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

Evolution and Islam Debate at Imperial College London

Can Buddhist Philosophy provide a Middle Way between Antiscience and Scientism?

Geology Lecture at Imperial College

From The Independent, by Jerome Taylor

"Organisers behind a British conference on Islam and evolution say they nearly had to cancel the event after receiving a torrent of opposition from Muslim students at one of the country’s top scientific universities, The Independent has learned.

The Deen Institute, a Muslim debating forum which promotes critical thinking, had hoped to hold a conference entitled “Have Muslims misunderstood evolution?” early next year. Among the speakers invited to attend included Muslim scientists, imams who have promoted the compatibility of Islam and evolution as well as those who preach a form of Islamic creationism.

The initial plan was to hold the event next month at Imperial College London, one of the country’s foremost universities for scientific exploration and debate, in cooperation with the local Islamic student society. But the Deen Institute said it was forced to pull out when it became clear that opposition to the event from supporters of creationism began mounting. It is now being held without input from any Muslim student society at Logan Hall, a conference centre owned by the University of London.

“We eventually had to give up of getting any support from student societies because it was seen as simply too controversial,” Adam Deen, co-founder of the institute, told The Independent. Deen, who describes himself as a “conservative Muslim” who encourages critical thinking, said he was surprised to receive such opposition at a place of scientific study, particularly as he had made sure to invite all sides of the debate including those who preach creationism...

...Mr Deen’s public Facebook account illustrates many of the concerns people raised. In one comment Mohammad Ali Harrath, the founder of the highly influential Islam Channel, wrote: “This debate is a big mistake. It is shifting debate to make it a Muslim issue rather than an issue between atheists and creationists...”

...Another commenter, Zeshan Sasjid, added: “Evolution is not Islamic. Prophet Adam did not have parents. A Muslim can’t believe that Prophet Adam...

...Muslims believe the Qur’an is the indisputable word of God and therefore any scientific discovery which risks proving something within their holy book as incorrect is highly controversial, particularly among the more literalist schools of thought. For example, most Muslim scholars have long accepted scientifically proven cosmology but even up until his death in 1999, Sheikh Ibn Baaz, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, continued to insist that the Sun revolved around the Earth based on his interpretation of Islamic texts...

...Much of this newfound enthusiasm for attacking evolution has been pushed by Harun Yahya, a prominent Turkish theologian whose writings have been seized upon by literalists and those who exhibit a theological suspicion of science. Dr Oktar Babuna, a representative from the Harun Yahya movement, is scheduled to speak at the conference alongside Shaikh Yasir Qadhi, an influential imam who accepts evolution at a micro level but refuses to countenance the idea that man evolved from anything other than Adam himself...    Read it all here.

(As an aside, observers of the interfaith dialog scene may remember the Harun Yahya organization as having some definite opinions on Buddhism)

Pseudoscience, Antiscience, Irrationalism and Anti-rationalism

In a previous article I noted how Christianity is deteriorating rapidly, with a headlong retreat into obscurantism, anti-science and general dumbing-down.  

However, it would be erroneous to conclude that the same thing is happening to Islam, because orthodox Islam has never attempted to emerge from anti-science and obscurantism. So for the Koran-believing jihadist, fundamentalist creationism is business as usual .    In fact, Islam goes further than Christianity in not only rejecting science when it conflicts with scripture, but rejecting rationalism itself!

Philosophical Debate at Imperial College

 
Al-Ghazzali, the prominent Sufi jihadist, anathematized rational belief in causality by preaching that what is perceived as cause and effect between objects is mere appearance, not reality. Instead, only Allah truly acts with real effect; all seemingly natural observances of causation are merely manifestations of Allah's habits, for Allah simultaneously creates both the cause and the effect according to his arbitrary will.    . This, of course, undermines the rational basis of all sciences, and for some religious people this is their only way of coping with modernity.  All science is wrong and evil. 

However not all Muslims reject evolution, though they do tend to have a rather unusual understanding of the theory.

Materialism

Although we laugh at the way the creationists try to defend their religious beliefs, they may have genuine concerns, though expressed in a very incoherent way.    What may be motivating them subconsciously is the need to reject materialism  - the belief that all phenomena in the universe, in particular the human mind, are explainable in terms of matter. In other words, such concepts and experiences as beauty, love, spirituality, pleasure and pain are reducible to nothing but physical and chemical interactions.

Materialism leads to a rejection of spirituality, both in terms of declining religious belief, and also in the arts, where the cult of ugliness, with its obsessions with the sordid and brutalistic, works to reduce humans to nothing more than biological automata .  Of course all religions reject materialism as an article of faith, but none apart from Buddhism attempts to offer any rational philosophical refutation of the materialist worldview.

The religious motivation to reject science as a whole may derive from a need to reject materialism, coupled with a confusion of science with scientism. 

Scientism

Scientism is a misuse of scientific methodology  beyond the limits of its applicability, including attempts to reduce all knowledge to only that which can be understood by mechanistic models. It is an overreaching view of science as if it were capable of describing all reality and knowledge, or as if it were the only true way to acquire knowledge about reality and the nature of things.

While Buddhism is quite happy with science in general, and especially with evolution, it does not agree with scientism, and disputes claims that the mind can be explained or understood in physical terms, because its ultimate nature is non-physical: 'when the body dies the 'mechanism' of the body, holding the spirit is gone and the spirit finds a new body sooner or later, perhaps immediately.'  - Alan Turing (Code Breaker, Mathematician and Buddhist Philosopher)

For a discussion of why the mind is a non-physical, fundamental aspect of the universe which is not derived from anything else, see Confronting Materialism and the Delusion of the Mechanical Mind.

 

Buddhist Philosophy - the Middle Way between Scientism and Antiscience

All physicalist/materialist explanations are algorithmic ( Church-Turing-Deutsch Principle).

However. the 'Hard Problem' of the mind seems incapable of any algorithmic understanding, as no progress has been made since the problem was first formulated by the eminent Victorian physicist John Tyndall 140 years ago.

It is therefore a reasonable working hypothesis that the mind is non-algorithmic, and is thus a good candidate for being non-physical.

A phenomenon that is non-algorithmic is not reducible to the 20 or so fundamental algorithmic building blocks that comprise the instruction set of a general purpose computer, these are SET, MOVE, READ, WRITE, ADD, SUBTRACT, MULTIPLY, DIVIDE, AND, OR, XOR, NOT, SHIFT, ROTATE, COMPARE, JUMP, JUMP-CONDITIONALLY, RETURN.  

In particular, the causal JUMP-CONDITIONALLY (usually implemented as IF...THEN...ELSE...) is not applicable to any non-algorithmic phenomenon, for if we could describe in a stepwise manner how the phenomenon functioned, then the phenomenon would be algorithmic!

This puts non-algorithmic systems, such as the mind, beyond the limits of science and scientism without violating any scientific principles, or abandoning rationalism, or otherwise degenerating into antiscience.

Thus Buddhist philosophy can protect spirituality from destruction by the bleak and barren doctrines of materialism and scientism, without the need to believe six impossible things before breakfast, or the truth of Genesis and the Koran as the literal 'word of God'.

However, it seems unlikely that anything can protect the once-prestigious Imperial College from being dumbed down by Islamic intimidation, stealth jihad and creeping Sharia.  Western academia cannot withstand attack by the traditional Islamic debating tactics of ignorance, arrogance and aggression.

THE THREE PILLARS OF ISLAM

Related articles

Mysterians, Mysterianism and the Mystery of the Mind

Algorithmic compression and the three modes of existence

Non-algorithmic phenomena

Buddhism and Mathematics

Buddhism and Science 

Evolution, Emptiness and Delusions of the Darwinian Mind

Bridging the Explanatory Gap of the Hard Problem 

The Church-Turing-Deutsch Principle and Buddhist Philosophy

All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace

Is Richard Dawkins a Buddhist? 

THE CLOSING OF THE MUSLIM MIND:How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

- Sean Robsville

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BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY

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Buddhism, Sentience, Dukkha, Evolution and the Mind

Creationism
Any philosophy that claims to be worthy of rational consideration needs to be compatible with evolution.    

Both Christianity and Islam have major problems with evolution, and are consequently in headlong retreat into anti-science and irrationalism. 

Fortunately, Buddhism has no problem with this aspect of biological science, and indeed rejects the idea of inherently existing species as a form of essentialism.    

To Buddhists, species are just separate populations of interbreeding plants and animals.  Their defining characteristics have evolved over time and are therefor impermanent. The species do not have any essential nature, nor are they copies of some static Platonic ideal form or divine ‘blueprint in the sky’, as drawn up by God during the week of creation.

But although Buddhism is completely compatible with a scientific versus theological view of the origin of the species, it does need to explain 'The Hard Problem' of how non-physical minds have become associated with physical bodies over the course of evolution.  Otherwise Buddhism is in danger of losing its spiritual aspects and becoming just another bleak materialistic philosophy. 

Automata

Automata versus Sentient Beings
One way of approaching the Hard Problem of Consciousness is by asking why humans (and presumably other animals) are sentient, with inner experiences such as pleasure and pain?    Why could they not be ‘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'.

The Origin of Suffering according to Christians

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.

For a discussion of why the mind is a non-physical, fundamental aspect of the universe which is not derived from anything else, see Confronting Materialism and the Delusion of the Mechanical Mind.


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, it has to endure suffering and then leave its home, being able to take nothing 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.

Participatory Anthropic Principle
Finally, according to one version of quantum theory, the eventual association of physical bodies with non-physical minds was inevitable in order to collapse the superposition of the entire universe.


- Sean Robsville


RELATED ARTICLES
Evolution, Emptiness and Delusions of the Darwinian Mind
Rational Buddhism
Creationism: Crisis for Christianity = Opportunity for Buddhism
Is Richard Dawkins a Buddhist?
All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace 

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BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY

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