Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic

A Manifesto for the Mind Sciences and Contemplative Practice

B. Alan Wallace

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780231530323
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia orientale

A scholar of both spirituality and science proposes a radical approach to studying the mind with the goal of restoring human nature—and transcending it. Renowned Buddhist philosopher B.Alan Wallace reasserts the power of shamatha and vipashyana, traditional Buddhist meditations, to clarify the mind's role in the natural world. Raising profound questions about human nature, free will, and experience versus dogma, Wallace challenges the claim that consciousness is nothing more than an emergent property of the brain with little relation to universal events. Rather, he maintains that the observer is essential to measuring quantum systems and that mental phenomena (however conceived) influence brain function and behavior. Wallace embarks on a two-part mission: to restore human nature and to transcend it. He begins by explaining the value of skepticism in Buddhism and science and the difficulty of merging their experiential methods of inquiry. Yet Wallace also proves that Buddhist views on human nature and the possibility of free will liberate us from the metaphysical constraints of scientific materialism. He then explores the radical empiricism inspired by William James and applies it to Indian Buddhist philosophy's four schools and the Great Perfection school of Tibetan Buddhism. Since Buddhism begins with the assertion that ignorance lies at the root of all suffering and that the path to freedom is reached through knowledge, Buddhist practice can be viewed as a progression from agnosticism (not knowing) to gnosticism (knowing), acquired through the maintenance of exceptional mental health, mindfulness, and introspection. Wallace discusses these topics in detail, identifying similarities and differences between scientific and Buddhist understanding, and he concludes with an explanation of shamatha and vipashyana and their potential for realizing the full nature, origins, and potential of consciousness. "His range and depth of knowledge is astounding, and his linking of this knowledge to the practices and views of science is unique." —Arthur Zajonc, author of Catching the Light

PART I

RESTORING

OUR

HUMAN

NATURE

ONE

TOWARD A REVOLUTION IN THE MIND SCIENCES

DEFERRED DEVELOPMENT

For millennia before Galileo (1564–1642), people throughout the world gazed at the starry skies with unaided vision and sought to understand the correlations between celestial and terrestrial phenomena. Multiple systems of astrology were the fruits of their labors, but the modern science of astronomy remained beyond reach. For centuries, mathematicians sought to understand the movements of celestial bodies in accordance with the dominant worldviews of their times. But even the heliocentric system devised by Copernicus (1473–1543) was widely regarded as simply one more plausible mathematical model, for it was not experimentally better than Ptolemy’s (c. 90–168 C.E.) geocentric model. It was Galileo who introduced advanced technology for observing celestial phenomena, and his empiricism soon triumphed over the rationalism of his predecessors. The modern science of astronomy had begun.

Galileo’s astronomical use of the telescope was a pivotal point in the first revolution in the physical sciences, which began with the publication of Copernicus’s work On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543 and culminated with the publication of Newton’s (1643–1727) masterpiece, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, in 1687. After decades of rigorous observations of biological phenomena, Charles Darwin (1809–82) initiated a revolution in the life sciences in 1859 with the publication of his first classic, On the Origin of Species. This revolution took on momentum in the 1930s when Darwin’s views were synthesized with Mendelian genetics, and it has culminated in the Human Genome Project and commercial applications of genetic engineering.

The start of scientific study of the mind is dated to 1875, the year that Wilhelm Wundt (1831–1920) and William James independently established the first experimental psychology laboratories in Germany and the United States. The natural sciences were at a crossroads. Over the preceding three centuries, scientists had made dramatic advances in quantitative observations of objective physical phenomena that are independent of the human mind. Now they were faced with the challenge of studying mental phenomena, which are subjective, immeasurable with technological instruments, and difficult for multiple researchers to verify. With no scientifically rigorous means of observing mental phenomena themselves, the safest approach was to focus on the physical correlates of mental phenomena, such as neural activity and behavioral expressions.

Wundt argued for the indispensability of extending the scientific method by “perfecting our inner observation” so that introspection could be rigorously applied to the scientific study of the mind.¹ James envisioned psychology as a science of mental phenomena, including thoughts, emotions, memories, desires, volitions, perceptions, and all other conscious and unconscious mental processes.² He proposed a threefold approach, including the indirect study of the mind by way of behavior and neural correlates, and the direct study of mental phenomena themselves. Within this strategy, he declared that one should rely “first and foremost and always” on introspection, which is the sole means by which mental phenomena—and not just their objective physical correlates—can be observed.³ James was aware of the many formidable problems in adopting introspection as a viable means of scientific inquiry,⁴ but he was convinced that this was necessary in order to expand the scientific worldview to fully incorporate both subjective and objective phenomena.

Shortly after James’s death, however, American behaviorist John B. Watson (1878–1958) set the new science of mind on what he perceived as a more conservative course by equating psychology with the study of objective, physical, quantitatively measurable human behavior. Watson argued that psychology must “bury subjective subject matter [and] in trospective method.”⁵ Throughout the history of science, new methods of observation have been devised for investigating a wide variety of natural phenomena. But over the past century, the cognitive sciences have devised no rigorous means of examining mental phenomena. The revolution in the mind sciences proposed by Wundt and James never took place, and scientific methods for directly observing mental phenomena have barely surpassed folk psychology. Although behaviorism, cognitive psychology, and the neurosciences have made many advances in understanding the mind, there has been no revolution in the 130-year history of the mind sciences comparable to the revolutions in the physical and life sciences.

THE NEW SCHOLASTICISM

For centuries preceding Galileo, natural philosophy was dominated by the ideological constraints of medieval scholasticism. As a result of Aquinas’s (1225–74) grand unification of biblical theology and Aristotelian philosophy, it was assumed that the general principles of nature were already well known. The ideology of scholasticism dictated which ways of thinking were “reasonable,” and the authority of the Bible and Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) determined what kinds of experience qualified as reliable empirical evidence.

Galileo challenged the prevailing ideology by insisting that empirical evidence, based on meticulous observation and experiment, should be rationally analyzed and evaluated without the constraints of medieval dogma. Revolutionary ways of understanding the world are threatening and painful to those who are rigidly committed to the ways of the past, and Galileo’s theories met with fierce resistance. Darwin faced similar opposition when he presented his empirically based theory of natural selection, which contradicted the biblical account of the creation of species. But physics and biology have prevailed over the dogmas of the past, radically shifting our understanding of the nature of matter and life in the universe.

In his insistence on the primacy of the direct observation of mental phenomena, James expressed the revolutionary spirit of empiricism in the tradition of Galileo and Darwin. But he challenged the methodological constraints and materialistic assumptions of the prevailing mechanistic view of the universe. By 1820, classical mechanics had developed to such an extent that Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) cogently argued for a deterministic universe governed entirely by physical forces.⁶ In 1847, Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94) presented his seminal paper on the mathematical principles governing the conservation of energy,⁷ whereby all nonphysical causation was excluded from the natural world. And in 1864, James Clerk Maxwell (1831–18) presented his famous equations describing the propagation of electromagnetic fields. This explanation was based on a physical medium, the “luminiferous ether,” as well as an absolute frame of reference. By 1875, when experimental psychology formally began, the mechanistic view of the universe was held by many scientists to be the ultimate explanation of the nature of reality.

But such confidence proved to be short-lived. In 1887, the existence of a mechanical medium for the propagation of energy fields in empty space was disproved by the renowned Michelson-Morley experiment. Since then, electromagnetic fields have been explained in terms of mathematical abstractions alone; they can no longer be conceptualized as material stuff oscillating in empty space. In 1905, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) published his special theory of relativity, overthrowing long-standing beliefs in the absolute nature of time and space as well as the existence of the luminiferous ether. Twentieth-century advances in quantum physics have supplanted Laplace’s physical determinism, and insights into nonlocality and quantum entanglement have refuted the assumption that causality is confined to local, mechanical interactions. The unresolved “measurement problem” in quantum physics challenges the very existence of elementary particles with mass and energy existing independently of a system of measurement. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle demonstrates that the conservation of energy is not nearly as airtight as was previously assumed. And current theories of quantum field theory, quantum cosmology, and string theory force us to question the notion of a universe constituted of absolutely objective matter.

As a result of advances in physics at the end of the nineteenth century, the incompatibility of theism and mechanistic materialism had become increasingly apparent not only to scientists but to other intellectuals as well. In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) proclaimed “God is dead,” which was his provocative way of describing the popular rejection of ab solute values: people no longer believed in a cosmic order. Nietzsche felt this would lead to nihilism, a disaster that could be avoided only if human values were newly established on a natural basis that transcended a world of mindless matter. Similarly, as a result of advances in physics at the end of the twentieth century, the antiquated nature of nineteenth-century materialism is becoming increasingly apparent. Steven Weinberg, for example, has taken a position tantamount to declaring that matter is dead: “In the physicist’s recipe for the world, the list of ingredients no longer include[s] particles.”⁸ He asserts that “matter thus loses its central role in physics.”⁹

Although nineteenth-century physics appeared to corroborate the atomism of Democritus, the twentieth-century revolution in physics has reduced matter to mathematical abstractions, or ideas. Werner Heisenberg concluded, “With regard to this question, modern physics takes a definite stand against the materialism of Democritus and for Plato and the Pythagoreans.”¹⁰ Many of the beliefs of mechanistic materialism have now been rejected, and the absolute Cartesian separation of subject and object has been challenged scientifically and philosophically. The renowned experimental physicist Anton Zeilinger sums up this radical shift in his comment that “one may be tempted to assume that whenever we ask questions of nature, . . . there is reality existing independently of what can be said about it. We will now claim that such a position is void of any meaning.”¹¹

Remarkably, well into the eighteenth century—long after the groundbreaking discoveries of Kepler, Galileo, and Newton—Aristotelian physics was taught in the great universities of Europe as if the first revolution in physics had never occurred. Most of the innovators conducted research outside the universities, under the auspices of independent organizations such as the Royal Society.¹² Nowadays, it is equally odd that virtually all contemporary university undergraduate and graduate courses in psychology and neuroscience are based on the physics that was current in 1875, neglecting the second revolution in physics!

Some physicists argue that the startling discoveries of quantum physics have no relevance for the study of the mind and brain.¹³ If this is true, it certainly makes the work of the cognitive sciences easier. But a growing number of distinguished physicists are beginning to challenge this view, proposing that consciousness may play a far more fundamental role in the natural world than was previously assumed.¹⁴ Research is ongoing and the debate continues, but little news of this controversy penetrates departments of psychology and neuroscience.

With the rise of behaviorism in the early twentieth century, the cognitive sciences entrenched themselves in the mechanistic worldview of the preceding century while distancing themselves from the revolutionary empiricism of William James. John Watson, for example, declared in 1913 that psychology must “never use the terms consciousness, mental states, mind, content, introspectively verifiable, imagery, and the like.”¹⁵ The most influential proponent of behaviorism, B. F. Skinner (1904–90), continued to argue forty years later that since mental phenomena lack physical qualities, they have no existence whatsoever.¹⁶ Rarely in human history has allegiance to dogma so flagrantly violated experience.

Although few scientists and philosophers today are this brazen in their dismissal of mental phenomena, the specter of nineteenth-century materialism continues to haunt the classrooms and laboratories of the cognitive sciences. In various ways, subjective experiences have been granted provisional membership in nature, but only if it can be shown that—despite appearances—they are equivalent to objective physical phenomena that operate according to the laws of nineteenth-century physics. Philosopher John Searle, for example, proposes that conscious states are equivalent to “higher order physical processes in the brain.”¹⁷ But the neural correlates of consciousness have not yet been identified, so his declaration that states of consciousness are identical to hypothetical physical processes in the brain illuminates nothing except his materialistic assumptions. Owen Flanagan suggests that mental phenomena misleadingly appear to be nonphysical, but they are actually “realized” as neural events, which are their “essential nature.”¹⁸ There is overwhelming evidence that specific neural events cause specific mental events, but there is no compelling empirical evidence indicating that mental phenomena are themselves identical to their neural correlates, despite common claims to that effect.¹⁹ Cristof Koch is one of many neuroscientists who have expressed skepticism about the equivalence of brain states and mental phenomena: “Are they really one and the same thing, viewed from different perspectives? The characters of brain states and of phenomenal states appear too different to be completely reducib...