Multiple drafts or Anatman? Neuroscientific and Buddhist Conceptions of the Self and Language

By Laura E. Weed The College of St. Rose

Abstract:

This paper will argue that Daniel Dennett’s multiple drafts, linguistic conception of a self cannot be correct. First, I will argue that the most basic sense of a self is a biologically primordial, enactive phenomena, whereas linguistic capacity, especially story-telling, is a sophisticated, specifically human and cortically directed activity. Second, I will explain the Buddhist anti-substantialist position which claims that consciousness is a relational fact among a variety of non-substantial skandas or adjuncts of existence that co-determinately arise, creating the natural world and the mind. I will show how this non-substantialist conception of a self and world better accounts for recent discoveries in neuroscience than standard western materialism or dualism do. Finally, I will show how an enactive, relational conception of self and mind can better account for linguistic phenomena, as well.

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Multiple Drafts or Anatman? Neuroscientific and Buddhist Conceptions of the Self and Language

1. Introduction and Overview

There is no general agreement among researchers in neuroscience or

consciousness studies about exactly what consciousness is. Some researchers focus on

very high level human capacities to exhibit a Theory of Mind, of a type that even toddlers

and autistic persons lack, to define as the state of consciousness.1 In the case that this

definition is accepted, even some humans do not rate as conscious agents. The self-

reflective conception of consciousness tests for mirror-recognition. On this standard for

consciousness some apes, some birds and dolphins rate as self-conscious, while infants,

dogs and cats do not.2 Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers have argued that

consciousness is the capacity of a logical engine to produce inferences, from which it

follows that computers, as well as animals and humans may be conscious. There are

many other varieties of definitions of consciousness emerging in the literature, as well.

Daniel Dennett has identified consciousness with an advanced level human linguistic

capacity, the capacity to generate a narrative story of oneself.3 Like other high-level or

abstract descriptions of consciousness, this one rules out the possibility that

consciousness could exist for creatures without linguistic capacity. Buddhists, in

contrast, have usually held that consciousness is a more biologically based, and low level

form of self-awareness and interaction with the world. By Buddhist standards, even

snails and clams and sometimes insects rate as conscious agents, but computers are ruled

1 Alison Gopnik, “Theory of Mind” in The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences” eds. Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999, pgs. 838-8412 Susan Blackmore, Consciousness, an Introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 2004, pgs. 170-1723 Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Little Brown and Co., Boston, MA, 1991, p. 210

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out because they are not biological agents. This paper draws on selected neuroscientific

research to support the Buddhist point of view.

Daniel Dennett’s multiple drafts, linguistic conception of a self cannot be correct.

Many of the arguments that I will present will apply as well to an argument against the

other higher-level accounts of consciousness, but I will not offer those here. First, I will

argue that the most basic sense of a self is a biologically primordial, enactive phenomena,

whereas linguistic capacity, especially story-telling, is a sophisticated, specifically human

and cortically directed activity. Second, I will explain the Buddhist anti-substantialist

position which claims that consciousness is a relational fact among a variety of non-

substantial skandas or adjuncts of existence that co-determinately arise, creating the

natural world and the mind. I will show how this non-substantialist conception of a self

and world better accounts for recent discoveries in neuroscience than standard western

materialism or dualism do. Finally, I will show how an enactive, relational conception of

self and mind can better account for linguistic phenomena, as well.

2. The Multiple Drafts model of a mind is too abstract, cognitive and cortical

a. Dennett’s Multiple Drafts Model of a Self

Daniel Dennett’s conception of the self or mind is based on the AI computer

model. He states his basic thesis in Consciousness Explained, this way:

Human consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes…that can best be understood as the operation of a “von Neumannesque” virtual machine implemented in the parallel architecture of a brain that was not designed for any such activities. The powers of this virtual machine vastly enhance the underlying powers of the organic hardware on which it runs.4

4Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Little Brown and Co., Boston, MA, 1991, p. 210

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Dennett argues that humans are ‘meme machines’ that developed through a

combination of genetic and phenotypic plasticity in the brain, as it interacted with our

environment. This interaction may have been primarily physiological for the first one

hundred thousand years of human evolution, or so, but has become increasingly cultural

as homo sapiens has become increasingly cultural. Dennett remarks,

…[O]ne way or another, the plastic brain is capable of reorganizing itself adaptively in response to the particular novelties encountered in the organism’s environment, and the process by which the brain does this is almost certainly a mechanical process strongly analogous to natural selection.5

Dennett argues that this mechanical process becomes cultural as we “learn to learn” and

learn to pass on the cultural acquisition of “Good Tricks” to our progeny. Cultural

memes are passed on this way, according to Dennett.

We have also learned how to make the fruits of this learning available to novices. We somehow install an already invented and largely “debugged” system of habits in the partly unstructured brain.6

So, for Dennett, as for functionalists, generally, most of our ability to think, act, or

self-reflect, as a human, is a function of human evolutionary interactions between a

plastic brain and an environment inhabited by ‘memes.’ Dennett uses Richard Dawkins’

conception of a ‘meme’ as a culturally passed on parallel of a ‘gene’ to explicate his

claimed analogy between culturally evolved and biologically evolved cases of change or

learning. Memes are repeated patterns encountered by the brain which develop cultural

significance and are passed on culturally as the debugged system of habits installed

5 Dennett, p. 1846 ibid. p. 193

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through learning. Consciousness, for Dennett, is just this collection of internalized

memes, the inputs and outputs of plastic brains.

A sense of self develops out of the memes linguistically, although images and

other memes may also play a role. Dennett argues that there is no centrality or ‘stream of

consciousness’ in the memes, so no ‘Central Meaner.’7 Instead there are parallel

pandemoniums of memes creating “Multiple Drafts,”8 which are streams of narrative that

we may use to tell stories of ourselves, or we may not even notice. More fragmentary

drafts will simply be generated and pass out of existence without our notice. But some of

the multiple drafts become patterns or central ideas in or lives and become combined into

stories or narratives that we tell about ourselves. He describes humans as story telling

animals, as follows.

Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly concocting and controlling the story we tell others and ourselves about who we are…Our tales are spun, but for the most part we don’t spin them: they spin us. Our human consciousness, and our narrative selfhood, is their product, not their source.9

While Dennett’s picture of the self provides a clear interpretation of the AI

paradigm for the function of mind and nature of a self, as rooted in logic-like linguistic

structures, I will argue that consciousness can not be the cortical-level cognitive and

linguistic story-telling function that he describes in the above passages. I have three

reasons for finding Dennett’s picture of the self inadequate. First, I will argue that

consciousness does not need memes, of either a linguistic or perceptual sort in order to

exist. For, it arises from more basic forms of intentional interaction with an environment

7 Consciousness Explained, p. 2538 ibid. p. 2549 ibid. p.418

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than linguistic or cultural memes do. Second, I will argue that emotions play as large a

role in consciousness as perceptions and cognitions do. Third, I will argue that the

primordial nature of consciousness can not be cognitive, perceptual or emotional, but

must be some more basic type of ‘background’ thing that includes or provides a basis for

cognition, perception and emotion.

b. Intentional interaction with an environment

Cognitive scientists disagree about what functions of a brain, should be identified

as the NCCs, or neural correlates of consciousness. Some, such as the HOT10, HOP11 and

HOGs12 theories, place the NCCS in the higher cortical areas of the brain, as requiring

thought (HOT), perception (HOP), or general organization(HOGs), respectively, for

consciousness. So they, like Dennett’s multiple drafts theory, will require more cognition

or perception than I think is necessary for consciousness to exist. Others locate NCCs in

the limbic system, or in a theater of consciousness.13 These theories will turn out to rely

on an isolated conception of the brain which will not satisfy the conception of

consciousness that I am developing in this paper, as well as requiring functions of the

brain that are more sophisticated than the ones that I will consider most important. I will

argue that the suggestion that there are neural correlates of consciousness is useful to the

degree that the involved brain structures are tied, in some rather direct ways, to action-

intention sequences of interrelationship with an environment. Three theories that do so

connect NCCs to the environment are Jaak Pankseepp’s Affective Neuroscience, Andy

10 David Rosenthal, "Mental Qualities and Higher-Order Concepts", Journal of Consciousness Studies, 13 2006. 11 Joseph Levine, Purple Haze, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 2001 12 Robert Van Gulick, “Understanding the Phenomenal Mind: are we all Just Armadillos?”, in Mind and Cognition, an Anthology, ed. William Lycan, 2nd ed., Blackwell Publishers, 199913 Bernard Baars, In the Theater of Consciousness, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK, 1997

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Clark’s dynamic-interactive conception of mind, and Francisco Varela’s conception of

mind as enaction or embodied cognition.

Jaak Panksepp argues that the neurochemistry of the brainstem is not

substantively different in humans than it is in lizards or frogs, animals with no cognitive

or linguistic capacity, and far less limbic capacity for emotion than even mice or rabbits.14

Yet, the neurochemistry of the brain-stem function enables reptiles to engage in activities

that promote productive interaction with the environment of types that Panksepp

characterizes as intentional interaction, such as seeking, fear, and rage. In mammals and

in humans, these basic activities become emotional, but even in reptiles they constitute

the pre-cursors of what he calls a “SELF a Simple Ego-type Life Form.”15 Panksepp

disagrees with authors who write all reptilian behavior off as mere reflex activity,

pointing out that the orienting activities and survival choices made by reptiles are

sometimes quite sophisticated and flexible. Although the limbic system is responsible for

the greater refinements in emotions that develop in mammals and humans, Panksepp

argues that the midbrain is responsible for the basic sense of a self.

…[T]he SELF first arises during early development from a coherently organized motor process in the midbrain, even though it surely comes to be represented in widely distributed ways through higher regions of the brain as a function of neural and psychological maturation [in mammals and humans]. Not only does this archaic SELF-representatior network control motor tone and some simple orienting responses, its intrinsic rhythms can be transiently moderated by a wide array of regulatory inputs, and it is highly interactive with all the basic emotional circuits [in mammals and humans.]…16

Panksepp’s primordial sense of a self is not cognitive or perceptual in any direct sense,

but is rather a sub-cognitive and sub perceptual feeling of presence and interaction. In

14 Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience Oxford U. Press, 1998, Chap 6, p. 97-12015 ibid. p. 30916 ibid.

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its favor, one of the key medical elements used in determining if someone is conscious or

not is whether they have the motor tone and orienting responses he cites in the above

passage. He explains his conception of consciousness as follows.

…[P]rimary-process consciousness will not be conceptualized simply as the “awareness of external events in the world,” but rather as that ineffable feeling of experiencing oneself as an active agent in the perceived events of the world. Such a primitive SELF-representation presumably consists of an intrinsically reverberating neural network linked to basic body tone and gross axial movement generators. It may provide a coherent matrix in which a variety of sensory stimuli become hedonically valenced.17 (author’s emphasis)

When the conception of a SELF is rooted in NCCs as basic as mid-brain and reticular

systems, it is fairly clear that sophisticated levels of cognition and perception can play

very little role in basic consciousness. Consciousness will also, on this account, spread

very far down the animal chain, to at least reptiles.18 If consciousness is as basic to life-

forms as Panksepp argues that it is, the cognitively-based AI account will surely be far

too sophisticated to account for it.

Andy Clark also describes the self-environment relationship in terms of functions

between an environment and an embodied brain, but in the Clark version, the inter-

relationships are described as abstract information-processing relationships. Clark

describes the mind as a collective composed of events in a physico-informational space19

that arises from the interaction of a brain and muscular system with an environment.

Humans co-evolve with their environments as feed-back loops in self-organizing

dynamical systems, of which Clark says,

17 ibid. p. 31018 Panksepp argues for capacity for instrumental learning even in the sea snail, Aplysia, p. 3619 Andy Clark, Being There, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998 p.66 Clark attributes the concept of physico-informational space to Kirsh and Maglio.

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These systems are such that it is simultaneously true to say that the actions of the parts cause the overall behavior and that the overall behavior guides the action of the parts.20

Selves or minds can be distributed across environments, according Clark’s view of

things, so humans do not exist as completely autonomous brains-within-bodies and

consciousness does not exist as a function of the autonomous brains. One’s memory of

where one’s shoes are is located as much in the architecture of one’s house and closet as

it is in the brain or mind on Clark’s view. There is nothing in his description that rules

out the possibility that a snail or a reptile could engage in this type of dynamic interaction

with an environment.

However, unlike Panksepp, Clark concurs with Dennett’s AI model of the mind,

thinking that robots might actually be fairly good candidates for representational systems

of the type that he believes conscious agents are. He thinks that the biological details of

brain stem construction are irrelevant factors and dismisses all but functional

relationships as relevant to a conception of mind. Clark claims;

By allowing representational glosses to stick to complex dynamical entities (limit cycles, space-state trajectories, values of collective variables, etc.) the theorist pitches the information-processing story at a very high level of abstraction from details of basic systemic components and variables, and thus severs the links between the representational description and the specific details of inner workings. The best representational stories, it now seems, may be pitched at an even greater remove from the nitty-gritty of physical implementation than was previously imagined.21

In an endnote attached to this passage, Clark concedes that a dynamical systems approach

to functionalism will not provide a mechanical, step-wise solution as an account of

mental functioning, but claims that this concession has positive effects in terms of ability

20 Ibid. p. 10721 ibid. p.170

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to give an account of mind. I think the effects are good for describing functional

dynamics, but poor for explaining consciousness.

I’ve included Clark’s dynamical interaction account of mind, here, because I think

that the dynamical-systems approach is very helpful for understanding how minds and

worlds do interact with one another and mutually generate the characteristics of one

another. But I think that Clark’s abstract description of interaction obscures the centrality

of Panksepp’s sense of self in consciousness. A computer is not a self-moving system

that engages in intentional, phenomenologically driven seeking, nurturing, fear, rage and

play activities, and it does not have a hedonically valenced and ineffable sense of self. I

vote with Panksepp that these primordially conscious activities are biologically based,

and that the brainstem is the most likely NCC for them. But I think that Clark’s

description of emergent dynamical systems is helpful to describe how dynamical co-

evolution could occur for creatures with brainstems.

Francisco Varela argued that sensori-motor enaction provides a form of

neurophenomenology, which ties cognition and other mental events to human-

environmental interaction. He distinguishes three levels of time scale that have been

discovered in neurological investigations, to clarify three distinct senses in which

phenomenal experience is temporal. The Specious Present, in William James’s term,

operates more quickly than the time scale at which linguistic formulations take place, but

more slowly than the automatic firing of neurons. Varela claimed that the three time-

scales correspond to levels of integration of experience, that constitute an horizon of the

present.

…[I]t is important to introduce three scales of duration to understand the temporal horizon just introduced: 1. Basic or elementary events (the 1/10

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scale), 2. relaxation time for large scale integration (the 1 scale), and descriptive/narrative assessments (the 10 scale).22 (author’s emphasis)

The first and quickest, 1/10 scale represents micro-cognitive phenomena, such as

perceptual reactions and oculomotor behavior that takes place in as few as 10-100

milliseconds. These neuronal activities establish basic rhythms that may or may not be

picked up by cell assemblies and incorporated into synchronous collections of integrated

cell assemblies. The second, slightly slower and more integrative rhythm operating at the

1 scale of time, (fractions of a second) results in dynamical networks, creating a specious

‘now’ that engages in reciprocal determination and relaxation with its neural sub-

assemblies.23 Varela describes this rhythmic activity as generating “transient aggregates

of phase-locked signals coming from multiple regions”24 of the brain, and generating a

form of neuronal synchrony that establishes a specious present as an experience of unity

of consciousness. 25

The third time scale lasts in the order of seconds, and constitutes the perception-

action time scale. Language and cognitive competence emerge at this time scale.26

Varela summarizes the significance of the neurological time-scale distinctions, for the

thesis of this paper, as follows:

Nowness, [which emerges at the second time scale ] in this perspective, is therefore, pre-semantic in that it does not require a rememoration… in order to emerge… 27

22FranciscoJ. Varela, “The Specious Present,” in Naturalizing Phenomenology, eds. Petitot, Varela, Pachoud, & Roy, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1999, p. 27323 ibid. p. 27424 ibid. p. 27525 ibid.26 ibid. p.27727 ibid.

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However, the narrative sense of self emerges at the third time scale, which integrates

streams of moments of nowness into, “…broader temporal horizons in remembrance and

imagination.”28

Varela argues that the temporal dimensions of the self that he has just identified

do not, however, constitute a linear temporal sequence. Rather, he concurs with Merleau-

Ponty that they constitute a “network of intentionalities.”29 He would also agree with my

assessment of Clark’s theory that while dynamic systems theory is essential to understand

how these time scales emerge in the brain and interact with the rest of a person’s

environment, the underlying biochemistry of the brain is essential to understanding how

this works, not irrelevant. For, the neurons, at the 1/10 scale constitute the component

level of analysis, and it is their oscillations that become synchronous at the 1 scale.

Further, at the 10 scale, the global behavior is “not an abstract computation, but an

embodied behavior subject to initial conditions,”30 which are provided by the neuronal

rhythms. Biological systems, unlike mechanical ones, are unstable as part of their normal

functioning, and so are capable of forming trajectories that generate new percepts out of

the chaotic behavior of the neuronal phase-spaces of cell assemblies. Varela argues that

gestalt phenomena such as the necker cube illustrate the capacity of mental organization

across the various temporal scales of mental functioning to generate multi-stability of a

type that operates in complex non-linear and chaotic systems.31

Varela attributes a Husserlian form of double-intentionality to the non-linear

relationship among the scales of temporal awareness that he has identified. He identifies

the two forms of intentionality as a) retentional or transverse intentionality, which is 28 ibid.29 ibid. p. 28130 ibid. p. 28331 ibid. pgs. 286-291

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static, and b) longitudinal or integrative intentionality, which he cites Husserl as calling

“the unchanging substrate from which the flow emerges.”32 He agrees with Husserl that

the retentional level of intentionality is primarily linguistic or imagistic, and claims that

this level of intentionality corresponds to his level three time scale. Husserl’s

longitudinal level of intentionality is more basic, and will correspond to Varela’s level

two time scale, the “nowness” of existence. While Varela believes that the two forms of

intentionality interact in ways that intertwine them, he also thinks that the affectively

informed, longitudinal sense of nowness should be identified as “the self, pure ego or

basic consciousness,”33 rather than the retentional level of intentionality.

To summarize my argument so far for a more primordial, biologically based

conception of consciousness to this point; consciousness must be something that operates

at a basic level of neuronal cell assemblies interacting rhythmically, or of brain stem

capacities to innervate activities as basic as temporal coordination, intentions rooted in

nowness, seeking, fear, rage and nurturance activities and basic orienting and motor-tone

interactions with the environment. The method of operation of the interactions may be

non-linear, and are certainly dynamical, but these operations can not be understood in

abstraction from the biological base of which they are constructed. In the next section I

will show how emotions must also interact with this basic form of consciousness and

inform it.

c) For creatures with a limbic system, consciousness is emotional.

Traditional western philosophers, such as Plato, Descartes and Kant considered

consciousness a matter exclusively of conception, as Descartes’ “I think, therefore I

32 ibid. p. 294, emphasis added33 ibid. p. 295

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am,”34 so well epitomizes. Empiricists, such as Locke, Berkeley and Hume arguing

against the rationalists, entertained the possibility the perception might be more

significant than cognition for thought. Contemporary cognitive science is undermining

the exclusivity of the ‘rationalism vs. empiricism,’ ‘cognition or perception’ paradigm for

mental operation by showing that emotions, which have long been considered

impediments to clear mental operation, are in fact, essential components of consciousness

as well as of cognition and perception.

Jaak Panksepp and Antonio Damasio, for example, have pointed out the centrality

of emotions in thinking. Far from being a noisome distraction from pure rationality, as

Plato35 characterized them, emotions are the essential motivators for both action and

thought, and play key roles in perception, as well. Damasio tells the story of Phineas

Gage36 to point out that once the planning area of the pre-frontal lobe of the brain has

been destroyed, as Gage’s was by a railroad construction accident, personality, character,

planning activities, and social skills were destroyed along with that section of the brain.

Thinking and perceiving can not be used effectively independently of the emotionally

valent felt sense of one’s existence, which is prior to either thinking or perceiving,

according to Damasio. Patients lacking in emotions are also abysmal failures at decision-

making, despite ability to perform normally on tasks that test only cognitive

functioning.37 Sociopaths, Damasio points out, are persons with very low levels of

emotional arousal. But far from being Plato’s paradigms of rational moral perfection,

34Rene Descartes, Meditations, in Readings in Modern Philosophy, vol !, ed. Roger Ariew and Eric Watkins, Hackett Publishing Co, Indianapolis, IN, 2000 , p.3035 Plato, the Republic, especially book IX,571a-577, where the tyrannical man is described as one who operates with emotion rather than pure reason, in Classics of Western Philosophy, ed. Steven M. Cahn, 6th ed, Hackett Publishing Co,.Indianapolis, IN, 2002, pgs. 161-16436 Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error, Harper-Collins/ Quill Press, New York, NY, 1994, pgs. 3-1437ibid. p. 221 ff.

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they are immoral or criminal in the decisions they make.38 High levels of intellectual and

perceptual ability render a sociopath more effective at accomplishing evil, not more

moral.

Jaak Panksepp also concentrates on the centrality of emotions in life. Panksepp

argues that basic emotions, such as seeking, rage, fear, nurturance and play arise in the

reticular formation of the brain stem, and motivate all actions in creatures with brain

stems. Even snakes and frogs experience these drives, and while they become more

sophisticated in mammals, possessing limbic systems, and still more sophisticated in

humans, who moderate the basic brain-stem and mammalian emotions through higher

cortical areas of the brain, such as the pre-frontal cortex areas that were destroyed in

Phineas Gage, Panksepp argues that the primordial sense of self exists even for the

primitive creatures,39 as I have already argued. One of the main functions of the SELF

system, according to Panksepp is intrinsic motivation which arises from “neuro-

physiological properties of genetically ordained subcortical emotive systems.”40 His

argument for this point of view, again, is based on the neuro-biochemistry of the linkages

in the brainstem, which have not altered much in the course of evolution from creatures

with only a brainstem through those mammals endowed with limbic systems or humans

endowed with cortical areas.

All consciousness is orienting, motivating and equipped with an emotional tone,

on Panksepp’s view. He argues,

…[A] primitive neuro-dynamic of self-awareness…may have been achieved by an ability of the SELF-map to establish a characteristic resting tone within the somatic and visceral musculatures. The establishment of such a tone

38 ibid. p. 178-179.39 Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, the foundations of human and animal emotions, Oxford University Press, NY 1998, pgs 55-5740 ibid. p. 123

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throughout the body and brain, along with a variety of reafferent processes may have provided each organism with a feeling of individuality, of “I-ness”41

Although the pre-frontal cortex clearly plays a major role in controlling emotions,

for humans, Panksepp makes clear that the lower rather than the higher mental functions

pull rank in the SELF system. He claims that the primary sense of self is more intimately

connected to motor than to sensory or cognitive cortices, agreeing with Varela that

embodied senses of emotionally lit action are more basic than either perception or

cognition in human consciousness. “Action-readiness” is the goal of the entire conscious

system, for Panksepp, and that is what stabilizes both the perceptual and cognitive

systems of the SELF.42 Panksepp would concur with Buddhists who recommend

deference not only for other human lives, but for all conscious life, which, both would

insist, extends quite far down the biological chain.

I think at this point in this paper that I have articulated a conception of

consciousness, based in Neuroscience, that places primacy in some very biological and

very low-level action-intention sequences, rather than in the more conceptual or

perceptual cognitive areas of human functioning that have been preferred by

philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists in the past. In the next section of the

paper I will examine why Buddhists would say that the way to learn about consciousness

is to “Drop off body and mind,”43 as Dogen advised.

3. The Self as Anatman: an unsubstantial interaction of actions, intentions, perceptions, cognitions, emotions, physical forms and background consciousness.

41 Panksepp, p. 31342 ibid.43 Zen Master Dogen, Enlightenment Unfolds, ed. Kazuaki Tanahashi, Shambala Press, Boston, MA, 2000, p. 32

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I have argued so far that, some functionalists and neuro-phenomenologists are

drawn to relational conceptions of the self, which feature a network of interactions

among neurological brain events, action-intention sequences developed interactively with

an environment, and, in the human case, social interactions with other humans. In this

section of the paper I will further develop a conception of mental architecture that

informs these insights with the work of Buddhist Philosophers, especially:

a) Fa Tsang's Hua Yen-Ti'en Tai view of reality as pratitya samutpada,

b) Nishida Kitaro’s view of consciousness as a homeground of pure experience out of which both cognition and sensation flow, and

c) Thich Nhat Hanh's conception of self, reality and social relations as Interbeing.

These three Buddhist philosophers interpret the self and mind as systems of relations

which are inter-penetrable both with each other and with the environment, paralleling the

descriptions of the neuroscientists. The result is an organic view of a self as part of an

eco-system, that is less essentialist and less autonomous than the typical western

conceptions. This conception of self is, however, responsive to cognitive science

discoveries about how functional modules of the brain interact with parts of the body and

aspects of the environment.

a) Pratitya Samutpada: Fa Tsang’s Dynamical interaction view of World and Mind

Fa Tsang was a teacher of the Hua Yen school of Buddhism that followed the

Tien Tai School in the development of Chinese Chan. He is famous for the story of the

Golden Lion, in which he is trying to convince a princess of the truth of the Mahayana

Buddhist claim that mind and world co-dependently arise through a dynamical interaction

called pratitya samutpada. Fa Tsang and the princess are on the porch of her palace. She

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walks up to a huge golden lion and kicks it, insisting that the lion is there, material, and

independent of her consciousness of it, in a spirit reminiscent of contemporary western

reductivist materialism. Fa Tsang responds as follows.44

1. The lion, as shape, has no real character. The gold is real, but the lion comes into and goes out of existence every moment, depending on the perspective, experience, focus and attention of the perceiver. Technically speaking, Fa Tsang and the princess, though standing next to each other, experience different lion-shapes.

2. The dharmas (phenomenal percepts) of the lion produced through dynamical causation between the percipients and the lion are each without self-nature. They are no-things which ultimately are absolute emptiness.

3. Although there is absolutely only emptiness, this does not prevent the illusory dharmas from being clearly what they are (phenomenal percepts). The two characters of coming into existence through causation and dependent existence co-exist.

4. These two characters eliminate each other and perish once the attachment to false causation and dependent co-origination has been released. Without attachment, the illusory dharmas have no power. Recognition of this truth can bring Sudden Enlightenment.

5. When the feelings have been eliminated and true substance revealed, all becomes an undifferentiated mass. Perfect reality and pure function then arise.

The interrelations among the parts of the (phenomenal) lion are the interrelations

of one-to-all and all-to-one described in T'ien-T'ai, also reminiscent of Andy Clark’s

dynamical account of actions of parts causing a whole while the actions of the whole

cause the parts. Fa Tsang points out that each hair on the lion contains and implies an

infinite number of lions and each lion contains and implies and infinite number of hairs.

Dharmas, as emotionally driven cognitions and perceptions, multiply in all directions in

an infinite geometrical progression, like the jewels in Lord Indra's net.

44paraphrased from A Soucebook in Chinese Philosophy, by Wing-Tsit Chan

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In terms closer to those of western cognitive science, Fa Tsang is claiming in

Kantian style, that the entire phenomenal world has only a relational existence. If it were

not the case that creatures like us name, identify, perceive, inter-act with, and emotionally

valence gold statues of lions, the gold would exist only as an undifferentiated noumenon.

To put the matter in terms of Varela’s distinction between retentional and longitudinal

intentionality, it is only the retentional (language and image) level of intentionality for

which the Golden Lion exists. If the princess can quiet the intellectual, emotional and

perceptual grasping that exist at the retentional level of intentionality, the linguistic and

imagistic ‘objects’ that co-dependently arise from her dynamic interaction with the

environment will subside, will stop being generated. At Varela’s 1 time-scale, or the

longitudinal level of intentionality, the relationships that generate the percepts do not

exist. Consciousness may not be linguistically driven, as I have been arguing here, but

greed certainly is, if Fa Tsang is correct. The Buddhist insight on the matter observes

that although it is natural and normal for humans to interact with our environment by

forming cognitive, perceptual and emotional dynamical relationships and attachments, it

is not necessary that we identify with Varela’s intentional time scale of 10, at which these

relationships form. We have a deeper level of self, the longitudinal intentionality at time

scale 1, to which we can retreat for at least temporary escape from grasping. Buddhists

will agree with Panksepp and Varela, that the more basic and primordial sense of a self is

more truly a self. But it is also a no-thing, a non-thing, for things as entities are generated

by perception, cognition and emotional valence.

The Buddha alerted his followers to the dangers of identifying themselves with

the five skandas; five illusory karmic waves that we mistakenly take to be our substantial

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selves. The five skandas are cognitions, emotions, perceptions, physical forms and

background consciousness. As I have presented Fa Tsang’s argument above, and

interpreted it in terms of contemporary neuroscience, it is an argument for banishing the

illusions of the first four of the skandas.

b) Pure Experience: Nishida Kitaro’s view of ‘homeground’ consciousness

Nishida Kitaro concurs with Fa Tsang, Varela and Panksepp that the self is not to

be found in the emotionally-lit perceptual or cognitive functions of mind. His analysis of

the relationship between time and a sense of ‘nowness’ is strikingly similar to Varela’s

analysis of longitudinal intentionality, as this passage reveals.

There is always a certain unchanging reality at the base of the mind. This reality enlarges the development of consciousness from day to day. The passage of time is the continuous change of the unifying center that accompanies this development, and this center is always “the present.”45

Kitaro uses the word ‘intuition’ to describe an alternate mode of relation to reality that

operates out of this deeper sense of self. Pure experience, he maintains, is not the every-

day experience that differentiates between a subjective sense of self and an objective

sense of a world that exists independently of the self. Rather it is what he calls an

intuition of the ultimate unity of reality. He says of this intuition,

Mainstream psychologists may argue that it is only a habit or an organic activity, but from the standpoint of pure experience it is actually the state of oneness of subject and object, a fusion of knowing and willing. In the mutual forgetting of the self and the object, the object does not move the self and the self does not move the object. There is simply one world, one scene…[in]…a state that has transcended subject and object. 46

45 Nishida Kitaro, An Inquiry into the Good, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 1990, p. 6146 ibid. p. 32

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Kitaro is referring to the complete absorption in activity that can occur when one is lost in

say playing music, dancing or painting. This type of absorption is one in which time

seems to stand still, there seems to be no distinction among ones body parts, mind or will,

one’s medium of expression and the object or space in which one is acting. All flow

together in a happy state of unity, perhaps reminiscent of Aristotle’s conception of

eudaimonia. In terms of the neuroscientists that we have been examining in this paper,

again, it would be Varela’s intermediate time scale at which this type of unity of activity

would take place. Profound experiences of unity, whether aesthetic or religious, are often

described as ineffable, perhaps because they take place at levels of mind-world

integration that are distinct from those of typical cognitive and perceptual distinctions.

Kitaro’s homeground of pure experience is, for him the real sense of self, from which

cognition, perception, willing, and other ‘adjuncts’ of consciousness arise.47 To know the

real self is to dwell in the pure experience. Subject and object are not distinguished there

because this linguistic and logical manner of making distinctions is not available there.

c) Thich Nhat Hanh on Interbeing

Thich Nhat Hanh explains the life of a Buddhist as the life of one who “interbes.”

He says,

Too many people distinguish between the inner world of our mind and the world outside, but these worlds are not separate. They belong to the same reality. The ideas of inside and outside are helpful in every day life but they can become an obstacle that prevents us from experiencing ultimate reality. If we look deeply into our mind we see the world deeply at the same time. If we understand the world we understand our mind.48

For Hanh, not only the subjective and objective worlds, but also the social and individual

worlds relationally co-dependently arise. Hanh argues that it is pointless to try to be

47 ibid.48 Thich Nhat Hanh, Interbeing,3rd ed. Parallax Press, Berkeley CA, 1998, p.4

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happy in the future, because the only time or place one has in which to be happy is the

here and now,49 stressing, once again, the centrality and importance of the specious

present as articulated by Varela. Socially, also, children deprived of productive

interaction with other ‘selves’ do not develop a sense of themselves. The social as well as

the physical environment is essential to develop a functioning ecological self-system.

To summarize my Buddhist sources and their relevance to this paper, Buddhism

contains a conception of the self, as relational, as primordial, as rooted in a specious

present, as neither cognitive nor perceptual, and as deeper than the ordinary sense of self

that develops from a perceptual or cognitive account of mind, which is emotionally

valenced. In this Buddhist conception of the self the self is not an ego, but a field of

interactive relations, or a form of pure activity and situated experience. The Buddhist

view of a self is compatible with the new conception of a self as a dynamical rhythm that

is emerging in contemporary cognitive and neuroscience. Although my conclusions

about language should be fairly apparent by now, I will now turn to a more explicit

summary of why this sense of self cannot be a linguistically defined or driven entity.

4. The self is ineffable Anatman, not Multiple Drafts of Narrative.

In using the distinction between the retentional and longitudinal levels of

consciousness in my argument, I have agreed with Varela, Husserl, Kitaro, and,

ultimately, William James, in identifying phenomenal experience with the specious

present, the nowness of dynamic interaction with the environment. I have also argued for

the ineffableness, the orientating function and the primal nature of this most basic

integrating biological rhythm. In this section of the paper I will continue the argument

for why this basic animal sense of self should be considered more fundamental and more

49 ibid.p.6

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important than the ‘higher level’ and more restrictedly human conceptions of self that

most researchers in the area prefer. Varela is of course, correct to point out that in the

human case at least, these two forms of consciousness rarely occur in isolation from one

another. Meditation practice attempts to isolate the more primal sense of self, while, I

speculate, autism might signal someone who is lost in the cognitive and higher functions

at cost to the basic capacity to integrate and orient.

Dennett argues, as I quoted previously, that

Our tales are spun, but for the most part we don’t spin them: they spin us.50

He insists that this spinning is a purely mechanical process that does not require

consciousness,51 claiming against authors such as David Chalmers52 that there is no such

thing as an ‘explanatory gap’ between a behavioristic third-person analysis of someone’s

mental operation and a first-person phenomenal account of the same event, because there

is no phenomenal “what it is like” to be anything, whether a person or a bat, over and

above the behavior, instincts, and physical acts that the person exhibits. Not only are

there not two levels of consciousness for Dennett, there is not even one. A meme

machine does not require a point of view any more than a computer does, and according

to Dennett, we meme machines do not have one.

Focusing specifically on language, I argue in this section of the paper first that an

evolutionary account of language, to which Dennett is sympathetic, must build on more

primitive biological detection devises which must be, as Ruth Garrett Millikan argues,

consumer-oriented intentional orientation and action enabling devices. Second, I argue

that the AI account of language as mechanical information transfer cannot account for the

50 Consciousness Explained, p. 41851 ibid. p.38352 David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, Oxford University Press, 1996

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rootedness of language in embodied biological expression of actions, orientation, and

experience. Third, I argue that no language can be truly free of phenomenal “what-it-is-

like-to-be”-ness and its basis in primary consciousness.

a) The evolution of language

Ruth Garrett Millikan argues that representations cannot be simply neutral

information processing items that exist in a vacuum, as AI claims they are. Rather they

must have consumers-systems for which the information rates as a representation.53 She

argues against causal and natural-sign theories of information processing that intentional

interpretation of a sign is more important than its causal connections:

Anything the signs may indicate qua natural signs or natural information carriers then drops out as entirely irrelevant; the representation producing side of the system had better pay undivided attention to the language of its consumer. The sign producer’s function will be to produce signs that are true as the consumer reads the language.54

I gave a similar argument against Dretskian accounts of information flow55 in The

Structure of Thinking, in which I argued that whether a creature intentionally connects the

sign to the feature signified is more significant for communication that whether the

feature actually is so connected, or not.56 There could be failures of intentional

connections on both consumer and producer sides of a representation, on a Dretskian

view. As I argued,

…[S]imple correlation on the mind-to-world side of the relationship is not strong enough to establish a semantic identity. For semantic identity the perceiver must be applying an attentive point of view to the object selected. …[O]n the world-to-mind side of the relationship…correlation will not do the job of seeing to it that the experience in question is of the thing. “Ofness”

53 Ruth Garrett Millikan, “Biosemantics,” in White Queen Psychology and other Essays for Alice, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993, p. 8654 ibid. p.8855Fred Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of Information, MIT Press, Cambridge MA 1981 56 Laura E. Weed, The Structure of Thinking, Imprint Academic, UK 2003,

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[requires] experiential impact, [not] mechanical transfer.57

This observation of a need for intentional identification for a language system to work

ties the functionality of a language back into the intentions of a self-system, from which

behaviorists, reductivists and Dennett were so keen to divorce languages. Indeed,

Millikan argues that evolution could not produce a language system in any other way.

She accuses the AI and causal philosophers of being committed to the efficacy of

language resulting from a “freak accident” rather than from a form of biological design in

which intentional actions are linked to behaviors to fulfill the intentions, all of which are

connected to desires, survival skills, and proliferation.58 Again, the dynamics of action-

intention sequences tied to an environment must inform language and its use as much as

they inform all other aspects of Panksepp’s SELF. Language may be a uniquely human

and clearly higher-level activity, featured at Varela’s 10 scale of retentional

consciousness. But it cannot have utterly lost its connections to its biological source. In

the next section I will say more about this source.

b) The embodied biological origins of language

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have argued that language originates in

embodied basic level concepts which “…use our perceptual, imagining and motor

systems to characterize our optimal functioning in everyday life.”59 These concepts are

originally expressions of basic bodily processes and movements, which emerged

evolutionarily as ‘primary metaphors,’ neurologically linked expressions that tie sensori-

motor and subjective domains together.60 Some of Lakoff and Johnson’s examples of

57 ibid. p. 5158 Biosemantics, p.9659 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, Basic Books, New York, NY, 1999, p. 55560 ibid.p.46-47

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neurally based metaphorical linkages that would form basic linguistic concepts are

“Happy is up”, “Important is big”, “Difficulty is burden” and “Help is support”61 These

metaphors occur cross-linguistically in many languages, and they are inevitable given the

way that language develops through evolution. Lakoff and Johnson explain as follows.

Our enormous metaphorical conceptual system is … built up by a process of neural selection. Certain neural connections between the activated source and target-domain networks are randomly established at first and then have their synaptic weights increased through their recurrent firing. The more times those connections are activated, the more the weights are increased, until permanent connections are forged. 62

Lakoff points out that these neural linkages result in the formation of primitive

categorization schemas that are found in most human languages. He lists the variety of

types of categorization schemas the research ( by Roach et. al.) has discovered;

--In the Conceptual system there are four types of cognitive models: propositional, image-schematic, metaphoric and metonymic. Propositional and image-schematic models characterize structure; metaphoric and metonymic models characterize mappings that make use of structural models.--Language is characterized by symbolic models, that is, models that pair linguistic information with models in the conceptual system….--Cognitive models are embodied, either directly or indirectly by way of systematic links to embodied concepts. A concept is embodied when its content or other properties are motivated by bodily or social experience. This does not necessarily mean that the concept is predictable from the experience, but rather that it makes sense that it has the content (or other properties) it has, given the nature of the corresponding experience. Embodiment thus provides a non-arbitrary link between cognition and experiencei

Note that the link established through propositional, image-schematic, metaphoric and

metonymic categorization models are non-arbitrary, according to Lakoff. They depend

61 ibid. p. 50-51.62 Ibid. p. 57i

? George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987) 154

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very much on the underlying neural structures and the underlying experience. I would say

that these linkages depend essentially on Nishida Kitaro’s pure experience, and Francisco

Varela’ sense of nowness, as well. They form the linkages that connect Varela’s level 1

longitudinal phenomena to level 10 retentional phenomena.

So, to briefly summarize what I have said so far on the issue of the connection

between language and experience; not only can language not be an externally imposed

collection of memes that imposes a ‘narrative draft’ mind on an otherwise mindless

creature, autonomously of any experiences that the creature probably doesn’t have

anyway, but also language cannot develop without a neural and experiential base to

which it is essentially indexed. Evolution could only produce language in this way,

through experience. Without basic concepts there could be no narrative drafts, and

without the embodied connections through experience, through nowness, there could be

no basic concepts. I will now conclude this paper with a brief commentary on the reality

of phenomenal experience, both as it informs language, and as it exists ‘ineffably’ or

independently of language.

c) What it is like to be a language user?

Dennett has engaged in a long-standing debate with David Chalmers over Thomas

Nagel’s claim that there is something it is like to be a bat.63 The ‘something that it is like’

implies a sense of phenomenal presence, and Chalmers has followed Levine in claiming

that there is an explanatory gap between explanations of mental events in third person

scientific terms and explanations of the same events in first person experiential terms, as

the person (or bat!) experiencing the event would describe them.64 Dennett, for his part,

63 Thomas Nagel, “What is it like to be a bat?” The Philosophical Review, vol 83, 1974, pgs. 435-45064 The Conscious Mind, Oxford U Press, 1996, p. 47

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takes himself to have disqualified Chalmers’ qualia65 I can’t summarize the volume of

literature that has contributed to this debate, here, but I will briefly summarize what the

results of this paper are for this discussion.

If language is as strongly rooted in basic phenomenological experience as I have

argued in this paper, it follows that artificial languages, such as computer or logical

languages are, as John Searle argued,66 simulations of language, not the real thing.

Experience in biological creatures creates language, and not the other way around, as

Dennett would have us believe. Humans are not meme-collections, but meme-producers,

who can, if they are sufficiently disciplined in Buddhist or other centering and

detachment activities, quiet the noise of the memes. This is done, neurologically, through

a volitional retreat from operating at the normal 10 temporal scale of retentional

consciousness to operating at the more basic 1 scale of longitudinal consciousness. We

share the longitudinal consciousness with most animals, although the retentional level of

consciousness is more uniquely and characteristically human. We should not look for

consciousness exclusively in the uniquely human functions, however, because, as

Buddhists have long taught, the present is the only place where experience is available to

us. This sub-cognitive and sub-perceptual level of awareness is also the location

eudaimonic flow, in which subject and object are not distinguished, there is no grasping,

and happiness is possible. Far from being products of multiple drafts devised by cultural

memes, we are anatmans, relational beings that delude ourselves if we think we are the

substantial subjects of the stories we tell.

65 Consciousness Explained, chap 1266 John Searle, Minds, Brains, and Science, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1984

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So, yes, there is something it is like to be a language user. The phenomenal or

relational self is a center of activity that is aware of itself as an agent, and as an

experiencer. Computers, memes and narrative drafts do not have the right structure and

are not the right types of creatures to engage in the neurological and biochemical

activities that produce rhythms in cell assemblies that produce a sense of a specious

present. We share this ineffable sense of a SELF system with animals, but become

language users through emotional, cognitive and perceptual articulations of that

experience, that achieve much more than animals can in cerebral functioning. In the

process of using the higher-level retentional aspects of consciousness, we can loose sight

of their bearings in an evolutionarily deeper SELF system, but our happiness requires that

we reacquaint ourselves with the source. In a well-integrated person, narratives connect

the specious present to a retained past and a projected future, richly entwined with one

another through embodied metaphors, emotions, images, and concepts. And that’s what

it’s like to be a language user.

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