Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy

Empty Persons

Mark Siderits

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351911894
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Criticism

Since the publication of Mark Siderits' important book in 2003, much has changed in the field of Buddhist philosophy. There has been unprecedented growth in analytic metaphysics, and a considerable amount of new work on Indian theories of the self and personal identity has emerged. Fully revised and updated, and drawing on these changes as well as on developments in the author's own thinking, Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy, second edition explores the conversation between Buddhist and Western Philosophy showing how concepts and tools drawn from one philosophical tradition can help solve problems arising in another. Siderits discusses afresh areas involved in the philosophical investigation of persons, including vagueness and its implications for personal identity, recent attempts by scholars of Buddhist philosophy to defend the attribution of an emergentist account of personhood to at least some Buddhists, and whether a distinctively Buddhist antirealism can avoid problems that beset other forms of ontological anti-foundationalism.

Chapter 1

Situating Reductionism

This work concerns Reductionism and its consequences. A Reductionist (that is, a reductionist about persons) holds that the existence of a person is really nothing more than just the existence of certain other kinds of things.¹ In this respect it is not unlike saying that a pool of water really just is a mass of H₂O molecules, or that a bolt of lightning really just is a series of electrical discharges. Reductionism about persons is thus a type of ontological reductionism: it holds that a certain sort of thing that is ordinarily thought to exist turns out to be reducible to certain other sorts of things that are in some sense ontologically more basic. Before investigating the consequences of Reductionism, it is important to be clear about just what it might mean to say that something is reducible to other kinds of things. Reductionists typically say that a thing of kind K just is a set of ‘im-Kish’ things when assembled in a certain way. The ‘is’ of just is suggests identity, but the ‘just’ suggests that the K lacks the ontological robustness required for identity. So there is something of a mystery here. In this chapter we will first investigate a Buddhist framework that may shed some light on ontological reductionisms in general; then we will look at how this applies to the case of persons.

Ontological Reductionism

Suppose that the users of a given discourse regularly refer to things of kind K. There are three possible views one might take with respect to the ontological status of Ks. One might be a non-reductionist about Ks, holding that things of this sort belong in our final ontology – that the Ks will be among the items that must be mentioned in any complete theory about the nature of reality. Or one might be an eliminativist about Ks, holding that belief in the existence of Ks within the discourse community is wholly the product of the acceptance of a false theory. Finally, one might be a reductionist about Ks, holding that while Ks may be said in a sense to exist (pace the eliminativist), their existence just consists in the existence of things of a more basic sort, things of which the Ks are composed, so that (pace the non-reductionist) Ks do not belong in our final ontology. Now it may not be immediately apparent that this third sort of view is a genuine option. Quine, for instance, denied that a distinction may be drawn between what is here called reductionism and eliminativism.² To see why the reductionist is not just a very diplomatic eliminativist, we must say more about what motivates first the non-reductionist, and then the eliminativist. This should help to clear the land between the two for possible occupation by the reductionist.

A non-reductionist about Ks believes that things of that kind are not mere fictions or mental constructions (like Santa Claus), but are ultimately real, that is, make up part of the furniture of the universe as it is, independent of our theorizing about its nature.³ What sorts of reasons might be given for such a claim? Suppose someone were a non-reductionist about corporations. They would then hold that while our final ontology contains persons and inanimate objects (such as buildings and machines, or whatever might be the ultimate constituents of buildings and machines), any theory that only referred to persons and inanimate objects and did not also refer to corporations would be radically incomplete. They might, for instance, claim that being an officer of a corporation has certain characteristic effects on individual psychology that cannot be explained just in terms of the physical and psychological interactions of the individual with other members of the corporation. It might likewise be claimed that only in this way can we understand how an individual might come to be morally obligated to provide reparation for a past injustice that they were not a party to (because the injustice occurred at a time when they were not a member of the corporation).⁴ The corporation must be granted admission to the ontological inner circle, they would claim, since it has genuinely autonomous causal and explanatory powers that cannot be reduced to the causal and explanatory powers of its members.

Other sorts of reasons might be given for non-reductionism about corporations. It might be claimed, for instance, that a corporation cannot be reduced to the persons who are its members and the physical objects that are its property, since a corporation can continue to exist through the replacement of all its original members and property by new members and property (provided the replacement process is gradual enough). As we shall see, however, the reductionist has a ready reply to this claim. Moreover, the non-reductionist will face a serious challenge concerning the seeming lack of empirical evidence for their ontological claim: when we observe what is called a corporation, we always seem to perceive individual persons and property and never this supposedly extra thing, the corporation. Given this difficulty, it seems best for the non-reductionist to rest the case for their ontological claim chiefly on the grounds that the corporation has genuinely autonomous causal and explanatory powers.

What sorts of reasons might be given for an eliminativist view about Ks? Since no one is likely to be an eliminativist about the corporation,⁵ let us consider instead the eliminativist about disease-causing demons – the supposedly incorporeal entities that were once thought to be the agents of various human diseases. We may imagine that within a community that shares this medical theory, people regularly refer to such demons, and there are specialists who have learned to identify particular kinds of demons. Thus the appropriately trained specialists would agree that a patient with high fever and chronic coughing suffers from possession by the blue lizard-lipped demon, while one with a low-grade fever, chronic coughing, and blood in the sputum suffers from possession by the yellow pin-feather demon. Let us also suppose that various treatments have been fashioned, different ones depending on which sort of demon is thought to be responsible for the patient’s malady, and that these are often at least marginally effective.

The eliminativist about demons would obviously claim that demons do not exist. For we now know that diseases are caused by microbial infection, not demonic possession, and our only reason for supposing there to be demons had to do with the explanatory role they played in the now discredited theory. But then what explains the ability of speakers to learn to refer to distinct kinds of demons, and of specialists to tailor (marginally) effective treatment to the identity of demon type? If demons really were invented out of whole cloth, then these abilities may seem somewhat mysterious. Might it not be that the term ‘demon’ was actually this community’s rather confused way of referring to microbial pathogens? The eliminativist will resist this last suggestion, on the grounds that demons are simply too unlike microbes for the identity to go through. Demons have malicious intent, for instance, while microbes do not. And while both theories agree that pathogens may be perceived and identified by means of specialist techniques, the techniques that are prescribed could not be more different: according to the demonic possession theory, ingestion of certain herbs by the specialist; according to the microbe theory, culturing of patient tissue, followed by staining and microscopic inspection or DNA sequencing. Now that we accept the microbial theory, belief in demons cannot be retained, even in the guise of a limited perspective on the truth. While talk of demons did perform a systematizing role that must have connected up, somehow or other, with the manifest effects of microbial infection, the theory in which such talk is ensconced is simply incompatible with the theory we now accept. Demons must be eliminated.

What happens, though, when the theories are not so clearly incompatible? We know of many episodes in the history of science in which one theory is neither wholly eliminated in favour of another, nor simply absorbed into the other. Let us look at one such case – that of the theory of the covalent bond and quantum mechanics. This is, of course, a classic case of intertheoretic reduction in the sciences, and for that very reason it may suggest requirements for successful reduction that prove too stringent. It is, though, at least a place to begin if we wish to see some daylight between non-reductionism and eliminativism.

When we say that the theory of the covalent bond (a theory that is central to organic chemistry) may be reduced to quantum mechanics, we are making a certain claim about the relation between two theories: talk of covalent bonds may be systematically replaced (through the employment of so-called bridge laws) by talk of certain quantum mechanical states, in such a way that the latter theory is thereby shown to explain the predictive success of the former. Some caution is required in interpreting this result. It does not show that the covalent bond is a quantum mechanical state. For the covalent bond is a feature of certain molecules, and molecules are not among the objects of study of quantum physics. The relevant bridge laws do not simply take us from talk of covalent bonds to talk of quantum shifts and leave everything else unchanged; instead they take us from the domain of chemistry to the very different domain of quantum mechanics, from talk of enduring atoms composing molecules to talk of wave functions. The straightforward identification of the covalent bond with quantum phenomena does not seem to be an option. On the other hand, neither does outright elimination of one theory or the other seem to be in the cards. However, since quantum mechanics is a well-confirmed theory that has a wide variety of applications far beyond the case of the covalent bond, it appears to have the upper hand here. Given this, two questions arise: (1) why not simply declare chemistry to be superfluous, and eliminate it in favour of quantum mechanics? Moreover, (2) why not ‘lighten’ our ontology by retaining quantum mechanical states (which shall be needed in any event) and dismiss the covalent bond from our ultimate ontology?⁶ These are distinct questions calling for separate answers, and this point is important to our understanding of reductionism. Question (1) concerns which sorts of theory we should accept as true, while question (2) concerns what is strictly speaking real; the first is semantic, the second is ontological. We begin with (1), and shall return to (2) later.

The successful reduction of the theory of the covalent bond to quantum mechanics shows the former to be in principle dispensable, but showing this is not the same thing as giving a positive reason for eliminating the first theory. For one thing, there is not the marked incompatibility between statements of the two theories that we saw in the case of the demonic possession and microbial infection theories of disease. While it seems to us incomprehensible how germs could have the malicious intent of a demon, we think we can see how the quantum shift could underlie some of the properties we attribute to the covalent bond. Observation conditions for the two types of states seem likewise compatible. The evidence for the existence of the covalent bond was gathered without relying on the observer entering into trance states and the like. And the systematizing functions of these two theories do not appear to conflict. In the medical case, we expect there to be instances where the microbe theory requires a classificatory scheme at odds with that of the demon theory: blue demon possession turns out to be two distinct diseases, bacterial and viral pneumonia. Not only does this situation not arise in the case of chemistry and quantum mechanics, but also coming to understand the latter may help us better understand the rationale behind the former theory’s classificatory scheme. Apart from its apparent superfluousness, we do not find any positive reason to eliminate the theory of the covalent bond.

Most important, though, is the simple fact that quantum mechanics would prove an extraordinarily cumbersome tool for explaining and predicting the behaviour of (those physical systems that we treat as) organic compounds. Since we have an interest in the behaviour of these sorts of things, we would do well to retain the theory of the covalent bond. True, the theory turns out to be in principle dispensable. But there is no obvious bar deriving from quantum mechanics to its continued employment, and the theory appears to be virtually indispensable in practice. Thus there seems to be good reason to retain it.

Turning now from the semantic question (1) of the truth status of the theories to the question (2) of the ontological status of the entities posited by the theories, to say that the theory of the covalent bond is useful is not to say that the covalent bond deserves a place in our ultimate ontology alongside quantum phenomena. Given that the relevant bridge laws render certain truths of organic chemistry deducible from those of quantum mechanics, the entities and states referred to by organic chemistry turn out to lack autonomous explanatory and causal power. Since we can explain the facts of this entire domain and more with just the entities and states referred to by quantum physics, it would violate the principle of lightness to include the covalent bond in our ultimate ontology. Yet it seems odd to eliminate it from our ultimate ontology while at the same time retaining the theory that posits it. Here the nature of our reasons for retaining and not eliminating the theory of the covalent bond gives us some guidance. These reasons were thoroughly pragmatic. This suggests that the covalent bond is really just how certain sorts of quantum phenomena will appear to us given certain relevant facts about our perceptual capacities, for instance that our sense faculties are macroscopes and not microscopes; our cognitive capacities, such as that much of our thinking is algorithmic; and our interests, for example in technologies of material transformation. The physical world is fully and accurately described by the laws of microphysics. But for creatures like us, it will prove useful to treat certain portions of this world as conforming to the laws of chemistry. The reductionist about Ks typically claims that Ks just consist in something else, some ‘more particular’ sort of thing: heat just consists in mean molecular kinetic energy, lightning just consists in electrical discharges, and so on. It would be misleading to claim that the covalent bond just consists in certain quantum phenomena – the situation is much more complex than this. Still, such a statement does convey the flavour of the reductionist approach here. The covalent bond is just how we see certain stretches of the physical world, given our limited discriminatory abilities and our unwillingness to look too closely.

The covalent bond is not, then, ultimately real. Are we to be eliminativists about the covalent bond after all? Not precisely, say the reductionists. It is not, they say, wholly false to claim that covalent bonds exist – although, they hasten to add, this is just because of the way that we talk and think. The covalent bond is not in our final ontology, but it is a posit of a theory that is, while in principle dispensable, in practice indispensable (for creatures like us). This is what reductionism about the covalent bond comes to. Many will no doubt find this intermediate ontological status – neither ultimately real nor utterly unreal – mysterious. We shall shortly describe a device that is designed to dispel some of the mystery. But first we need to reflect on the strategy that was just used to distinguish between reductionism and eliminativism. This depends crucially on seeing the question of the ontological status of Ks as in part a semantic question. To say, for instance, that the covalent bond may be reduced to quantum shifts is to make a certain claim about the relation between two theories: talk of covalent bonds may be systematically replaced by talk of certain quantum mechanical states, in such a way that the latter theory may be seen to explain the predictive success of the former.⁷ By contrast, the demonic possession theory of disease does not reduce to the germ theory, for there is no way to systematically replace talk of being possessed by a certain demon with talk of microbial infection. Thus it is that we take a reductionist stance toward the covalent bond, but an eliminativist stance toward disease-causing demons. The term ‘covalent bond’ is now revealed to refer to certain distinctive sorts of quantum mechanical phenomena. So while a complete description of reality need not mention covalent bonds (whereas it would have to mention such things as quantum shifts), we may tolerate talk of such things just because the term is a useful way to refer to a certain class of quantum phenomena in which we take an interest.⁸ With demons, though, things are quite different. When we come to accept the germ theory of disease, it becomes apparent that our former talk of being possessed by demons cannot be seen as just a rough and ready way of referring to microbial infection. Whereas the covalent bond is a posit of a useful though subsumed theory, the demon is a posit of a discredited theory, hence all talk of demons is to be eliminated.

Distinguishing between reductionism and eliminativism requires introduction of the semantic dimension. But this complicates matters significantly, for success at replacing the terms of one theory with those of another is something that admits of degrees. Consider the terms ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’, which are intermediate be...