Agent Plus Environment

I said I’d return to discuss a sutra that Khenpo Kalsang translated during the Tibetan monastery retreat I attended. Here’s the scoop:

The self is a delusion

Khenpo Kalsang translated a sutra called Advice to a king for the group of us who were staying at the monastery. The sutra told the story of a king who encountered the Buddha and wished to kill him. The Buddha asked the king, “Conflict and fighting and killing cause exhaustion and suffering in this life. Why would you enjoy this?” The king, considering this, responded that he enjoyed fighting because he always conquered his enemies. The Buddha said, “Great king, these are very minor enemies–insignificant! There are much greater enemies that you should fight.” He explained that the greatest enemy was not another man, or another country, but the clinging of self. He explained how one could fight this enemy with the six perfections and with selflessness. The king is convinced, and instead of killing the Buddha, becomes devoted to him.

The clinging of self, or self-cherishing, is one of the defilements. This means it is a cause of suffering (recall that if you manage to become free from suffering and the causes of suffering, you’ll eventually reach nirvana). Simply put, one develops an attachment to the five aggregates (body, mind, feeling, perceptions, activities), and one fears losing the parts of the self through death, illness, hunger, cold, and so on. This is a problem. The way to triumph over self-clinging is to realize that the self, the “I,” does not exist in reality.

The gist of the argument presented in this sutra is this: the self is a delusion because it is a construct based on the aggregates. We have names: names are labels, and so the name is not a self. The body is also not the self, because the flesh and blood are just like the walls of a house: that is, a combination of elements that are, if you break them down enough, no different than the elements that make up the walls of a house. The mind is not the self, because it has no matter form. Because self-clinging is based on these three things (name, body, mind), through this analysis, the personal self cannot be found. It’s a delusion.

Something is missing here. Simply being unable to pinpoint the exact location of the self doesn’t mean it’s entirely a delusion. I’d agree, based on other readings, that there is no one physical thing responsible for the sensation of selfhood. There is no single structure in the brain that we can point to and say this is where “I” am. This is the where consciousness happens. But that’s all the argument can say: that no one thing is responsible. The self could just be an amalgamation of things: the body, the mind, the interactions of these with the world. The five aggregates that compose a person. The agent and the environment. The self could just be the name we give this combination of things.

Other sutras and other pieces of the Tibetan Buddhist philosophy may better explain this delusion. But even if they do, I may still just fundamentally disagree with pieces of the philosophy. (E.g., that dualistic bit about the mind having no matter form.)

The take away message may be this: Whether or not the self is a delusion depends on your definition of “self.” Go figure.

I am not special.

I am human, and there is nothing that makes me special. I am composed of the same atoms as every other thing in existence in this universe. I am no more special than the Jacaranda trees blooming outside my window, than the magpies cawing from their perches on the roof, than the strangers whose eyes catch mine on the street.

And yet I am unique: There is exactly one organization of atoms that is me. There is exactly one set of events that could have given rise to the person I am, because if any other events had occurred, I would not be exactly the same as I am right now. It’s almost so obvious it isn’t worth stating. Almost.

Copernicus and Galileo weren’t special, either

Humans have always held a biased view of their existence. We placed ourselves in a geocentric, Ptolemaic universe, with the stars and planets revolving around us. We were reluctant to abandon our pedestal: When Copernicus proposed a heliocentric model of the universe, supporters of the theory were condemned for heresy. Galileo was lucky: He was just placed under permanent house arrest. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake. Fast-forward through a few hundred years of debate and you reach today, when it is accepted that our planet does not sit in a privileged location in the universe, but most people are still uncomfortable with the idea that we might just be here by chance.

In a universe of 70 sextillion stars (and that’s just the observable universe, according to a 2003 estimate), it is nearly inevitable that at least one planet would form in the habitable range around a star, and that the right combination of elements would be present for some form of life to develop and evolve enough for beings conscious of their own existence to arise (Argyle, 1977; Ellis & Brundit, 1979; Hoyle & Wickramasinghe, 1999). Our Earth happens to be one such planet.

It’s all physical

I’m going to propose something radical: The universe is a purely physical place. If this is true, it follows that everything in it is also physical, including the mind and mental states. This tends to be a huge point of contention, as the majority of the people in the world adhere to a dualist theory of mind, in which the body is physical but the mind is made of a corporeal substance, unexplainable in physical terms and irreducible to physical states of the brain. (More specifically, most world religions adhere to some form of dualism, e.g., the belief that one has a soul, and the majority of the people in the world adhere to one of these religions.)

There are a number of problems with this approach, most notably the fact that the dualist perspective cannot satisfactorily answer the question of how the mind and body can interact if they have no causal properties in common. Descartes proposed a substance he called animal spirits as a go-between, which merely begged the question (Churchland, 1988); 17th century philosopher Arnold Geulincx suggested the interaction was merely an illusion and that the brain and mind don’t actually affect each other at all (Livingston, 2002). The seemingly plausible suggestion that the mind and brain are connected through a form of energy not yet understood is a logical argument from ignorance. Dualists argue that the mental domain is not lawful, that concepts such as truth, love, and beauty are forever beyond reduction–and yet biologists have found ways to reduce life, which was also once said to be irreducible and magical (Churchland, 1988). Why can’t the mind be a similar case?

Another problem to solve was that of consciousness: If the mind is not made of a special substance, then how does matter organized into a brain give rise to consciousness when matter organized in other ways does not? Various theories suggest that it is exactly this–the particular organization of the brain and the sheer number of connections between neurons–that is responsible for consciousness (see, e.g., Edelman & Tononi, 2000; Hofstadter, 2007). The details of these theories I’ll leave for a later date.

Science says

If you are inclined to believe scientific evidence, the theories that win out reduce the mind to matter. I could easily spend a few thousand more words explaining why this is the case, but I’ll move on for the sake of finishing my explanation of the site name.

In a physical world, people (along with all other living things on Earth) originate from DNA in a purely physical process. You may have heard of the “nature versus nurture” debate: Are we just our genes? Is everything we are predetermined by our DNA, or does the environment in which we grow up and live play some role? I’ve never understood why it’s a debate. Studies of twins have shown that possessing identical DNA will not give rise to identical people (Harris, 2007), which disproves the “we are just our genes” hypothesis. DNA obviously has some affect, and Harris cites evidence that genes account for about 45% of personality, but what makes people and creatures (otherwise known as agents) who or what they are is the interaction of their genes and their environment. Every agent is the sum of everything internal to it and its interactions with everything external to it. Humans are no exception. I am no exception.

Thus the title.

References:
Argyle, E. (1977). Change and the Origin of Life. Origin of Life, 8: 287-298.
Churchland, Paul. (1988). Matter & Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
Edelman, G., & Tononi, G. (2000). Consciousness: How matter becomes imagination. Penguin Books, London, England.
Ellis, F., & Brundrit, G. (1979). Life in the Infinite Universe. Royal Astronomical Society, 20: 37-41.
Harris, J. (2007). No Two Alike. W.W. Norton & Co.
Hofstadter, D. (2007). I Am a Strange Loop. Basic Books.
Hoyle, F., & Wickramasinghe, N. (1999). The Universe and Life: Deductions from the Weak Anthropic Principle. Astrophysics and Space Science, 268: 89–102
Livingston, K. Integrating the Sciences of Mind. Chapter 2.