do not see it. And if we do not see it, then it cannot interact with the matter of the brain to play any role in the mind (see There is No Life After Death, Sorry, 23 Jan 2015). So the self and the mind cannot be wholly immaterial either.

We do not need to have all the specifics to draw broad conclusions about the mind and especially that part of the mind which is our sense of being someone, our first-person perspective. Despite the fact that many philosophers wish to hedge their bets, arguing that science is a social construct (or whatever), what we can do with evidence is eliminate certain types of explanations. As intuitive and attractive as other kinds of explanations for mind are, they simply do not explain what has been observed. The two extremes of physical-monism and dualism can be excluded from consideration because they do not generate the right kinds of answers. And this enables us to focus on the type of answers that are at least possible. There are still a range of these, but we do know that only a virtual self of some kind, generated by the brain in some way, fits the facts.

The current best explanation of the known facts is that the brain is creating a simulation of a self, integrating many streams of information into a first-person perspective. No one suggests that we fully understand the workings of the brain or how it generates a sense of self. Indeed some argue that theories of the mind have yet to explain anything. But any theory that eventually does explain the functioning of the mind will certainly not be a kind of physical-monism or involve substance dualism. And thus, for example, studying how neurons and brains work in a physical sense will not only be relevant to the study of the mind, it will be essential.

This is good news for Buddhists. As regular readers will be aware I am rather antipathetic to the idea that modern science confirms ancient wisdom. For example, I think there is no genuine connection between Buddhism and quantum mechanics. As far as I can see, claims to the contrary are bunk based on a superficial understanding of both Buddhism and quantum mechanics. Just because two bodies of knowledge can be counter-intuitive does not mean that they are in any way connected. However, in this case the idea of virtual self is fairly consistent with some Buddhist ideas about selfhood. It is also consistent with the idea that one can, through concentration exercises and reflection, substantially and permanently alter one's perspective on the world of experience to the extent that one no longer relates to it via a sense of self. If the sense of self were wholly immaterial (a ghost in the shell) or material (i.e. "hardwired"), then meditation could have no effect on it; we could not rid ourselves of the sense of being a self through meditation and introspection if self were anything other than a simulation whose parameters we can tweak through how we think.

Morality and Continuity

In 2014 Thomas Metzinger wrote:

"As a philosopher, my conceptual point is that only if an organism simulates itself as being one and the same across time will it be able to represent reward events or the achievement of goals as a fulfillment of its own goals, as happening to the same entity. I like to call this the "Principle of Virtual Identity Formation": Many higher forms of intelligence and adaptive behavior, including risk management, moral cognition and cooperative social behavior, functionally presuppose a self-model that portrays the organism as a single entity that endures over time."

Here Metzinger has put his finger on the crucial point about living things. Living things act in ways that over time seem purposeful. We move towards goals and to some extent towards meta-goals. I'm wary of a teleological argument here. I mean, for example, that we seek out and consume food as a goal. And in anticipation of this we plant crops many months ahead of their ripening, and then store the resulting food, anticipating future need as a meta-goal. I don't mean, for example, that evolution is developing towards a general goal or anything of that nature. Desire, seeking behvaiour, and reward for fulfilling the desire have to be coordinated at some level. If they were not then we would have real difficulty with basic functions like eating and mating.

But crucially moral behaviour requires us to believe that we endure over time. Buddhist teaching on morality openly acknowledges this. The Jātaka stories are all about connecting actions to consequences over time, linking previous lives to present one. Buddhist metaphysics goes out the window at this point, because they disrupt the kind of continuity required for moral behaviour by weakening the links between behaviour in this life and reward in the next (I'll return to this point below). 

If I believe that I will not be the one to achieve the goal, that it will for example only be achieved by my grandchildren, then I am probably less motivated than if I could see an immediate benefit to myself. The classic example of this is the problem of climate change. Even where climate change is admitted to be caused by human activity, the political will to make the necessary changes is lacking, partly because the time scale over which the changes occur are too long for most people's imaginations, i.e. the not only go beyond the electoral cycle, but beyond an individual human life. Almost no one is willing to commit to spending resources on a project that has almost no immediate benefits, but which will make life easier in future centuries. And as frustrating as this is, it can hardly be surprising. We surely know enough about human motivation not to be surprised by this fact.

George Lakoff has described morality as a kind of book keeping exercise (see Moral Metaphors, 8 Nov 2013). Actions create mutual obligations for ourselves and those we have contact with, which may be conceived of as debts. As social animals we are always in debt to our social group, and need to keep track of the debts of the group as a whole. If, for example, food is shared with us a quid pro quo is expected that we might repay in kind or through something of equal value. A social group is held together by a network of these mutual obligations. Where I grew up, people are quite relaxed about taking on social obligations - we make friends easily. In England most people are at pains to avoid any new social obligations, so it's difficult to make friends. English people don't want to be in debt to strangers, though ironically they have amongst the highest levels of financial indebtedness in the world.

Different political ideologies evolve out of the different responses to these debts. In the present political climate of the UK we have a government which on has staked everything on paying back existing national debts (despite 0% interest rates) and not accruing any more debts (which by its own standards it is failing to do). We have an opposition which is confused about how to respond. The Brits are largely a conservative nation and don't like to see the government getting into debt. On the other hand household debt is very high and rising.

What most cultures do is extrapolate from this social model of fairness within the group and propose the idea that the world is fair. This is called the Just World Hypothesis. I've written about this in connection with the afterlife. Since life is patently not fair or just, the afterlife becomes the place of debt settlement. And an afterlife requires a matter/spirit duality to enable something to survive the death of the body. In afterlife theories in which the afterlife destination is determined by morality, the deeds of the deceased are weighed against the law. In the case of ancient Egyptian myth, as recorded in their Book of the Dead, the heart of the dead person is on one side of the balance and an ostrich feather representing the law is on the other. In some religions God does the judging. Being judged is a distinct milestone on the journey to the afterlife in all moralistic religions.

Buddhists tried to skirt this inherent eternalism by proposing that rebirth was governed by the same principle as the arising of vedanā, i.e. that the dying being was a condition for the next living being. But they almost immediate split into factions, each of which developed a different explanation for how this might happen. There was no consensus amongst Buddhists on how rebirth occurred or what it entailed. And no existing explanation survives its encounter with modernity (See The Logic of Karma, 16 Jan 2015). This is because trying to explain the afterlife by generalising a theory of how mental events are related doesn't work. It reduces the connection between actions and consequences. Hence, historically, Buddhists had to sustain two distinct discourses: one with respect morality (summed up as actions have consequences for me) and another for metaphysics (it is not me, but not another either). But in moral terms, as Buddhists tacitly admit, if it is not me that is game over for morality. The second part of the formula, not another, is not important because it is not me. Hence Buddhists both deny that it is you (or another); and at the same time emphasise that it really is you. Getting Buddhists, or even supposedly neutral scholars of Buddhism, to even admit that this duality exists has proved very difficult. One meets incredible resistance and even hostility to the very idea. Even though it is plain as day.

Morality, especially Buddhism morality, depends on being aware of and sensitive to the consequences of actions, but, as I say, our metaphysics creates a barrier to owning consequences. The metaphysics is so problematic that Nāgārjuna ends up repudiating the very idea of karma (or a being who does karma) as fictions of "relative truth". He describes them as illusions "like the cities of Gandharvas in the sky" (see Chapter 17 of Mūlamadhyamaka Kārikā). Connecting consequences to actions without invoking eternalism is almost impossible. The early Buddhists simply set aside metaphysics when it came to morality. They set aside the limitations of the anātman doctrine and taught that we are the owners of our karma, the heirs to our karma (Cf. Five Facts to Continuously Reflect On).

But if morality is a book keeping exercise and accounts are settled in the afterlife, then where are the books? Something has to provide a memory of our accounts that persists after death. For those worldviews that include a soul or an overseer god this is not a problem. Admitting supernatural entities solves the problem. Buddhists came up with various schemes to allow karma to accumulate and transfer. Highlighting the arguments that each came up with for the other views is a theme of my writing on karma. No Buddhist idea of how karma and rebirth work was universally accepted. Most sects thought that other sects had got the problem disastrously wrong. 

Morality depends on some connection between the person who acts and the person who suffers the consequence. And in those Just World worldviews in which justice is delivered postmortem, that connection must survive death. And this is precisely where Buddhist metaphysics of no-self are problematic. There are two main problems as I see it.

1. The relation of conditional arising is not sufficient to motivate anyone to act well. I argue that this is born out by Buddhist's own approach to teaching morality. I have already identified a dichotomy between metaphysical and moral teachings.

2. The flat denial of any self in many Buddhist metaphysical narratives, even an experiential self, undermines any possibility of morality. Also if there is actually no self, then everyone would be severely autistic and unable to respond to anyone else.

Hence the talk of no-self literally meaning there is no self must be at least partly wrong. Because even those people who claim to have broken the fetter of self-view (sakkāyadiṭṭhisaṃyojana) are still able to interact with people, to recognise them and respond appropriately to them. On the other hand any self we do have at the experiential level can only be a simulation created by our brain to help us navigate the world. The trouble is that existence and non-existent are black and white extremes when we need something a little more subtle. If instead the self is part of a virtual simulation then terms like existence and non-existence don't apply. If we abandon the attempt to prove this kind of all-or-nothing proposition one way or the other and view the self as a simulation then we can start asking more interesting questions. How does the brain achieve the kind of continuity required for goal seeking behaviour and thus for morality? Is it simply memory, or is there a more specific mechanism?

Earlier I mentioned the semantic problems of talking about self. Everyone understands something different by the relevant words. I have written about on several occasions the confusion of terminology. On one hand the meaning of ātman in Buddhist circles apparently changes depending on when and where it is being used. Initially the instruction seems to be that because ātman is a permanent unchanging entity it cannot be associated with any of the sense spheres. Thus, it cannot be experienced. And ipso facto cannot be known. There is a strict epistemological limit (despite what Vedantins may say). A permanent entity could not give rise to an experience. Nāgārjuna discusses this: we either always know about a permanent entity (past, present and future); or we never know. There can only be absolute knowledge or absolute ignorance of permanent entities; there can be no middle ground, no change from ignorance to knowledge. So ātman can never appear in experience (and nor can God). This is explicitly ruling out some unnamed extra sense beyond the five physical senses and the mind. There is no possibility of knowing by extra-sensory perception. And yet the same texts clearly believe in what we would call extra-sensory perception: that space is no impediment to knowledge. One can see things that are invisible, hearing things that are inaudible, and so on. That said the knowledge that comes this way is just an extension of sensory knowledge. One might see or hear at a distance, but no new senses are operating.

There is considerable confusion over how to translate ātman: soul, self, Self, ego, Ego, and so on. And on how to understand what it means at different times and in different contexts. As far as the Pāḷi texts are concerned they appear to be responding to the metaphysical entity as described by the Upaniṣads (see Gombrich 2009). There the ātman is a permanent unchanging entity that resides in our body, usually in our heart, and is not affected by the changes that our bodies and minds experience; not affected by life or death or suffering. Ātman is always pure and unadulterated. This is not what ego means, nor "self" in the usual sense. It does not equate to an homunculus either.

Morality in the Absence of Self

In discussing this issue with a colleague a resolution to this apparent conflict between karma and anātman emerged. In his view the sense of being a separate self is the origin of unskilful actions. While one has a sense of being a separate self, one will react to experience with attraction or aversion and thus create karma. So for someone with a simulated sense of self (i.e. all "normal" human beings), it is necessary for them to believe that they will suffer the consequences of their actions in order to motivate them to be moral. However, when one eradicates the sense of being a separate self, this also removes the motivation to act unskilfully. Greed and hatred are responses of the self to opportunities and threats in the environment. No self means no greed, no acquisitiveness; no hatred, no aversion. Thus the need to motivate the person to be ethical through the fear of consequences is also eliminated at the same time. 

Part of the problem we have in understanding this and communicating it, is that the few people who attain this state of spontaneous morality have not yet been properly studied. Worse we still rely on Iron Age or Medieval worldviews that are rooted in profoundly wrong conceptions of the world, life, and people. As yet we have no good way of integrating this perspective into a modern body of knowledge. The beginnings of a way forward may emerge from the work of people like Andrew Newberg who is studying the neuroscience of religious experiences. He calls his field "neurotheology" and is particularly interested in theistic interpretations of religious experiences, but has also studied the brains of Buddhist meditators. Ideally we would have a cohort of people who experience themselves as having a self who could participate in a baseline study before they practised and then again once they had eliminated the sense of self. This would give us a much better understanding of what has happened to them.

It would be especially interesting to see if anything changes in the way that they parse grammar. It is common for such people to use pronouns in the conventional way, but to say that they no longer understand the world to be divided up into I, you or they. So how they use pronouns accurately becomes an interesting question.

Unfortunately all we have to go on at present is the testimony of those who experience the cessation of the sense of being a separate self and they are themselves a source of confusion. It's clear that many approaches to achieving this state exist and that people from different traditions are attaining it. But each of them seems to see in it the culmination of their particular tradition and explain that their traditional interpretation of the experience is the correct one. As David Chapman recently observed:

"People in non-ordinary states, produced by psychedelic drugs or meditation, often proclaim sudden, unshakable, universal understanding. They rarely or never can explain their supposed understanding. I think these are probably mostly illusory. Such experiences may give genuine but ineffable insight into some things. I’m reasonably sure they involve no actual understanding of most things." - The Illusion of Understanding. 

This is also my conclusion from trying to correspond with a few people who talk about being permanently in a non-ordinary state, and many in-depth conversations with a friend who spends a good deal of his time in non-ordinary meditative states. 

Compare the conclusions of Gary Webber for example. For him the dropping away of ego is the confirmation of the teachings of Ramana Maharshi, an early 20th Century teacher of Advaita Vedanta. Webber understands his experience in Vedantin terms and is critical of the Buddhist teaching of emptiness. Though he clearly doesn't really understand the emptiness teachings. For Webber, for example, free will is an illusion because in his view everything ties back to an unchanging essence that underlies the universe. This combines ideas from the Upaniṣads with the influential Sāṃkhyā school of Indian metaphysics (a huge influence on Patañjali and Yoga metaphysics). For Webber this kind of metaphysical speculation is underpinned by his experience of awakening. But Buddhists who describe more or less the same experience -- i.e. the loss of internal dialogue and a first person perspective -- argue that no such metaphysical speculation is valid. The Awakened can still disagree amongst themselves on metaphysics (as they have traditionally done throughout history, especially in India).

This discrepancy plays out in other ways and one that particularly interests me is the use of language, particularly pronouns and grammatical agents. People with no self say that they experience no first-person point of view, that they do not see the world in terms of self and other. And yet they are still able to accurately use pronouns. If there truly was no distinction at all between self and other, then pronouns would be confusing. If there were genuinely no reference point in experience, then one would struggle to accurately ascribe actions or qualities to agents. A pronoun is used to point out the agent of an action or owner of a property. So the awakened still have access to the knowledge of how pronouns map onto situations, on how verbs require agents, and thus on some level are able to distinguish agents. Mind you most of us use pronouns without thinking, so perhaps it is unfair to expect the awakened to have insight into this issue. Until we better understand how anyone with no first-person perspective can use pronouns accurately we have to remain suspicious of the generalisations that those people draw from their experience. Something does not add up.

In other words the awakened still seem to be unable to look past their own subjectivity. That subjectivity may be radically different from mine, but it still seems to have the same kinds of limitations. Logical fallacies and biases are still in play. What we need is for a few people who have experienced enlightenment to become lab rats, so that we can study them. We need to better understand the nature of the changes they have experienced in order to better codify them and make them available to other people, if in fact that is desirable.

~~oOo~~

Metzinger, Thomas (2014). What Scientific Idea Is Ready For Retirement? The Edge. https://edge.org/response-detail/25446

A Review of The Heart Sutra, by Kazuaki Tanahashi.

Tanahashi, Kazuki. 

The Heart Sutra: A Comprehensive Guide

 to the Classic of Mahayana Buddhism. 

Shambala, 2014.

When one spends years studying and writing about a text it is always an occasion when a major new publication comes out promising something a little more than the usual recycled clichés. So I welcomed the publication of a new book on the Heart Sutra by respected Zen Buddhist author Kazuaki  "Kaz" Tanahashi, best known for translating commentaries by Dogen. The book has received rave reviews from the Zen community and on Amazon. It contains a number of chapters exploring the history of the text, including some material that is new or difficult for the average reader to get hold of, often because, as with a good deal of scholarship on the Heart Sutra, it was published in Japanese. So, in that sense, the book fills a gap in the market. The publisher, Shambhala Publications, are known for publishing fairly serious works alongside mass-market trivia and reviewers seemed to be particularly impressed by the author's "scholarship". However, my own delight at obtaining a copy of this book was soon tempered by misgivings about the quality of the scholarship, particularly with reference to the Sanskrit texts and to aspects of how it treats the sutra's history.

The new book was published by Shambala in 2014 as an attractively designed hardback. After the massive disappointment of Red Pine's popular translation and study of the Heart Sutra, this book promised to be a corrective. The sub-title proclaims that it will be a comprehensive guide. This suggestion of comprehensiveness seems to refer to the inclusion of many versions of the text in the discussion section, including several versions in less well known Asian languages. However, it quite quickly becomes apparent that in an English language book on the Heart Sutra there is not much advantage to having a Vietnamese or a Mongolian translation. It makes me wonder who the intended audience was. 

The crucial versions required for understanding the text and the history of the Heart Sutra are the surviving Sanskrit manuscripts, those used by Conze for his (flawed) critical edition, and the Canonical Chinese texts (T250, T251, and T256) and, in addition to these, the early Prajñāpāramitā texts that the Heart Sutra quotes from, particularly the version in 25,000 lines and its translations into Chinese (esp T223 and T220) and also《大智度論》Dà zhì dù lùn (Sanskrit *Mahāprajñā-pāramitopadeśa) T1509. The last is a commentary, attributed to Nāgārjuna, on the 25,000 line text incorporating the lines that are quoted by the Heart Sutra. Tanahashi does include most of these versions (leaving out T1509 and T220) and some discussion of the sources of the Heart Sutra; however, rather than producing a critical discussion of the differences between the texts and what that might tell us, the author manages only a superficial comparison of the texts in different languages. His scholarship is more of an exercise in collecting versions and contains almost no critical evaluation of the versions.

To make it more confusing, Tanahashi takes the Japanese Horiuzi Palm-leaf manuscript, the Sanskrit version embedded in T256, and the edition produced by Conze as three distinct recensions. Weirdly, he refers to Conze's edition as the "Nepalese Version" despite the fact that Conze used Japanese and Chinese manuscripts and inscriptions, including the Horiuzi manuscript, for his edition. Despite its flaws, Conze's edition is a true critical edition; i.e., an attempt to use the existing manuscripts and inscriptions to reconstruct the text that underlies all of them. The idea of a critical edition seems to be lost on Tanahashi. It is not unusual for Japanese authors to privilege the Horiuzi manuscript, because of its claim to be the oldest manuscript (albeit that it is not as old as is usually claimed). But this manuscript is also riddled with errors and must be seen in the context of the manuscript tradition as a whole. Tanahashi refers to T250 as the "α version", though T250 is clearly no such thing. T250 contains large chunks of text that are not included in any Sanskrit text, for example, making it the least likely candidate amongst the short-text versions to be an ur-text.

Part of the problem is that Tanahashi rejects the conclusions of Jan Nattier in her watershed 1992 article in which she spells out the reasons to doubt the author attributions and, therefore, the dating, of both T250 and T251 (usually attributed to Kumārajīva and Xuanzang, respectively). It's apparent that neither T250 nor T251 can be the ur-text for the Heart Sutra. Tanahashi, unlike Red Pine, accepts that the Heart Sutra was composed in China, but he has no explanation for how either T250 or T251 could have been the model for the Sanskrit text as it has come down to us.  As it stands, T250 has several more phrases that have no counterpart in any other text, let alone the Sanskrit, than T251 does. This makes it less likely to be the "α version" than any other Chinese text. But then, neither T250 nor T251 precisely corresponds to the Sanskrit version. The ur-text or α version is almost certainly no longer extant and the versions we do have show signs of editing. Tanahashi makes no mention that I can find of T1509, even though it is highly likely to have influenced the final form of the Chinese Heart Sutra, if not having been the actual source of the quotations. Nattier (1992) sets out the evidence for these conclusions in great detail in her article. In many cases, she is simply repeating (with references) the widely held views of her colleagues, though she does make original observations on this subject, as well.

So, while it is clear that Tanahashi has made some effort to understand the various versions, the conclusions that he comes to are idiosyncratic and, frankly, misleading. And this is problematic, because of the influence of both author and publisher. We know from history how mistakes can become canonised and propagated because they are associated with authority figures or popular books. Conze's work on the Prajñāpāramitā is a case in point. 

While we are on the subject of idiosyncrasies, Tanahashi's frequent translation of śūnyatā as "zeroness" (alongside other translations) is deeply problematic. I commented on idiosyncratic translations in my review of Thich Nhat Hanh's new translation of the Heart Sutra. A translator always has difficult choices to make but, rather than being an exercise in self-expression on the part of the author, translation must prioritise the needs of the reader, especially the reader who does not know the source language. When a jargon term has a standard or widely accepted translation, the translators ought to be constrained to follow it, unless there is some good reason not to. In which case they must explain in detail what that reason is and leave plenty of signposts for the reader so that they can join the dots. To my knowledge, no other translator has ever suggested "zeroness" as a translation of śūnyatā and, in my view, it conveys utterly the wrong impression. The new translation of the Heart Sutra featured in the book uses "boundlessness" which says more about modern (Romantic) Zen concerns than it does about the way that Prajñāpāramitā authors saw śūnyatā, i.e., in terms of the absence of svabhāva. The problems of an apposition between a substantive and an abstract noun I noted in my Form is Emptiness essays seems to apply even more in this case: "form is zeroness" looks exactly like nihilism. And it leads to mutant translations such as "(Avalokiteśvara saw five skandhas and) perceived them as zero-like self-nature." [sic] (156 ). On p.157 Tanahashi seems to have become confused by the fact that later on Indian mathematicians used śūnya as a word for "zero", because in this context it clearly refers to absence (of svabhāva), just as it does in some early Buddhist texts.

In the book there is no discussion on what the differences between the versions of the text might signify. So the reader is left with multiple conflicting versions of a well-known text without any commentary that might help us make sense of the differences. It's not necessary to argue for a definitive version because there may not ever have been one. But Tanahashi could have spelled out which are the most important versions and tried to explain the significance of the differences between them. For example, what does it mean when one version of a text includes a passage that no other version includes? Textual criticism would usually see such passages as interpolations: chunks of texts that have been added to one version only, and not passed on in other versions. The presence of just such a passage is what disqualifies T250 as the "α version".

Tanahashi says that he accepts Nattier's Chinese origins thesis, but if he does accept Nattier's thesis then it does not show in his exegesis. None of the explanations that she provided for some of the back-translations, for example, make it into Tanahashi's exegesis. There are places where it might have been useful, such as the case of 究竟涅槃 or niṣṭhānirvāṇapraptaḥ (Tanahashi 186-7; cf Nattier 1992: 178). This phrase is natural in Chinese, but extremely awkward in Sanskrit. This is a key part of the evidence for the text having been composed in Chinese and then translated into Sanskrit by someone who was unfamiliar with the Sanskrit idioms of Prajñāpāramitā texts. An Indian Buddhist composing in Sanskrit would not come up with this phrase. Nor does it occur in the Prajñāpāramitā literature. If Tanahashi accepts Nattier's thesis, why not make use of the observations that flow from it? 

In a previous essay I pointed out some minor errors in the book. But of considerable concern is the author's weakness in Sanskrit. Although he purports to be translating and interpreting the Sanskrit text for the reader, he seems not to be at home in Sanskrit, by any means. Indeed, he often seems to be relying on third parties to inform his explanations of Sanskrit. This means that he makes a number of basic grammatical (syntactical and morphological) and etymological errors. Some examples include:

• On p. 148 the author asserts that "śvara is an adjective meaning 'delight in'." There is no word śvara श्वर in Sanskrit. The second form of the name Avalokateśvara (avalokita-īśvara) is Avalokitasvara (avalokita-svara) where svara, स्वर, means "sound". There is no form with aśvara अश्वर (also not a word) or with asvara अस्वर. See Avalokiteśvara & The Heart Sutra (24 April 2015)
• On p. 193 he describes mantra as "related to the verb mant". The verbal root is √man, the verb is manyate. The t in mantra comes from the instrumental suffix -tra and the etymology of the word is man-tra, "that which facilitates thought".
• On p. 156 the author gives a number of elaborate definitions of the verb paśyati, "behold, look at, perceive or notice". This is taken directly from Monier-Williams's Dictionary (MW) where these are the senses in which the word is used in the Ṛgveda (Something beginners often misunderstand is that MW places the older definitions first in each entry). But he has missed out the very first definition, and in this case by far the most apposite definition from MW, i.e., "to see". In practice "see" is the most common sense of the word in general Sanskrit, especially in a Buddhist context - it would be unusual to translate it as anything other than "see". And this is what a non-Sanskrit speaking person needs to know. One cannot just translate from the dictionary, one has to have a feel for how the language is used in practice!
• On p.153-5 the author has divided the phrase vyavalokayati sma pañcaskandhās tāṃś ca svabhāvaśūnyan paśyati sma in the wrong place, creating a phrase that starts with ca - this is forbidden by Sanskrit grammar (this is very basic Sanskrit). The two phrases are vyavalokayati sma pañcaskandhāṃs ([Avalokiteśvara] examined the five skandhas); and tāṃś ca svabhāvaśūnyan paśyati sma (...and he saw that they lack self-existence). Here the metaphor SEEING IS KNOWING probably applies, i.e., "[he] examined the five skandhas and understood they lacked self-existence." I deal with this sentence in detail in Attwood (2015).

These are just examples I have scribbled in the margins of my copy. There are many more. Another problematic area is the commentary on the formula rūpaṃ śūnyatā śūnyataiva rūpam (158-62). Here the author has mixed up the text, misunderstood which bits of the different versions correspond to which, and fluffed the Sanskrit etymologies. The result is a disastrous muddle. There are three pairs of phrases in the Sanskrit Heart Sutra, but only two pairs in the Chinese (T250, T251) and the 25,000 line text in both Chinese and Sanskrit. Tanahashi knows that one of the three pairs is the odd one out, but he chooses the wrong pair so that his commentary is on the pair that is left out, but connected to the pairs that remain. 

It seems that no one who with a good knowledge of Sanskrit proofread the book. No one fact checked Tanahashi's assertions about the Sanskrit text. No doubt this would have been expensive and added to the cost of the book and lengthened the production process, but the result is rather poor and often misleading. In a book promoted as a comprehensive guide to the most popular Mahāyānist text, you'd think it would merit careful attention. Sadly not. What we have here is another Zen translator attempting to pass himself off as able to translate an important text from Sanskrit without really knowing Sanskrit. And since their peers know even less Sanskrit, the practice can continue because if you pack a book with grammatical jargon and etymologies it looks like you know what you are talking about. 

Where the book does better is in describing the cultural context of early Medieval China. Though even here it now seems very dated and superficial in the light of Paul Copp's book on the cult of dhāraṇī in early Medieval China (2014). Copp sheds a good deal of light on the Chinese practice of using short texts for inscriptions and manuscripts to avert misfortune and create good fortune. Tanahashi manages to convey that the text was used in this way, but not why. 

As I mentioned, reviews praise the scholarship of the author. The book's blurb says that the line by line (in fact, phrase by phrase) analysis provides "a deeper understanding of the history and etymology of the elusive words than is generally available to the nonspecialist". Unfortunately, the non-specialist is in no position to evaluate the information being presented to them, either. The dust jacket endorsement attributed to Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara declares the books "unsurpassable!" In fact, it could easily be surpassed simply by correcting the many errors. Few non-academics are able to appreciate what good scholarship looks like and thus are unable to see limitations and deficits in this book. An accumulation of detail (often erroneous detail), without any real attempt make sense of it, is not scholarship, it is more like stamp collecting. Scholarship involves the critical evaluation of what one has collected and trying to communicate insights that derive from that evaluation. Tanahashi's book is like a stamp collection. Everything is nicely displayed, but some of the labels are wrong, and there is nothing to say why these particular stamps are important or useful. 

The book includes a new translation composed with help from Joan Halifax (3-4). Like the translation produced by Thich Nhat Hanh, this one paraphrases the text to try to make it more consistent with modern Zen concerns. The result is another padded out, turgid pseudo-poem. The Heart Sutra itself is not comprehensible without considerable contextualisation (and possibly not even then). As with previous translations this translation fails to see the text as a Prajñāpāramitā text and sees it, instead, in sectarian terms as a Zen text. On one hand, this is not such a bad thing. If one is trying to communicate something to an audience of modern Zen Buddhists, then one uses terms and ideas that they will understand. Commentators (both ancient and modern) typically use the Heart Sutra as a floating signifier to carry a message that is independent of the words and aimed at promoting a sectarian view of Buddhism. In which case, the author would ideally be clear that this is what they were doing. Tanahashi is not clear on this point. The book pretends to be a non-sectarian work that gives the reader a "deeper understanding... of the elusive words", but it fails on two counts: firstly, the information about the words is frequently inaccurate; and, secondly, the commentary is all too often not elucidating the words of the text, but instead expounding the ideology of Zen seen through the lens of Romanticism.

In one case the translation mistakes the object of a verb and thus mistranslates. Where the text says that dharmas do not arise or pass away, the author and his co-author translate this as śūnyatā not arising and passing away. This might be doctrinally sound, but it is not what the text says, either in Chinese or Sanskrit. Nor does it say that "Boundlessness is the nature of all things". The Chinese text is 是諸法空相 "All dharmas are marked with emptiness" or sarvadharmāḥ śūnyatālakṣanā. Anyone familiar with Buddhist Chinese will recognise 空相 as the equivalent of Sanskrit śūnyatā-lakṣana. The concept of "nature" has sneaked in here, giving the text an ontological twist, i.e., a speculation about the nature of dharmas, rather than a statement about the observed characteristics of them. The sheer number of such problems makes reading the book an exercise in exasperation for an informed reader.

I have written to the publishers to point out some of the many mistakes I have noted above, but without much hope that I can repair the damage done. Shambala have not responded to my emails. In the end the book is very disappointing. I certainly disagree with Zoketsu Norman Fisher when he says on the back cover blurb that "this astonishing work of loving scholarship... is a must-have for any serious Dharma student". It is an astonishing work, but for all the wrong reasons. The best one can say about it, is that it is reasonably priced. 

It's a real shame that this book falls so very far short of the claims for it. There really is no good book on the Heart Sutra in English and thus another opportunity has been lost to open up the fascinating history of this text to the general public in a meaningful way. People often ask me what book I would recommend and I keep having to say that I cannot recommend any book on the Heart Sutra. Indeed, I find myself warning people not to read books. Don't read Red Pine, for example. Don't read Conze, D T Suzuki, or Mu Seong. Don't, because the books are poorly researched and written. They won't help you understand the text or put the words into practice and they will certainly mislead you in ways that will be difficult to detect if you don't read Sanskrit and (Buddhist) Chinese. I haven't read commentaries by the Dalai Lama or Thich Nhat Hanh, but going on the latter's translation I would not recommend him either. One is probably better off not reading this book, either.

It is ironic, given the iconic status of this text, that the best scholarship is ignored and the worst is wildly popular. Donald Lopez's two books (1988, 1996) on the late Indian commentaries preserved in Tibetan certainly offer some insights, but those commentaries are sectarian and rather difficult to understand and interpret. Similarly with more recent translations of the earlier Chinese commentaries by Xuanzang's students Woncheuk and Kuījī (Hyun Choo 2006, Shih & Lusthaus 2006). The best one can do at this stage is read Jan Nattier's 1992 article (being sure to read all of the footnotes carefully), and Paul Copp's (2014) book on dhāraṇī. This at least opens some doors and gives one a sense that the popular view of the text does not hold water. I've written nearly 30 essays on the Heart Sutra and related texts covering certain details of the text, but a truly comprehensive, critical study of the Heart Sutra in its own right as a Prajñāpāramitā text, sadly does not yet exist. Quite surprising given the manifest popularity of the text. 

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Attwood, Jayarava. (2015). Heart Murmurs: Some Problems with Conze’s Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya. Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, 8, 28-48. http://ocbs.org/ojs/index.php/jocbs/article/view/104/123

Copp, Paul. (2014) The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism. Columbia University Press.

Hyun Choo, B. (2006) 'An English Translation of the Banya paramilda simgyeong chan: Wonch'uk's Commentary on the Heart Sūtra (Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya-sūtra)'. International Journal of Buddhist Thought & Culture, 6: 121-205.

Lopez, Donald S. (1988). The Heart Sūtra Explained: Indian and Tibetan Commentaries. State University of New York Press.

Lopez, Donald S. (1996). Elaborations on Emptiness: Uses of the Heart Sutra. Princeton University Press.

Nattier, Jan (1992). 'The Heart Sūtra: a Chinese apocryphal text?' Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. 15 (2) 153-223. Online: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ojs/index.php/jiabs/article/view/8800/2707.

Shih, Heng-Ching & Lusthaus, Dan. (2006). A Comprehensive Commentary on the Heart Sutra (Prajnaparamita-hyrdaya-sutra). Numata Center for Buddhist Translation & Research.

Tanahashi, Kazuki. (2014). The Heart Sutra: A Comprehensive Guide to the Classic of Mahayana Buddhism. Shambala.

Freewill is Back on the Menu

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

- Mary Midgley.

I don't find freewill a particularly interesting problem, but it does come up from time to time. Because it is essential to Buddhist ethics, I've ended up writing about it a few times despite my reluctance, mainly to try to counter what I see as a pernicious trend to Determinism amongst Buddhists influenced by Advaita Vedanta. My essays on the subject include: Do We Have Freewill?(6 Feb 2015), A Sutta on Freewill Experience and Free Will in Early Buddhism (4 Apr 2014). The problem has become a cause célèbre amongst scientists since the 1980s when Benjamin Libet (1916-2007) first published results of his experiments on the so-called "readiness potential". The correct interpretation of these experiments has always been hotly disputed, though Determinists seldom cite any dissenting voices when they reference this material (so readers might be unaware of the controversy). We have seen a number of physicists in recent years citing Libet in the media and in books for the general public as "proving" that there is no free will. But as Peter Clarke observes:

Despite the fame of the Libet experiment and its frequent acceptance in popular and semi-popular writings, it has been the subject of intense controversy. Indeed, most specialists in the philosophy of free will who have addressed the Libet claim have rejected it. (2013)

Philosophers and physicists seem to fall out in public quite often these days. See, for example, Goldhill (2016) for a typical complaint about facile arguments from prominent physicists on the subject of philosophy. Physicists seem to take a perverse delight in dismissing philosophy out of hand, but often show their deep ignorance in the process. Stephen Hawking infamously declared philosophy dead. Paraphrasing Goldhill, this is a very stupid thing for a very smart person to say. Which just goes to show that smart people do make mistakes and do say stupid things. We can't just abdicate the responsibility for evaluating what people say, even when they are experts. As Richard Feynman said, "science is the belief in the ignorance of experts". And if we are not in a position to judge, then we can always seek out those who are and get their opinion. Unfortunately, physicists are often seen as authorities and thus their views on philosophy are widely taken seriously, even when they are out of their depth and saying stupid things. 

In this essay, sparked by a blog by Deric's MindBlog, I will outline Libet's findings, explore some responses from other scholars, and look at the philosophical implications. We might not be able to put to rest the wailing of "there is no free will" by Determinists, but we can at least give them something to chew on for a while.

Libet's Experiments

Libet was investigating the phenomenon of readiness potential (RP). The RP is a slowish build up of electrical potential in the brain, measured at the scalp over the motor cortex by an electroencephalograph (EEG). It occurs a second or more before people make voluntary movements. As the name suggests, this build up of electric potential was assumed to be the brain "getting ready" to initiate a movement. Libet was interested in the timing of the RP and the decision to move.

Libet's classic experiments (Libet 1985, Libet et al. 1983) asked people to make a simple movement, usually flexing their hand or wrist. The subjects were instructed to move whenever they felt like it (within a 20 sec window). At the same time they observed the position of a spot moving in a circle on an oscilloscope screen and reported the position of the spot when they felt the "urge to move". What he found was that there was a delay of some 200 milliseconds (ms) between becoming consciously aware of an urge to move and the actual movement. However, the readiness potential began to build up 350-500 ms earlier.

Note, this is a very short-range phenomenon. The voltage measured on the scalp is in the order of a few micro-volts (10^-6 V). The amplitude drops off sharply. Another few centimetres from the scalp and the electrical activity would be undetectable (so no, this is not a mechanism for telepathy!). Indeed, one of the drawbacks of EEG for measuring brain activity is that it doesn't detect electrical activity below the cortex layer. The technique is also poor at localising the activity - multiple electrodes and sophisticated analysis of the activity can improve this, but EEG is still a pretty blunt instrument. The technique is famous for the early discovery that the activity in the cortex occurs in waves.

Libet controversially interpreted the initiation of the readiness potential as the "decision" to move, the point where the brain unconsciously began preparing to move. Becoming conscious of an "urge to move" came significantly later, and then, finally, the action itself was initiated, the whole process taking almost half a second. In this interpretation, the experience of willing our hand to move comes quite a long time after the brain has decided to move. In other words, the experience of willing our hand to move is a secondary feature in the process. Hence, freewill, interpreted as contra-causal freewill, is not what initiates a voluntary movement.

Contra-causal Freewill

I was alerted to idea of contra-causal freewill by reading Patricia Churchland's book Touching A Nerve: The Self as Brain (2013) in which she argues against it. Contra-causal freewill is the idea that we have an abstract capacity called "will" that is like the executive branch of the abstract capacity of "reason". To be considered contra-causally free, this capacity to make decisions or initiate actions must be free from any influences other than itself. Specifically, emotions, motivations, desires, goals, and knowledge must be excluded as potential influences. If any of these influence our decision making then, in this view, our will is not free. Thus for Libet, if some unconscious part of the brain is making the decision to move and then placing the idea in our conscious minds, then even though our brain is still making a decision, it does not count as free will because it is not based on the abstract reasoning capacity.

Any long time readers of this blog will know that this definition of free will is suspect at best. There are two main problems with it. Firstly, the definition makes an egregious mistake in considering reason to be an abstract capacity. I follow Lakoff and Johnson in taking reason to be a function of an embodied mind. Reasoning specifically uses metaphors grounded in our experience of the world to enable abstraction. It is not that we have an abstract capacity for reason, but that we have an embodied capacity for abstraction. Research by Antonio and Hannah Damasio (amongst others) has shown that emotions are involved in all decision making. As I have explained it, emotions tell us how salient any fact is to our decision making process (see Facts and Feelings, 25 may 2012). There is simply no plausible way for contra-causal freewill to operate. Secondly, the definition involved legacy understandings of how reasoning works. I also follow Mercier and Sperber in seeing reasoning as an argumentative capacity. It is well known that individuals are generally very poor at reasoning tasks. Most of us do not to make rational decisions and when we try to, we almost inevitably fall into cognitive bias or logical fallacy. On individual tests of reasoning, we frequently score worse than random guessing. The long lists of cognitive biases and common logical fallacies that we are prone to bear stark witness to this. Reasoning is not activated until we are assessing someone else's argument or retrospectively justifying our own actions (see An Argumentative Theory of Reason, 10 May 2013). 

As Churchland has said, contra-causal freewill is not particularly interesting. Even if the experiment showed that we do not have contra-causal freewill, this would still not be interesting as the concept is a legacy of a bygone era that has no place in modern discussions about the mind or morality. Clearly, many scientists are poorly informed on developments in philosophy because they think philosophy is worthless. They cannot be relied on, in general, to be guides to the philosophy of freewill. This is an important caveat when considering this question. My suspicion is that the criticism cuts both ways. That as much as philosophers like to comment on science, they are often too poorly informed about it to be trustworthy guides to it. All too many philosophers in this field seem to be ontological dualists who do not believe that studying neurons can tell us how the mind works, for example. Sorting out whether or not any individual commentator on this issue makes sense is really quite difficult. No doubt I am also a poor guide to this issue. However, other scholars have been trying to reproduce Libet's experiments and assessing his interpretation of the results since it was published. And we can turn to them to get some balance.

Re-evaluating Libet.

As I say, the interpretation of Libet's experiments has been the subject of intense controversy since they were first published. It seems, from my outsider point-of-view, as though physicists have lined up to say that they prove that human beings are Deterministic and that there is no freewill. But even casually reading around this subject we see that philosophers have lined up to deny that Libet tells us anything about freewill.

For example, what exactly is a voluntary movement? Peter Clarke (2013), for example, cites the example of a tennis player serving a ball. The decision to serve may be voluntary and the movement of the arm might even be partially under conscious control, but the myriad movements that coordinate the whole body as it moves and balances to support the motion of serving are almost entirely unconscious. The motions that direct the ball to the precise location on the opposite player's court are mostly not under the direct control of the player. Tennis players have developed a kind of reflex that allows them to serve accurately at speeds that does not require conscious thought. Indeed, in many sports, we know that thinking too much about key muscle movements is counter-productive. So, is serving the ball a voluntary act? I get this playing the guitar. I train my fingers to find and pluck the notes I want so that I don't have to think about them and this enables me to sing at the same time. If I was consciously seeking out notes on the fretboard and dredging up lyrics and all the other components of articulation and delivery, I could not play the simplest tune, let alone something as complex as, say, the Beatles' tune Blackbird. The assumption that a decision to act cannot occur without being conscious of it is deeply problematic. In playing a tune like Blackbird, I initiate hundreds of actions with no consciousness of doing so because my attention is usually elsewhere. So this question is far from trivial and it ought to make us pause before considering what it means for an experimental subject to make a "voluntary movement". Even if Libet relies on a single movement, how do we know that this is representative, or that the experiment is able to isolate that movement from everything else that is going on in a conscious subject?

An important criticism of the Libet experiment is that it is very difficult to judge when one experiences the "urge to move". Clarke (2013) did the experiment himself and commented "When I try this, I find it very hard to judge the precise time when I decided to move my finger / wrist." Clarke describes studies on the reliability of the subjective timing of events which have shown it to be very imprecise. Additionally, the experiment involves an attention shift from the movement to the timing that "may have introduced temporal mismatches between the felt experience of will and the perceived position of the clock hand." Attempts to eliminate this mismatch have shown that the RP occurred before the "urge to move" only in about two thirds of subjects. To try to improve accuracy, the experiment was performed using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and this also showed that "the activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex was correlated with the decision [to move] with 60% prediction accuracy, up to 10 sec before the conscious decision." These findings seem to say that there cannot be a causal relationship between the RP and the "urge to move", else it would occur every time. In which case Libet appears to have misinterpreted what the RP is.

Clarke (2013) lists a number of other published criticisms of the Libet experiments. Firstly, Libet takes the RP to represent a decision to move; i.e., he believes that there is a causal connection between the beginning of the RP and the action, if and when it comes. However, it appears that there is no neural connection between the areas that build up potential in the RP (the sensory motor-cortex) and the parts of the brain associated with decision making (in the parietal lobe). Thus, in addition to there being a disconnect in practice, there is no obvious mechanism for the RP to cause the urge to move, either.

Secondly, if the RP was the cause of the movement, then we would expect a strong correlation between the timing of the onset of RP and the timing of the urge to move. But this correlation does not occur. Experiments to test this seem to rule out the RP as cause of the urge to move, though not of the movement itself. So, at the very least, the mechanism proposed by Libet has a missing link. And that link might play an active role in the process (i.e., might be directly causal).

Alfred Mele offers a third criticism of the Libet experimental set up, noted by Clarke (2013). In Libet's experiments, the data was only stored when a movement is initiated. Libet collected no data on what happened if the subject decided not to move. This vitiates his finding because it's entirely possible to prepare to move, which would presumably initiate an RP, and then not experience the urge to move. If an RP can exist and not give rise to an urge to move, then RP may not related to the urge to move at all. This possibility ought to have been excluded, but was not. A variation on the experiment by Trevena and Miller did collect data on cases where the decision was made not to move. The RP was the same whether they moved or not. And this suggests that RP does exist without giving rise to the urge to move, or an action, which undermines Libet's conclusion that RP represents a decision to move. 

A fourth weakness was pointed out by Hermann, et al. They set the experiment up as a decision to press one of two buttons in response to a stimulus. They also found the RP appearing before the urge to move occurred, but the RP occurred even before the stimulus appeared and thus is unlikely to have been related to a decision about which button to press. Again, the evidence points away from a coupling of RP and the urge to move. In fact, Schurger, et al (2012) showed the decision to move occurs very late in the course of the RP, not at the initiation of it.

Libet himself argued that his interpretation showed that, although freewill in the sense of consciously initiating actions was ruled out, we still had the option of inhibiting actions between the initiation of the RP (what he called the decision to move) and the urge to move. Some people called this "free-won't". This might be an interesting thread to follow up, except that considering the various critiques of Libet's experiment and interpretation, it seems that treating the initiation of the RP as the decision point makes no sense.

The real nail in the coffin, however, was published in Feb 2016 (just a couple of weeks ago as I write this). Libet was focussed on spontaneous voluntary movements (SVM) and it turns out that these are rather different in their underlying dynamic than movements initiated in response to a stimulus. Citing from Deric Brown's blog:

"A new generation of experiments is now suggesting that brain activity preceding spontaneous voluntary movements (SVMs) 'may reflect the ebb and flow of background neuronal noise, rather than the outcome of a specific neural event corresponding to a ‘decision’ to initiate movement... [Several studies] have converged in showing that bounded-integration processes, which involve the accumulation of noisy evidence until a decision threshold is reached, offer a coherent and plausible explanation for the apparent pre-movement build-up of neuronal activity.'" (Shurger et al. 2016)

So what looks like a build up of "readiness potential" is, in fact, happening because of anticipating having to make a decision at some point (and in the experiment the subject is explicitly primed to do so). The actual decision is reached when background neural activity reaches a peak:

"In particular, when actions are initiated spontaneously, rather than in response to a sensory cue, the process of integration to bound is dominated by ongoing stochastic fluctuations in neural activity that influence the precise moment at which the decision threshold is reached. ... This, in turn, gives the natural but erroneous impression of a goal-directed brain process corresponding to the ‘cerebral initiation of a spontaneous voluntary act’"

In other words, if we look again at the graph of "readiness potential" the decision to move comes at the peak of neuronal activity not at the onset of the RP. The RP is an accumulation of more or less random neuronal activity. This would explain some of the contradictory results mentioned above.

But, crucially, what this suggests to me is that the urge to move precedes the decision to move. The urge to move may, in fact, be an important factor in the decision to move. So it seems that Libet's interpretation of his experiment was flawed in these various ways and that freewill is back on the menu.

Conclusions

I discovered this information because I happen to read a number of neuroscience blogs and Twitter feeds and one of them happened to mention this new article by Shurger et al. (2016) which drew me into the subject anew. But there was always debate. Over what freewill means. Over what the readiness potential represents. Over the causal relationship between the readiness potential and the urge to move; or between the RP and the actual movement. Over Libet's experimental methods.

This experiment is so often presented with a one-sided interpretation, with no mention of the mass of contradictory evidence that make Libet's interpretation look doubtful. There is no mention of the intense debate that has ensued. Any reader could be forgiven for thinking that it was an open and shut case or that Libet had definitively shown that freewill could not exist. But this was never the case. The interpretation of the experiment could never be considered unequivocal proof of anything. The weakness of Libet's experimental design and the many contra-indications for Libet's interpretation of the readiness potential as a decision or even as causal, ought to have been given more prominence in the discussion of freewill.

Most scientists are aware of the problem with "proving" an hypothesis anyway. As Karl Popper observed, an hypothesis can really only be disproved or a conjecture refuted. A scientific theory may make more or less accurate predictions. For example, the Higgs Boson has not in fact been proved to exist. However, the theory (The Standard Model of Particle Physics) did predict a particle would be found in a certain energy range and such a particle was found in the Large Hadron Collider. So the theory survives another test, and we now try to test other predictions that it makes. The theory could fail at any point, and many scientists hope that it does, because that would make their work far more interesting and open up the field to new discoveries. The failure of the Standard Model would initiate a golden age of inquiry into the nature of the universe. Scientists are frankly bored by the idea that everything has been discovered. Which is the opposite of how they are sometimes portrayed and the opposite of religious approaches to knowledge. 

When so-called scientists give a biased presentation of an issue, citing only the evidence for their interpretation and avoiding even mentioning that there is considerable evidence against it, then that is a kind of fraud. Scientists committing such fraud ought to be censured by their peers. False statements ought to be retracted. And I think in this area of freewill many scientists are guilty of this kind of fraud. And many laypeople have repeated the fraudulent claims and perpetuated a falsehood.

In this the public have been extremely badly served by lazy journalists who have simply failed to report the experimental evidence. Whether this also amounts to fraud depends on your point of view. I see the primary function of journalism as being entertainment. Entertainers are always allowed some "poetic licence" to deceive us about facts if the version of events they present is more entertaining than reality. Hollywood films almost always distort history because the real story is often boring. Science journalists are a mixed bag and you never know which kind of story you are reading, but these days I just assume, with very few exceptions, that if a journalist is writing they are seeking to entertain rather than inform.

There will be those who cite this case as showing that the scientific method is broken. That in overturning a previous interpretation of the data science has proved that it cannot be trusted. To my mind, it says completely the opposite. This is science in action. This is the scientific process at work. The overturning of previous interpretations is part and parcel of embracing science. What we think we knew today is quite likely to be overturned tomorrow. For the religieux seeking certain knowledge and believing that they have found it, this seems anathema. That knowledge could be transient and contingent makes it seem untrustworthy. Religion is predicated on the idea of absolute knowledge, from which comes certainty, and relaxation, as all mysteries are resolved in the long run. But that is an impossible fantasy. In the real world, things are messy. Knowledge is never absolute. There is always the possibility of being wrong.

Religieux seem very uneasy with the idea that they might be wrong. Buddhists, in particular, seem to find this concept deeply troubling. Scientists, by contrast, embrace uncertainty and the principle that all knowledge may be overturned by a better explanation. Science progresses by testing ideas to destruction. This attitude of contingency with respect to knowledge of the world is, in fact, far more in keeping with Buddhist ideology. Most Buddhists appear to believe that the world can be understood in absolute terms, that the Buddha was omniscient in this sense, and that the Dharma is an expression of this absolute knowledge, i.e., that it represents absolute truth. They further believe that we can come to this absolute knowledge through introspection and believe that we cannot come to knowledge through examining the world. I have been told by a colleague, for example, that "no amount of study of the brain will ever tell us anything about the mind". Which is just Cartesian Dualism, as far as I can see, and thus a thesis that has already been soundly refuted.

However, despite having cast considerable doubt on the Libet interpretation, this is not the end of the story. There are other arguments against free will that are much more difficult to tackle than Libet's and his Determinist fans, for example, the argument by Sabine Hossenfelder on the Backreaction blog. I don't necessarily agree that arguments from fundamental laws eliminate the possibility of unexpected emergent properties that are indistinguishable from free will, but she still makes a strong argument for anyone who acknowledges the laws of physics. And so the arguments will go on. But as religieux we do need to be wary of pursuing a conjecture only because it supports our doctrine. Freewill is interesting because without it Buddhist ethics would be meaningless. If we seek only to bolster our view, rather than to seek the truth, then the possibility of being wrong is excluded and we are unlikely to accept that we have been wrong when the evidence becomes unequivocal. I see this happening in the area of the afterlife, for example. Intelligent people must always hold to the possibility of being wrong. But intelligent people are also the most reluctant to reconsider their considered views. Intelligent religious people are the worst. 

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Alexander, P., et al. (2016) Readiness potentials driven by non-motoric processes. Consciousness and Cognition, 39: 38–47. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2015.11.011

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

Clarke, P. G. H. (2013). The Libet Experiment and its Implications for Conscious Will. Faraday Paper No. 17. Faraday Institute for Science and Religion. http://www.bethinking.org/download/faraday-paper-17-clarke-en

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Goldhill, O. (2016). Why are so many smart people such idiots about philosophy? Quartz. March 05, http://qz.com/627989/why-are-so-many-smart-people-such-idiots-about-philosophy/

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Additional reading

Fischborn, Marcelo (2016) Libet-style experiments, neuroscience, and libertarian free will. Philosophical Psychology. 1(9) doi: 10.1080/09515089.2016.1141399

"The general result is that neuroscience and psychology could in principle undermine libertarian free will, but that Libet-style experiments have not done that so far."