Evan
Thompson is a professor of philosophy at the University of British Colombia who
specializes in cognitive science, Buddhism, and philosophy of mind. His latest
book, Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience,
Meditation, and Philosophy, investigates the intersection of brain science and
Buddhism in an honest, non-judgmental fashion that's true to neuroscience and
psychology without negating the metaphorical value of millennia-old aphorisms.
With an emphasis on dreaming and the complex facets of consciousness, Thompson
does a wonderful job at connecting old Buddhist and Hindu concepts with
contemporary learnings in the realm of the human brain. I recently chatted with
him about these topics.
Let's
get right to the heart of the matter: What is consciousness?
I use the
word consciousness to cover three things: awareness, the changing contents of
awareness — what we’re aware of from moment to moment when we’re awake, or when
we’re asleep, or meditating — and then ways of identifying with certain
contents of awareness as self. That threefold framework comes from the Indian
philosophical tradition — Buddhist traditions, Hindu traditions. I use that to
organize my discussion as to how the sense of self appears when we’re awake,
when we’re falling asleep, when we’re dreaming. I also examine the question of
the nature of awareness itself. The guiding image goes back to the earliest
Upanishads: luminosity, or light. The thought is that awareness masks or
discloses something in order for the mind to be able to grasp it. Light reveals
something for us to be able to see it; awareness allows us to perceive
something in a particular way.
One of
my favorite lines from the book is, "Consciousness is something we live,
not something we have."
Is consciousness
just a brain process, as many neuroscientists and biologists would say? Is it
something that is not understandable, as many philosophers would argue, because
we cannot bridge the gap between biology and first-person experience?
Consciousness is not just another thing or property that the body and brain has
in life that it doesn’t have in death. It’s the background to everything that
we experience, including everything we do in science. In that sense,
consciousness isn’t something that we have, as we have hands and feet, or as we
have books and tables. If we try to turn it into an object, we inevitably
destroy it. It has to do with our whole motive for being.
Is
consciousness body-dependent?
There are
two ideas I try to keep in balance throughout the entire book. One is that
consciousness is contingent on our embodiment. When you look for consciousness
it never shows up apart from some context of the body. At the same time, the
body always shows up in our field of awareness. I try to work with that
reciprocity or circularity as a way of resisting two tendencies. One is
straightforward reductionism: Consciousness is just a process of the brain. The
other is that no, consciousness is transcendent — in some spiritualist sense
apart from the body. If you critically examine the evidence people put forward
for the transcendence of consciousness, the evidence is lacking. But
consciousness is something we live; it has a primacy so that it doesn’t just
show up in a way that we identify with neuronal firings.
Another
favorite line of mine is when you describe the self as a process.
The
metaphor I use is a dance: A dance is a process, the process of dancing. In
dancing you dance; the dance is no different than the dancing. I use this as a
metaphor for the self: The self is a process; it’s something enacted, and it is
no different from that enacting of self in the process of awareness. In the
waking state that has to do with bodily action and perception. Of course in
daydreaming the sense of self shifts: We enact a mental autobiographical sense
of self when we project ourselves in the past or the future, so we identify
with a particular content of our awareness, which is a mental image of the
self. That’s a different enacting of the sense of self. Then when we fall
asleep that sense of self starts to dissolve; the boundaries between self and
other start to come apart. But then they reappear in the dream state, which is
very strongly connected to memory, so we enact within the field of awareness
the difference between what is the dream self and what is not the dream self.
So all of that is a kind of ongoing process of enacting a sense of self in
awareness.
These
old Buddhist concepts are presented very differently today then during their
inception. Do you see any problems with that?
A good
example of that is the present discourse around mindfulness. The term in its
original Buddhist context is that the word for mindfulness really has a sense
of memory, holding something in mind—remembering to keep attention on a certain
thing. It’s cognitively very rich. Whereas today the term is often used to mean
not thinking at all or being present without judgment. I’m not saying that’s an
invalid use of the term; it’s just a different sense of the term from a much,
much older use.
With
the mindfulness movement's emphasis on moment-by-moment awareness, there seems
to be very little discussion about what it's being used for beyond stress
relief or better cognitive functioning while at work. Can mindfulness be
detached from ethics?
That’s a
really important and in many ways difficult question. It depends what we mean
by ethics and it depends what we mean by mindfulness. Sometimes in Buddhism
some people will say, "Mindfulness is always an ethical notion,"
while in the way it’s being used in the West today, it’s often used decoupled
from ethics. There’s a sense in which that’s just not right. If you look just
at the concept of mindfulness, there’s a debate in Buddhism about whether it’s
a neutral mental process or whether it’s an intrinsically wholesome one.
Different Buddhist traditions say different things on this. We shouldn’t assume
there’s just one line in Buddhism and its relationship to ethics and
misrepresent the complexity of that tradition.
That all
being said, I’m very concerned with what I would call a decontextualized — or
maybe the proper word would be recontextualized — consumerist notion of
mindfulness, where mindfulness is about paying attention non-judgmentally in
the present moment. That gets framed in terms of paying attention
non-judgmentally in your little office cubicle so that you can take a
mindfulness pause and get back to work for a corporation that is maybe
contributing to global warming. Or the use of mindfulness under the heading of
"mental fitness" in the context of the military. That’s really quite
problematic. In the Buddhist tradition, even if the notion of mindfulness is
not, technically speaking, to some schools "intrinsically wholesome,"
it’s against the background of the whole Buddhist tradition, where there’s
certain basic ethical considerations that are in place. That’s often missing in
present uses of mindfulness, and that’s something we should be very concerned
about.
Source= bigthink.com
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