Process Philosophy and Buddhism: Process Metaphysics versus Substance Metaphysics

Are all functioning phenomena processes?

1.  Christian versus Buddhist worldviews
 
I've written this article in response to a couple of recent critiques of Buddhism by two prominent Catholic intellectuals, George Neumayr and Professor Regis Martin, which demonstrate common misunderstandings of Buddhist beliefs.    One of the causes of these misunderstandings is that Catholics and Buddhists have two very different metaphysical views of the world, which will almost inevitably result in them talking past each other.

Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of existence.

There are two main varieties of metaphysics:

(i)  Substance Metaphysics
.
(ii)  Process Metaphysics.

Substance metaphysics holds that the foundations of reality are things, substances and universal forms.   In contrast, process metaphysics holds that no stable foundation to reality can be found, and everything we observe is the aspect of a process or processes.

Most western philosophies have been based on substance metaphysics, whereas most schools of Buddhism are committed to process metaphysics.    Classical (pre-quantum, pre-Darwinian) science presupposed substance metaphysics, whereas modern science is moving towards process models of reality.

In terms of religious views, this difference can easily lead to misunderstandings.  Most Christians believe that a thing called 'the soul' survives death and continues to exist independently of the body.   Most Buddhists believe that a cognitive process called the 'mental continuum' or 'mindstream' survives death and continues to operate for a while independently of biophysical processes, until it forms a further association with another set of biophysical processes constituting the developing body of its next rebirth.   

This is easily misinterpreted: 'Buddhists don't believe in the soul' (as a thing) rapidly becomes misunderstood as 'Buddhists don't believe anything survives death'. 

I've listed the contrasting features of substance metaphysics versus process metaphysics below. Not all the points will apply to a particular philosophical variety of metaphysics, but the lists give a general flavor of the different worldviews, and will hopefully give Christians and Buddhists a clearer idea of where the other is coming from during interfaith dialog.





2.  Major features of Substance Metaphysics
 
2.1  Focuses on what there is.

2.2  Being is primary, becoming is secondary.

2.3  Reality is an assembly of static components whose changeable aspects are secondary and superficial.

2.4  Matter is static and stable and can be categorized into fundamental substances composed of atoms and particles.

2.5  The identity of an individual plant or animal is determined by some 'ideal form', specification, or prototype for the particular species of which it is a member. Thus the actual forms of individual dogs are determined by the universal form of 'dog'.

2.6 The human mind is either a 'thing' (a soul as believed by Christians), or is a secondary and superficial emergent phenomenon of matter (as believed by materialists).

2.7 Processes are secondary to substances, and consist of rearrangements of very small things (stable unchanging atoms).

2.8  Measurements are real, objective properties of what is being measured 'out there'.

2.9 There's a tendency to favor creationism rather than evolution.

2.10  There are often essentialist assumptions and presuppositions.





3.  Major features of Process Metaphysics
 
3.1 Focuses on what is occurring and the way it is occurring.

3.2 Becoming is primary, being is secondary, arbitrary and ultimately impermanent

3.3 All functioning phenomena are processes.

3.4 The human mind is a process.

3.5 All physical (as distinct from mental) processes can be modelled and understood in terms of the operations of a 'Turing machine'. (Church-Turing-Deutsch Principle)

3.6 Anything that causes a change is itself changed.

3.7 Large scale macro objects consist of combinations of very small processes (quantum phenomena).

3.8 Measurements are properties of interactive processes. The observer is part of the system.

3.9 There is a tendency to favor evolution rather than creationism.

3.10 Empty space is itself a process, with entities continually coming in and out of existence (quantum vacuum).

3.11  All living individuals are processes, with their apparent stability being maintained by 'homeostasis', which is a collection of coordinated processes that utilize energy inputs to maintain structure, water balance, chemical composition, pH, temperature etc.  When the processes of homeostasis fail, the individual undergoes the process of death.

3.12 The subjective assessment of the stability of a phenomenon (e.g. , planet, ocean, continent, shoreline, sandbank, raindrop) is arbitrary and based on the phenomenon's length of endurance in comparison with the human lifetime.  'Things' are snapshots of particular stages of processes.

3.13 The inability to find any stable, self-existent or internal quality of an object that defines what it is, implies that it is the mind of the observer that arbitrarily assigns the name, identity, function, and conventional discreteness to that object.

3.14  There is a continuity between all lifeforms, and our categorizing plants and animals into separate species is an arbitrary result of their current stage of development and the extinction of intermediate forms (Dawkins' Granny chain).

3.15 The predisposition of humans to reify phenomena is a cognitive bias resulting from our evolutionary history.



4. Mental processes - when Buddhism goes beyond science
 
If Buddhism were only concerned with physical processes, then it would be nothing more than a philosophy of science. However, Buddhism is especially concerned with non-physical, mental cognitive processes, such as the development of qualia in meditation, and the intentionality of attachment and aversion.  It is also concerned with the mind as a process that continues from one life to the next, and which does not end when its associated physical processes end.

Physical processes, which include processes studied within the academic discipline of physics itself - and also processes in those disciplines based upon physics such as cosmology, chemistry, biochemistry, biophysics, physiology, meteorology, geology, engineering and technology - can all be modelled, simulated and understood in terms of datastructures and algorithms.   

In some cases these datastructures/algorithms can be as simple as the formula on the back of an envelope, such as e=mc². In other cases, they involve complex software simulations.   What they all have in common is that they specify processes, and they are all ultimately reducible to the operations of a Turing machine.

A Turing 'machine' is a mathematical structure that can implement and emulate any computable mathematical/logical function or algorithm.  Although it’s called a 'machine', and has actually been implemented physically, the Turing Machine is usually regarded as an abstract mathematical thought-experiment.   There is a fundamental principle of science, known as the Church–Turing–Deutsch principle, that any physical system can be simulated by a universal Turing Machine.

However, an examination of the architecture and capabilities of the Turing machine demonstrates that it is incapable of supporting or generating such characteristic mental processes as qualia and intentionality. A completely different approach to studying and investigating these mental phenomena is required, which is where introspective Buddhist meditation techniques become applicable. 

John Tydall 1820 - 1893

5. Materialism and physicalism and their refutations
 
In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only phenomena that exist are matter/energy; that all things are composed of matter, and all phenomena (including consciousness) are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance, and reality is identical with the actually occurring states of energy and matter. 

This gives a problem to those substantialists who believe in a spiritual dimension to life, which includes most Christian theologians, who are therefore forced to postulate non-material things (souls) composed of some substance or substances which survive the death and dissolution of the material body.  This view, which requires the existence of  two fundamental kinds of substance - mental and material -   is known as substance dualism. 

According to the theologians, souls and soul-substance are unique to human beings. Animals don't possess souls and are purely material beings.    These theological views run into some pretty obvious difficulties when we try to reconcile them with evolution.  In addition, there is no evidence whatsoever of any 'soul-substance' detectable by science.

Process philosophy refutes materialism by demonstrating that processes, rather than substances are fundamental (quantum physics).

At first sight this would seem to provide similar difficulties for anyone asserting a spiritual dimension to existence, in that materialism is simply replaced by the more process-oriented physicalism, which is the philosophical view that everything is explainable in terms of physical processes.  The physicalists claim that all mental activities are reducible to the physical processes of neuronal firings in the brain.

However physicalism can be shown to have a yawning explanatory gap when it comes to providing any mechanism of consciousness.  It has 'known unknowns', to use a Rumsfeldian idiom, whereas the soul-substance theory is more in the realm of ‘unknown unknowns’.

An eloquent statement of these 'known unknowns' in physicalist attempts to explain the mind was provided by the Victorian physicist  John Tyndall in 1871.  I'll quote it in full, then go on to discuss some of the points in more detail, taking account of changes in knowledge and terminology in the intervening 142 years - none of which has to the slightest extent invalidated the deficiencies in physicalism identified by Tyndall:


"The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that a definite thought, and a definite molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously; we do not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of the organ, which would enable us to pass, by a process of reasoning, from the one to the other. They appear together, but we do not know why. 
 
Were our minds and senses so expanded, strengthened, and illuminated, as to enable us to see and feel the very molecules of the brain; were we capable of following all their motions, all their groupings, all their electric discharges, if such there be; and were we intimately acquainted with the corresponding states of thought and feeling, we should be as far as ever from the solution of the problem, "How are these physical processes connected with the facts of consciousness?" The chasm between the two classes of phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable. 
 
Let the consciousness of love, for example, be associated with a right-handed spiral motion of the molecules of the brain, and the consciousness of hate with a left-handed spiral motion. We should then know, when we love, that the motion is in one direction, and, when we hate, that the motion is in the other; but the "Why?" would remain as unanswerable as before."
    —John Tyndall (1871), Fragments of Science



6. Comments on Tyndall’s critique of physicalism
 
6.1  "The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable."     

It still is. Philosophers still cannot conceive of how a sequence of physical events, whether spiralling molecules, diode states, neuronal discharges or strings of characters, can produce qualitative experience (see the Chinese Room argument).


6.2  "We do not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of the organ, which would enable us to pass, by a process of reasoning, from the one to the other."

If we rephrase 'intellectual organ' as 'intellectual faculty', then the major addition since Tyndall’s time has been computer simulation and modelling.  Nevertheless, all that computer science has done is to confirm Tyndall's view by providing a more rigorous definition of physical and mechanistic processes, and a better understanding of why such processes cannot in themselves support the mental processes of intentionality and qualitative experience.

To illustrate this, suppose that we could map the brain, to whatever degree of accuracy required (down to single molecules if need be) as a three dimensional array of values in a computer.   Consider also that we knew that a certain configuration of values was associated with pleasure, and a different configuration of values was associated with pain. 

This three-dimensional array of values is reducible to, and actually stored within the computer as a one-dimensional array if binary digits (isomorphic with the tape in a Turing machine).  So we would then know that, say,  01010 was associated with pleasure, and 01101 was associated with pain. 

However, the mechanism by which these binary strings caused the subjective experiences would remain as obscure as ever, because there is no envisageable 'mechanism', in the Turing sense, that can bridge the gap between a datastructure and subjective experience.




6.3  "Were our minds and senses so expanded, strengthened, and illuminated, as to enable us to see and feel the very molecules of the brain; were we capable of following all their motions, all their groupings, all their electric discharges, if such there be; and were we intimately acquainted with the corresponding states of thought and feeling, we should be as far as ever from the solution of the problem, "How are these physical processes connected with the facts of consciousness?" The chasm between the two classes of phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable."
 
In other words, if the technology of brain scanning were so improved and perfected that we could follow the causal chain of physical or biophysical processes from seeing someone we love/hate, starting from the eye, then through the optic nerve into the brain until its final physical  manifestation as the firing of neurones, we would have reached a state beyond which no physical causal mechanism was present, and yet causality would still be occurring, as evidenced by the experience of love/hate.  

From a Buddhist point of view, any further causality along the chain would be regarded as coming from mental processes rather than physical processes.

Imagine the case where we caught sight of our fiancé(e) after an absence (which made the heart grow fonder).  Our mental processes would interact with the physical processes of the brain to produce the qualitative feeling of love.  Now consider the case where we caught sight of the same person a couple of years later as he/she was entering the courtroom during particularly acrimonious divorce proceedings. Would  our mental processes then interact with the same physical processes of the brain to produce the qualitative feeling of hate?

These non-physical interactions are discussed further in The Hard Problem.


For a general background see Buddhist Philosophy

Confronting Materialism and the Fallacy of the Mechanistic Mind

Promises, promises...

1. WHAT IS MATERIALISM?

Materialism is the belief that matter is the only reality in life and everything else, such as mind, feelings, emotions, beauty etc are just the by-products of the brain's physical and chemical activity, with no independent existence of their own.  Once their material basis is gone, mind and consciousness just disappear without trace.   Needless to say, materialism denies the validity of all religions and spiritual paths, not just Buddhism.

The debilitating effects of materialism don't just affect religions; they despiritualise all in their path, degrading art and encouraging brutalism.

Philosopher Roger Scruton believes that all great art has a 'spiritual' dimension, even if it is not overtly religious. It is this transcendence of the mundane that we recognise as 'beauty'.

Although materialism undermines the basis of all religions, nevertheless, materialism is of special interest to Buddhists, because Buddhism is the only religion that has a sufficiently strong philosophical basis to confront it.   Buddhism can argue rationally against materialism, whereas less  intellectually grounded religions can only bury their heads in the sand and ignore it, while their congregations decline and their institutions get taken over by small cliques of extremists.
 
As the Abrahamic religions have failed to tackle materialism, and instead are  degenerating into antiscience, idiocy and bigotry, Buddhism could become the only object of refuge for intelligent spiritual seekers wanting to escape the bleak and barren consequences of materialism.

This article will begin by looking at the sources and effects of materialism, then will attempt to get a workable definition of materialism in order to establish a clear idea of the 'object of negation' to be refuted.  The actual process of establishing this object of negation will itself begin to show some of the weaknesses of the materialist view.

In section four I will look at how we confront materialism, pointing out its inadequacies as a complete model of the mind. Finally, in section five I will put forward a more positive view of mind as a fundamental and irreducible aspect of all phenomena.

2.  THE ORIGINS, PREVALENCE AND CONSEQUENCES OF MATERIALISM

2.1 Scientism

Materialism always claims a scientific justification for its view, though as we shall see in section 4, this is not supported by close examination.

Materialism has its origins in scientism - a mistaken attempt to apply the methods of science beyond the limits of their applicability, in particular to claim to understand the workings of the mind (as distinct from the brain) in terms of physics and chemistry.  A warning against scientism was first given by the eminent Victorian physicist John Tyndall over 140 years ago:

"... the passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that a definite thought, and a definite molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously; we do not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of the organ, which would enable us to pass, by a process of reasoning, from the one to the other. They appear together, but we do not know why.

Were our minds and senses so expanded, strengthened, and illuminated, as to enable us to see and feel the very molecules of the brain; were we capable of following all their motions, all their groupings, all their electric discharges, if such there be; and were we intimately acquainted with the corresponding states of thought and feeling, we should be as far as ever from the solution of the problem, "How are these physical processes connected with the facts of consciousness?" The chasm between the two classes of phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable.

Let the consciousness of love, for example, be associated with a right-handed spiral motion of the molecules of the brain, and the consciousness of hate with a left-handed spiral motion. We should then know, when we love, that the motion is in one direction, and, when we hate, that the motion is in the other; but the "Why?" would remain as unanswerable as before."

Everything we have learned about the structure and physiology of the brain in the century and a half since Tyndall's statement has taught us a lot about the structure and physiology of the brain.  It has not progressed one inch towards closure of the explanatory gap of the Hard Problem.
 

However, amid the 20th century optimism that science and technology could do everything, Tyndall's warnings went unheeded, and scientism and materialism dominated philosophy throughout the century until its final years, when it became increasingly apparent that despite fifty years of promises that the 'electronic brain', exhibiting 'artificial intelligence', was just around the corner, the entire machine-intelligence project had failed to deliver and was now stalled. 

Not only that, but the converse project of attempting to reduce the mind to machine-like  activities had suffered the same fate, and in fact had made no progress since Tyndall's time  The Hard Problem of consciousness was reformulated in the 1990's by David Chalmers: 

“It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does."

2.2  Materialism as a default belief.

Although materialism has fallen out of favor with scientists and philosophers, it is still the default position among many people who are not scientifically educated, and who have been taken in by scientism.   Materialism is an unwillingly held default belief among many who don't see any rational alternative, while it is enthusiastically adopted by others to bash religion.  

There are undoubtedly many potentially spiritually-inclined people for whom scientism denies them the permission to believe in any dimension of reality other than a world restricted to the physical and mechanical, with its bleak and barren view of the potential of the mind.  

2.3 Secular Buddhism - The Enemy Within?

There is a movement within Buddhism, based on scientism, which is known as 'Secular Buddhism', and which ultimately seeks to reduce the mind to a by-product of the mechanical workings of the brain.

B. Alan Wallace  regards secular Buddhism as a counterfeit form of pseudo-Buddhism resulting from the current domination of science, education, and the secular media by scientific materialism:

"The Theravada Buddhist commentator Buddhaghosa refers to “far enemies” and “near enemies” of certain virtues, namely, loving-kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. The far enemies of each of these virtues are vices that are diametrically opposed to their corresponding virtues, and the near enemies are false facsimiles. The far enemy of loving-kindness, for instance, is malice, and that of compassion is cruelty. The near enemy of loving-kindness is self-centered attachment, and that of compassion is grief, or despair.  To draw a parallel, communist regimes that are bent on destroying Buddhism from the face of the earth may be called the far enemies of Buddhism, for they are diametrically opposed to all that Buddhism stands for. Batchelor and Harris, on the other hand, present themselves as being sympathetic to Buddhism, but their visions of the nature of the Buddha’s teachings are false facsimiles of all those that have been handed down reverently from one generation to the next since the time of the Buddha. However benign their intentions, their writings may be regarded as “near enemies” of Buddhism.

2.4 Soulless Buddhism - Or How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot

A traditional Buddhist teaching, which may unintentionally have the same despiritualising effect as Secular Buddhism, is the denial of the existence of the soul. This teaching has its origin in the denial of an ancient Hindu theology of an unchanging and unchangeable core to the mind, but does not deny a non-physical mind existing as a continuum that goes on from life to life.

Unfortunately, the teaching on no soul lends itself to misinterpretation by Westerners, who automatically assume that Buddhism must therefore be materialist.  In fact, the 'existence' of the soul is denied in the same way as the 'existence' of the body, in that body and soul are both processes, but do not have any static, unchanging inherent existence.   It would perhaps be best, rather than to deny the soul, to regard it as a conventional truth like the body.  For a detailed discussion of the soul in Buddhism see this excellent review.

3. A CLOSER EXAMINATION OF MATERIALISM - SOME DEFINITIONS

 

3.1  Inadequacy of the Concept of Materialism

Although I've used the word 'Materialism' up to now, the term is actually too vague to be of much use for detailed discussion, and has mostly gone out of use among philosophers.

Part of the problem is that there is no generally agreed definition of 'matter' among scientists. As Wiki says  "The term "matter" is used throughout physics in a bewildering variety of contexts...  It is fair to say that in physics, there is no broad consensus as to a general definition of matter, and the term "matter" usually is used in conjunction with a specifying modifier."

Another problem is that when matter is contrasted with mind, it can be very difficult to disentangle the two when we get down to the fundamental quantum level of physics.   According to one view (The Copenhagen interpretation), the mind of an observer is required to turn matter from probability to actuality.

3.2  Physicalism

In order to overcome the problems with 'Materialism', philosophers adopted the term 'Physicalism' as a more precise statement of the belief that that everything which exists is no more extensive than its physical properties.
 
"In contemporary philosophy, physicalism is most frequently associated with the mind-body problem in philosophy of mind.  Physicalism holds that all that has been ascribed to "mind" is more correctly ascribed to "brain" or the activity of the brain. The term "physicalism" is preferable to "materialism" because it has evolved with the physical sciences to incorporate far more sophisticated notions of physicality than matter, for example wave/particle relationships and non-material forces produced by particles." - Wiki

But even so, physicalism suffers from definition problems. Hempel's Dilemma questions how physicalism is defined. One could either define the physical with respect to the entities stipulated by contemporary physics, or with respect to some future complete physics. Both options seem problematic. In the first case, it seems reasonable to assume (based on the history of science) that current physical theories will very probably be refined by future scientific discoveries. Therefore, it is very likely that any definition of "the physical" based on the current state of physics would end up being ultimately false. If on the other hand, we define the notion of what is physical based some future idealized physics, we have not effectively defined anything at all because nobody knows what entities a future physical theory might postulate.    

3.3   Naturalism

Naturalism is an old-fashioned term which is a weaker and incoherent form of physicalism. Naturalism holds that all properties related to consciousness and the mind are reducible to natural phenomena.   This is such a vague definition as to be useless, since it leaves open the question whether such 'Hard Problem' mental phenomena as qualia and intentionality should be regarded as natural, especially since they don't seem to be explainable by physical, chemical and biological mechanisms (e.g. Tyndall's Love and Hate in section 2.1)

Alan Turing - Buddhist Philosopher, Mathematician and Code Breaker

3.4 Mechanistic Reductionism

The most precise term for the metaphysical basis of scientism is Mechanistic Reductionism (aka Philosophical Mechanism) . It is precise because its defining reference is to the Universal Turing Machine, which is a precisely defined mathematical object.  This avoids the slipperiness resulting from ill-defined basic terms such as 'matter', 'physics' and 'nature', and gives Buddhists and other anti-materialists a clear object of negation which can be refuted by rational argument. 

The Universal Turing Machine is an idealised mathematical object , yet it is functionally equivalent to the familair stored program computer  such as your desktop PC. The Church-Turing-Deutsch principle states that a universal computing device can simulate every physical process. To quote Michael Nielson 

'The Church-Turing-Deutsch (CTD)  Principle is a descendant of a famous idea known as the Church-Turing Thesis, taught to all computer scientists early in their degrees. I’ll talk later about the relationship between the Thesis and the Principle.

Just stating the CTD Principle makes it look deceptively obvious: Every physical process can be simulated by a universal computing device.
Most educated adults in the West today believe this Principle, whether they realize it or not.

We do not blink an eye to be told that a computer is being used to simulate a new aircraft, the explosion of a bomb, or even the creation of the Universe. The fact is, most people take it for granted that your standard desktop computer, given enough time and memory, can simulate pretty much any physical process.

Yet our ease with the CTD Principle is an ease brought by familiarity. One hundred years ago the statement would have been far more surprising, and, I suggest, even shocking to many people.

Viewed from the right angle, the CTD Principle still is shocking. All we have to do is look at it anew. How odd that there is a single physical system – albeit, an idealized system, with unbounded memory – which can be used to simulate any other system in the Universe...  More  

So, if we can show that the CTD does not apply to the mind, in other words that there are mental properties and/or  processes that are not reducible to the operations of a computer, we have established the reality of irreducible mind and disproved materialism.  Turing himself believed that the mind or spirit was non-physical and underwent reincarnation.

3.5 The Universal Turing Machine and Computationalism

If we want to be precise in our terminology, we need to understand that  computation, in the Turing sense, does NOT involve the manipulation of actual symbols.
 
Computation is limited to the manipulation of the characters of a defined 'alphabet' (which may be as simple as 0 and 1).

The symbolic significance of those characters is assigned from 'outside the system', and is thus a form of derived intentionality.

This limitation applies to all Turing-equivalent devices (and thus to  all physical mechanisms), including all computers.
 
A universal Turing machine consists of two main structures
(i)  a data tape
(ii) an action table (the program). 

The data tape can  be used to read in the program much like you can use a CD to read in either data or programs.   The data tape, being erasable, can be thought of as being equivalent to both the hard-disk memory and the RAM memory of a real life computer.    

The main difference between a Turing Machine and a PC is that in the Turing Machine the action table for even the simplest task becomes huge and unwieldy, and in a real world computer its functionality is simplified into about 20 basic operations implemented as the computer's instruction set.   By combining the members of this instruction-set into procedures, any algorithm (program) to simulate the behavior of any physical system can be constructed.

The physics-based sciences (and everything that reduces to them) construct their models, predictions and explanations by abstracting and reducing the numerous natural instances of processes operating on structures, into a few generic procedures operating on data (for example, the orbits of all the planets, comets etc can be described by Newton’s Laws)

Consequently,  physical explanations will be impossible to construct, will fail, or will be inapplicable as 'category errors' for any phenomena where...

(i) Processes cannot be reduced to procedures
(ii) Structures cannot be reduced to data
 
The intractable features of The Hard Problem of Consciousness seem to be that some of the processes of consciousness are not even in principle reducible to procedures (they are 'non-algorithmic'). Similarly, qualia (eg Love/Hate) cannot be reduced to data.   

Physical models and explanations cannot bridge the gap between quantitative/Boolean phenomena (physics) and qualitative phenomena (qualia of the mind). The instruction set of a computer does not, and cannot, deal with any qualitative phenomena such as semantics, qualia and intentionality. The instruction set consists only of the boolean and arithmetic operations SET, MOVE, READ, WRITE, ADD, SUBTRACT, MULTIPLY, DIVIDE, AND, OR, XOR, NOT, SHIFT, ROTATE, COMPARE, JUMP, JUMP-CONDITIONALLY, RETURN and their combinations. None of these separately, or in combination, are capable of generating Tyndall's love or hate. No instruction set can manipulate any qualitative phenomena.


For people with a scientific education, the Turing Machine provides one of the most easily understood refutations of materialism, physicalism and the mechanistic model of the mind.  The argument is as follows:
 
- The behavior of all machines, computers and physical systems is reducible without remainder to the operations of a Turing machine.

- The behavior of the mind shows at least two functions - 'aboutness' (intentionality)  and qualitative experience (qualia) - that cannot in principle be reduced to the operations of a Turing machine.

- Therefore, there are some aspects of the mind that are non-mechanistic and non-physical.

See  Mind and Mechanism – Buddhism and the Turing Machine for a full explanation.


 
3.6 The limits of science
The domain of science concerns those aspects of the world that can be modelled effectively and efficiently in terms of algorithms and data-structures.

'Effectively' means that the models have predictive power (and hence are falsifiable).

'Efficiently' means that the models are simpler and more general than the phenomena that they model (they embody 'algorithmic compression')

All non-algorithmic phenomena, by their very nature, are outside the scope of the physical sciences.

The 'materialists', 'physicalists', 'reductionists' and other practitioners of scientism are committed to trying to represent the three-dimensional world of causality, composition and mind, in terms of the two dimensions of algorithms and datastructures.

This representation ultimately requires them to insert various square pegs (qualia, semantics, intentionality, freewill etc) into the round hole of mechanistic reductionism in the form of computationalism. But computation can only deal with quantitative and Boolean-logical values. 

 

4 CONFRONTING MATERIALISM AND THE MECHANICAL MODEL OF THE MIND   

We can refute the mechanical model of the mind if we can demonstrate mental phenomena that are irreducible to computational procedures.

The New Kadampa Tradition, foremost of all the schools of Buddhism, is uniquely placed to refute materialism, mechanistic reductionism and computationalism because its view of how things exist maps onto the areas of contention with mechanistic reductionism.

 

Challenging the mechanical model of the mind

4.1 Kadampa Buddhism versus Mechanistic Reductionism

The difference between the Kadampa Buddhist and the computationalist view of reality can be stated quite simply:

Kadampa Buddhism states that all functioning phenomena are dependent upon

- Causality
- Structure
- Designation by mind
The Computationalist believes that all functioning phenomena are dependent upon

- Causality
- Structure

...with the mind being reducible to the operations of causality on structure in the same way that the activities of a computer are reducible to the operation of algorithms on datastructures.

To the Kadampa Buddhist, in contrast, the mind is an irreducible foundation of reality. 

To be a purely physical system, a phenomenon must be capable of being completely simulated by algorithms acting on datastructures (without any unexplained remainder).  Buddhists would claim that there is always going to be an unexplained remainder, because algorithms and datastructures are not self-interpreting.  Any assignment of ‘meaning’ to them has to come from mental awareness, which is primal, not derivative of algorithms or datastuctures.  As Copthorne Macdonald  points out:

"Traditionally, definitions of primal entities have left much to be desired. Asked to define time, Einstein is supposed to have said: "Time is what clocks measure." A widely-accepted definition of energy is: "Energy is the capacity to do work." About awareness we might say: "Awareness is the capacity to present information subjectively." Each definition is saying something interesting about the primal entity it attempts to define, but each falls short of letting us look at the intrinsic nature of that entity. To me, this difficulty in defining awareness is itself strong evidence that this aspect of reality which I'm labeling awareness — like those other aspects: energy, time and space — is fundamental, not derivative."

4.2 Intentionality, meaning and semantics

Aboutness (intentionality) is, according to the Buddhist view, something that only minds possess.

Physical things, such as electrical circuits, computer inputs and outputs, do not possess aboutness. As Roger Scruton pointed out recently, the pixels displaying a picture of a woman on a computer monitor are not in themselves about the woman. Only the mind of the viewer is about her.

This quality of 'aboutness' is known in Western philosophy as 'intentionality'  - a rather confusing term which has nothing to do with 'intention'. In Buddhist philosophy, intentionality is known as  'mental designation', 'mental imputation', 'mental projection' or 'mental attribution'.

Near synonyms for intentionality are 'semantics' and just plain old 'meaning'. The property of being about something, of having 'an intentional object', is the key feature that distinguishes psychological phenomena from physical phenomena, because physical phenomena lack the ability to generate original intentionality, and can only perform an intentional relationship in a second-hand manner: derived intentionality, such as a textual description.

Intentionality plays a much more fundamental role in Buddhism that it does in traditional Western philosophy.  Intentionality, in its role as 'mental designation' is, together with causality and structure, one of the three axiomatic foundations of all phenomena,  and is not reducible to the other two.   John Searle argued for this position with the Chinese room thought experiment, according to which no syntactic operations that occurred in a computer would provide it with semantic content.

The role of intentionality in Western philosophy is weaker than in Buddhism.   Intentionality came comparatively late into Western thought, being first formulated in its modern form by Franz Brentano in the late nineteenth century.  Unlike in Buddhism, intentionality took a long time in the West to be established as a causative aspect of reality, and for much of the twentieth century was dismissed as an epiphenomenon of matter by the dominant philosophies of positivism, behaviorism and materialism:

'So-called ‘eliminative materialists’ (see Churchland 1989) resolutely opt for the second horn of Quine's dilemma and deny purely and simply the reality of human beliefs and desires. As a consequence of their denial of the reality of beliefs and desires, the eliminative materialists must face the challenge raised by the existence of physical objects whose existence depends on the intentions, beliefs and desires of their designers, i.e., human artifacts.'  -  Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

4.3  Mind and Meaning - Algorithms are not self-interpreting.

Something fundamental is missing from attempts to apply the Church-Turing-Deutsch model to the mind.  All meaning is inevitably stripped out of an algorithm before it can be processed by a machine, an operation known as compilation.  For example, the following two statements reduce to exactly the same algorithm within the memory of a computer

(i) IF RoomLength * RoomWidth > CarpetArea THEN NeedMoreCarpet = TRUE

(ii) IF Audience * TicketPrice > HireOfVenue THEN AvoidedBankruptcy = TRUE

both, when compiled, will appear to the machine as an anonymous executable form such as
IF a*b > c THEN d=1

The algorithmic models for carpet laying and theatrical success are said to be 'isomorphic' - they both have the same form, though they are 'about' very different phenomena.   This 'aboutness' is called 'intentionality' by philosophers, and is something that minds can process and machines can't.

The computer will perform the same internal operations whether its consequences are a visit to the carpet store, or an embarrassing surplus in Max Bialystock’s bank account.

Audience * TicketPrice > HireOfVenue

 

4.4 John Searle's critique of Computationalism

This critique of the possibility of machine intelligence has been further developed by John Searle in the famous Chinese Room Argument, which claims to demonstrate that a computer cannot understand what it is doing or why.

So procedure and structure, no matter how programmed, or as implemented on any sort of physical machine, are inadequate to describe the capabilities of human mental processes. (See computationalism).

This limitation will not be solved by hardware improvements. No matter how many terabytes, gigaflops, neural nets or iterations of Moore's law we throw at the problem of producing artificial intelligence, the difficulties will remain insurmountable as long as the hardware is only capable of dealing with truth values which can be treated as binary or numeric, and as long as compilers strip out all meaning from the source code in order to produce machine code.

But what other computer architecture is there?.   Every computer is equivalent to a Turing machine, which is itself a state-transition table coupled to a tape of symbols, neither of which are capable of holding intrinsic meaning.

4.5 Towards a definition of non-physical mind.

So we are beginning to see a definition of Mind emerging  from the limitations of the Church Turing Thesis.  The Mind is that which gives meaning and is ultimately formless and non-algorithmic.
 
Minds can perform algorithmic operations such as mental arithmetic (though remarkably poorly compared with machines), and are capable of perceiving structure, yet when both algorithms and structures are factored out of mental processes, there remains a non-algorithmic residuum, which is a clear formless awareness.   

This foundational ‘formless’ mind is without form itself, either as datastructures,  or as algorithmic operations expressed as structures such as state transition tables and flowcharts.

Nevertheless, the mind can grasp, comprehend and give meaning to such external structures, and also to structures of its own imaginative creation.

The mental faculty that creates algorithms in the mind of the scientist, analyst or programmer ('The Mother of all Algorithms') is probably itself partly ‘intuitive’ and  nonalgorithmic.

4.6 Nonalgorithmic Phenomena

Computer simulations are, by their very nature, incapable of dealing with nonalgorithmic phenomena.


The great difficulty in talking about nonalgorithmic phenomena is that although we can say in general terms what they do, it is impossible by their very nature to describe how they do it. (If we could describe in a stepwise manner what was going on, then the phenomenon would be algorithmic!).

A typical example of a nonalgorithmic activity is assigning meaning to any object. For example, when is a chariot a heap of firewood? Or when is a car a pile of parts? (as discussed under sunyata). Many processes involving semantics, as distinct from syntax, appear to be non-algorithmic.

4.7  Qualia

Qualia are internal, subjective qualitative states such as the redness of red, aesthetic experiences of beauty and revulsion, pain, happiness, boredom, depression, elation, motivation, intention, the experience of understanding something for the first time, etc. Such states are subjective and private and are distinct (though causally related to) physical and neural activities.

The experimentally accessible processes, such as projection of images on the retina and the resultant neural firings etc, are describable in terms of manipulation of symbols (typically binary states such as fired/not fired, matrices of pixels or strings of pulses). However, how these symbols and the processes that manipulate them give rise to qualitative experience is one of the major areas of difference between the materialist and Buddhist viewpoints.

To the materialist, all perceptions - sight, hearing, touch taste and smell - arrive in the brain as bitstreams, a sequence of 1's and 0's like the bitstream which is bringing this information to you down the telephone wire. The 1's and 0's are physically implemented as electro-chemical impulses of neurons. The neural nets within the brain process these raw bit streams, firstly into data, then into information and finally into knowledge.

Buddhist philosophy has no difficulties with this process up to and including the point of generating information. However it points out that no mechanistic explanation appears to be able to bridge the gulf between information and knowledge, ie from symbols (whether on the printed page, or in the brain) to actual experience. There seems to be no bridge between the data about a rose, no matter how they are processed and arranged, and the actual subjective experience of the rose. The immediate knowledge of the rose consists (among other things) of the qualia of red, green, and the smell of its perfume, not to mention the very immediate and unpleasant sensation I get when I attempt to pick it up by its thorny stem.

The Buddhist does not doubt that the brain does some very sophisticated ordering of its incoming nerve impulses into the datastructures which are the objects of knowledge. But when all is said and done, those data structures remain as objects. They are not themselves knowledge, neither are they that which performs the function of knowing.

A datastructure by its very nature must have form. But according to Buddhist beliefs, the mind is formless and is capable of grasping any object of knowledge, including facts about the mind itself, which then become objects of knowledge in their own right. Consequently the mind is potentially unbounded.

Buddhist philosophy states that the the gap between information and knowledge cannot be bridged from the data-object side, it can only be bridged by the mind reaching out or going to its object (as it appears to do in certain quantum phenomena such as the 'spooky action at a distance' discussed in the section on quantum phenomena). Thus the mind is not a extension of the data processing capabilities of the brain either in terms of hardware, datastructures or algorithms. It is something totally different in its fundamental nature from all of these.

There is no one-way chain of causation between neurological events and qualitative mental states. Rather the mind appears to impute or project reality over the contents of datastructures within the brain, much as a PC operator would impute text, graphics, windows etc over the two dimensional array of dots that comprise a computer display.

4.8  Quantum Mind Interactions

The mathematical equations of quantum physics do not describe actual existence - they predict the potential for existence. Working out the equations of quantum mechanics for a system composed of fundamental particles produces a range of potential locations, values and attributes of the particles which evolve and change with time. But for any system only one of these potential states can become real, and - this is the revolutionary finding of quantum physics - what forces the range of the potentials to assume one value is the act of observation. Matter and energy are not in themselves phenomena, and do not become phenomena until they interact with the mind of an observer. 

Geshe Kelsang Gyatso - Leading Buddhist Philosopher of Mind

5 A MORE POSITIVE VIEW OF MIND

Up to now I've concentrated on refuting the materialist, mechanical model of the mind.   But we need to go beyond that. We need to produce a view of the mind that will offer an escape route from the soulless, stressed-out, dehumanised, over-regulated and proceduralised rat-race of present day existence, and re-establish our connection with the spiritual and numinous dimensions of life. 

However, there is a difficulty in that we cannot produce a model of the mind, because it is non-algorithmic.  As mentioned earlier, it is in general difficult to talk about non-algorithmic phenomena, because if we could describe in a stepwise manner how they operate, they would be algorithmic!  Ultimately the non-algorithmic nature of the mind can only be understood by meditative experience, not by procedural descriptions.   Again, Kadampa philosophy shows us the direction we need to take.

The Kadampa Buddhist definition of Mind is

"Mind - That which is clarity and cognizes. Mind is clarity because it always lacks form and because it possesses the actual power to perceive objects. Mind cognizes because its function is to know or perceive objects."
 
In Modern Buddhism Volume 1, p109,  Geshe Kelsang Gyatso says that as well as understanding how physical things (including our bodies) are empty of inherent existence and ultimately unfindable, we should also understand that the mind is similarly unfindable upon analysis.  

The mind is like an empty space that perceives or understands objects. It is not so much a 'thing' as a process, 'an ever-changing continuum' or 'mindstream'.   The very subtle 'root mind' is the process that goes on from life to life. All other temporary minds and thoughts are subprocesses that arise from it, and ultimately dissolve back into it.

So the mind is...
(i) Clear and Formless
(ii) Cognizing
(iii) Devoid of 'inherent existence' (or any defining essence)
(iv) A process rather than a 'thing'.
 
Not only is the mind empty of inherent existence, it is also empty of form or structure, though it can cognize forms and structures through 'the inexistent images of its intentionality', as they say in the trade.


In Transform Your Mind  Geshe Kelsang  says   "If the mind is not the brain, nor any other part of the body, what is it? It is a formless continuum that functions to perceive and understand objects. Because the mind is formless, or non-physical, by nature, it is not obstructed by physical objects."
 
'Cognizing' implies intentionality or 'aboutness'. Physical systems, including machines, are not in themselves 'about' anything. The apparent 'aboutness' of a physical system is projected onto it by the mind of its user.

The lack of inherent existence of the mind means that it has no defining essence, nothing to 'keep it as it is', so it can unobstructedly perceive all objects including those of its own creation. The mind can be 'about' anything whatsoever. This lack of defining essence, combined with lack of structure, allows the mind to change, expand, have freewill, and be creative.

The formless nature of the mind gives a double-whammy to any attempts to construct a deterministic physical or mechanistic explanation for the mind.

The first whammy is obvious: something totally lacking in form cannot be expressed as a structure.

Then there's the second whammy: algorithms and procedures are themselves ultimately structural.  In the Universal Turing machine (to which all other information processing machines are functionally equivalent) the algorithms take the form of state-transition tables, and the Turing machine populates its empty state-transition tables by reading them in from its data tape.

These whammies may explain why The Hard Problem is so hard that it is insoluble by science. The root process of consciousness is not even in principle reducible to a procedural form. Consequently, attempts at physical or mechanistic explanations are a category error.


Read more at Buddhist Philosophy

Evolution, Emptiness and Delusions of the Darwinian Brain.

Can you trust your mind?  How do you know it's giving you a true picture of the world?

If the mind is nothing more than the brain, and the brain has evolved solely to ensure the survival of our hunter-gatherer and neolithic farmer ancestors, then how do we know that it can reliably do anything beyond the range of competence for which evolution selected it?  

Natural selection cannot select directly for true beliefs, but only for advantageous behaviors.

So is the brain giving us a picture of the world that is merely fit for purpose, rather than one that represents some true underlying reality?    In that case, how does the brain cope so well with science and technology, which have arisen so recently that evolution cannot have had time to respond to selective pressures to deal these new cultural and environmental factors?

Darwin had doubts

The Darwinian mind may be deluded
Charles Darwin himself was one of the first to ponder these implications of evolution: 

"But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?"    
- Letter to William Graham, 1881 

Opening the Doors of Perception

Darwin realised that there is no necessary correlation between mental representations that have survival value, and those that portray a true picture.  In fact, delusions may have more survival value than truth, as users of hallucinogens such as LSD and magic mushrooms may discover:

"The brain is an organ which has evolved to display a particular interpretation of reality to the mind. There's no dispute that the brain operates abnormally under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs - but you've got to ask yourself - what is the purpose of the normal functioning of the brain?

The brain hasn't evolved to represent ultimate reality to the mind. The brain has evolved by selection of the fittest (not the most truthful) to project the delusion of the inherently-existing self onto the mind. This delusion of a permanent, unchanging self is 'imputed' over the ever-changing transitory collection of biochemical building blocks that makes up the physical aspects of a sentient being.

These biochemical building blocks are brought together by a loose temporary alliance of selfish genes. This alliance comes into existence at conception and ends at death. When the brain is functioning 'correctly', it is acting in the best interests of the alliance.

The brain is the alliance's propaganda machine, and it is constantly exhorting the mind to:

" Preserve ME ! Reproduce ME ! "

The correct functioning of the propaganda machine is obviously necessary for the preservation and procreation of the species. Nevertheless, to perform its function the brain needs to project a distorted view of the self onto the mind.

Disruption of this ceaseless barrage of ME-ME propaganda by psychedelic agents enables the mind to temporarily push the doors of perception ajar and peek beyond mundane biologically-determined appearances."

Defying the tyranny of the genes
All animals, including ourselves, have genetically programmed drives to eat, reproduce, fight for territory and mates, kill prey, help our kin and so on. These drives appear to our mind as attachment and aversion.

Manifestations of attachment include sexual desire, hunger and the need for security. Manifestations of aversion include fighting, fleeing and avoiding painful and dangerous situations. All these mental reactions have evolved because they gave our ancestors a selective advantage. They are, or were, essential for preservation of the individual and procreation of its genes.

We humans can to some extent distance ourselves from these drives. We can examine them and if necessary rebel against them. From the Buddhist point of view this is especially significant when these instinctive drives become pathological, giving rise to mental states such as anger, hatred, sadism, jealousy, greed, miserliness, tribalism, addiction, sexual abuse and so on.

Hatred, attachment and ignorance

The Three Poisons
In Buddhist ethics, aversion and greed (and their associated thought patterns) are two of the three poisons. The third poison is ignorance, which consists, among other factors, of being unable to separate the true nature of one's mind from the delusions which afflict it, especially the delusion of inherent existence.

The delusion of inherent existence is more subtle than the other two - greed and anger. 

We are deluded into seeing the world in terms of 'things' because our genes are telling us to grab resources. But if we take a step back and view the universe in terms of geological and cosmic timescales, it is apparent that there are no inherently existent things, only processes of continual change.   All phenomena are dependently-related to other phenomena and empty of any defining essence.

Individuals, buildings, artefacts, species, continents, planets and stars are transient phenomena caused by the coming together of parts. All compounded things are impermanent and eventually disintegrate. It is the deluded grasping at things as if they were permanent, or desirable in themselves, that is one of the principal causes of dukkha - the sensation of unsatisfactoriness due the transience of all biological pleasures.

So, the psychological symptoms of our evolutionary history are the three poisons of the mind, which are  of attachment and greed (for resources) aversion and hatred (for competitors and predators) and ignorance (of the whole show being a scam set up by the selfish genes to hijack the mind).  

But who or what is being deluded by this biological scam?  

If we aren't just the products of our genes, then what are we?  How is it possible for us to think of ourselves as potentially non-deluded, non-mechanistic, non-biological free agents?


The non-biological, non-physical component of the mind.
According to Buddhist philosophy, the reason we can work towards liberation from these poisons is that our minds, although influenced by biology, are not themselves predominantly biological  nor indeed fundamentally physical, nor are they emergent phenomena of physical or biological processes. In meditation we can imagine we are throwing away the three poisons, peeling off all our biological and social attributes in order to find out what we really are. We discover that we are pure awareness, a formless non-physical mental continuum that continues from life to life and body to body.

The evidence that our minds have capabilities that go way beyond what could have been selected solely by Darwinian evolution is discussed in the article on Mathematics and Buddhist Philosophy: 

"But it is hard for me to see how simple Darwinian survival of the fittest would select for the ability to do the long chains that mathematics and science seem to require".

"If you pick 4,000 years for the age of science, generally, then you get an upper bound of 200 generations. Considering the effects of evolution we are looking for via selection of small chance variations, it does not seem to me that evolution can explain more than a small part of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics."

"Certainly it is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin's process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess."

These considerations help dispel 'the horrid doubt whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy'.


The non-evolved, non-biological component of the mind is also non-physical, as discussed in the article on the Church-Turing-Deutsch Principle:

'So we are beginning to see a definition of Mind emerging  from the limitations of the Church Turing Thesis.  The Mind is that which gives meaning and is ultimately formless and non-algorithmic.

Minds can perform algorithmic operations such as mental arithmetic (though remarkably poorly compared with machines), and are capable of perceiving structure, yet when both algorithms and structures are factored out of mental processes, there remains a non-algorithmic residuum, which is a clear formless awareness.  

This foundational ‘formless’ mind is without form itself, either as datastructures,  or as algorithmic operations expressed as structures such as state transition tables and flowcharts.

Nevertheless, the mind can grasp, comprehend and give meaning to such external structures, and also to structures of its own imaginative creation.

The mental faculty that creates algorithms in the mind of the scientist, analyst or programmer ('The Mother of all Algorithms') is probably itself partly ‘intuitive’ and  nonalgorithmic.

But why does the mind have both biological and non-biological components?


Symbiosis of biological and physical minds.
One explanation for the coexistence of biological and non-biological aspects of the mind might be found in the process of symbiosis between the physical and non-physical person.  Symbiosis may explain why humans (and presumably other animals) are sentient, with inner experiences such as pleasure and pain.  Sentient beings are not just ‘philosophical zombies’   - mere automata lacking conscious experience, qualia, or sentience. 

In contrast  to a ‘philosophical zombie’, Buddhism defines a ‘sentient being’ as one that possesses a mind that can experience qualitative feelings, in particular suffering, unsatisfactoriness  or dukkha. 

The body of the sentient being may indeed be a physical automaton, but the mind is non-physical.    A sentient being  experiences its inputs (perceptions) and outputs (actions), in contrast to an automaton where no subjective states occur, and all meanings have to be assigned to inputs and outputs from 'outside the system'.



Symbiotic Mind – an Evolutionary Perspective
It seems likely that animals above a certain level of development require more than automatic reflexes in order to survive. Advanced organisms need motivation and intention in order to function in complex environments. Motivation and intention are chiefly driven by dukkha - the need to avoid suffering or unsatisfactoriness, and the restless but futile search for lasting happiness.  Dukkha and suffering, unpleasant though they may be for the individual, have survival and evolutionary advantages for the species. 

To quote Richard Dawkins:

"The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored."


Mental states such as suffering, unsatisfactoriness and pleasure are qualia. These subjective experiences, which carry strong immediate meanings, do not exist in automata - mechanistic systems such as relay networks or computers.

It is for this reason that complex animals have evolved neural structures which attract and capture minds. Fundamentally, it is the suffering and grasping of their minds - the need to avoid pain and seek pleasure - that provides the driving force for survival and reproduction of complex animals. The physical body enters into a symbiotic relationship with a non-physical mind.

In Buddhist philosophy, the mind of a sentient being is not a product of biological processes, but something primordial which has existed since beginningless time, and which will be drawn into another body once the present one has died.


Survival advantages of sentience
In evolutionary terms, any adaptation or feature must have some selective benefit for the organism that possesses it. Obviously, a physical body equipped with sentience will have an improved chance of surviving to propagate its genes over any mindless competitor which is not deterred by pain or motivated by pleasure.

But what does the mind gain from this symbiotic association?   Usually little or nothing. 

When the life of the biological partner comes to an end, the mind has to endure the sufferings of death and then leave its home, being unable to take anything with it. It must then enter the unstable state of the bardo and soon after find a new body. In Buddhist terminology these minds are wanderers or migrators in samsara (the realm of perpetual death and rebirth). The mind is non-evolved and non-evolving (at least not by the normal processes of natural selection).


Parasitic body, parasitized mind?
Perhaps the relationship between mind and body is more one of parasitism than symbiosis. The biological body gets a better chance to propagate itself.  But the mind has to endure dukkha -  the ever-changing experiences of craving, suffering and attachment that the body imposes upon it in order to force it to do what is necessary for survival, competition and reproduction.

The only way that the mind can escape being endlessly captured and used by biological systems is to permanently escape from the recurrent process of death, attraction to a body, and rebirth.  It is this cycle of 'samsara' that Buddhism claims to be able to break.

The evolutionary basis for the delusion of inherent existence.

In Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka, p 45 to 52, Jan Westerhoff argues that the mistaken belief in inherent existence of objects ('svabhava' in Sanskrit), is an inaccurate but useful conceptual handle on phenomena that has arisen from evolutionary selection.

Inherent existence as the brain's automatic default view.
'According to this cognitive understanding, svabhava (inherent existence) is here regarded as a superimposition (samaropa) which the mind naturally projects onto objects when attempting to conceptualize the world.'


Inherent existence as a simplifying concept
Westerhoff proposes that the brain has two preferred default views of phenomena, which have arisen through evolution:

(i) The principle of permanence
(ii) The principle of externality


The principle of permanence
'Other things being equal, we conceive of a sequence of stimuli as corresponding to a single enduring (though changing) object rather than to a sequence of different momentary ones [...] There are good reasons why we do not do so, primarily that such a representation is vastly too complex to use in practice. Any mind who lived in such a world of kaleidoscopically flashing phenomena would presumably be at an evolutionary disadvantage when compared with one that represented a world of stable, enduring objects.' - Westerhoff

The principle of externality
In the absence of evidence either way, we assume external rather than internal objects as the source of mental stimuli. For example, optical illusions still appear as illusions even when we know intellectually that the source of the mistaken perception is within ourselves, rather than within the object.   Similarly, ordinary dreams appear to be totally externally generated, and it takes special effort and training in lucid dreaming to bring them under our conscious control.

The beta movement is a good example combining the principle of permanence with the principle externality to produce a series of momentary stimuli which produce an optical illusion giving the appearance of a permanent entity


Emptiness as a corrective view against biologically evolved delusions.
'Emptiness as a  correction of a mistaken belief in svabhava is therefore not anything objects have from their own side, nor is it something that is causally produced together with the object, like the empty space in a cup.  It is also not something that is a necessary part of conceptualizing objects, since its only purpose is to dispel a certain erroneous conception of objects.  [ ...] a mind not prone to ascribing substance-svabhava ('inherent existence from its own side') to objects does not need to conceive of  objects as empty in order to conceive of them correctly.' - Westerhoff


The realization of emptiness by meditation
Buddhist teachers stress that mere intellectual understanding of emptiness is insufficient. We need to obtain a deep mental realization of emptiness in order to destroy the root of ignorance. 

Westerhoff explains these teachings as follows: 'It is because this cognitive default of the superimposition of svabhava is seen as the primary cause of suffering that the Madhyamaka draws a distinction between the understanding of arguments establishing emptiness and its realization. Being convinced by some Madhyamaka argument tht an object does not exist with svabhava does not usually entail that the object will not still appear to us as having svabhava. The elimination of this appearance is achieved only by the realization of emptiness.  The ultimate aim of the Madhyamika project is therefore not just the establishment of a particular ontological or semantic theory, but the achievement of a cognitive change.'

It is precisely this cognitive change that Buddhist meditations on emptiness aim to bring about.  The methods require progressing beyond a merely logical and conceptual understanding of emptiness, to acheive a direct realization of emptiness, which can then be applied to our entire 'conventional' experience.

As Geshe Kelsang Gyatso explains in Modern Buddhism:

"When we first realize emptiness we do so conceptually, by means of a generic image. By continuing to meditate on emptiness over and over again, the generic image gradually becomes more and more transparent until it disappears entirely and we see emptiness directly. This direct realization of emptiness will be our first completely non-mistaken awareness, or undefiled mind. Until we realize emptiness directly, all our minds are mistaken awarenesses because, due to the imprints of self-grasping or true-grasping ignorance, their objects appear as inherently existent."

Read more at Buddhist Philosophy