Abstract
When the relation between Buddhism and contemporary natural science is discussed there is usually at least one elephant in the room: the Buddhist conception of rebirth. This appears to constitute a clear example of a situation where Buddhism asserts the existence of something that science considers to be simply not there. The reason for this is obvious. If we accept the widespread contemporary belief that the mind is what the brain does, or, somewhat more cautiously, that the human mind could do nothing without the human brain also doing something at the same time then the destruction of the human brain during and after the process of death must mean the cessation of the human mind. This paper will discuss a number of strategies for addressing this tension.
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Notes
- 1.
I believe that there are some smaller, subsidiary elephants as well. One is the Buddhist conception of supernatural powers (iddhi, siddhi) that the practitioner is supposed to achieve at a relatively low level of meditational accomplishment. These include feats such as being able read another’s mind, or transforming one’s body into that of a god or an animal. See Bhadantācariya Buddhaghosa (1976: 1: 409–410, 444).
- 2.
For a comprehensive and up-to-date bibliography of the literature on the debate about the Buddhist conception of rebirth see Bhikkhu Anālayo (2018: 237–271).
- 3.
Note that this does not presuppose the mistaken idea that the Buddhist conception of rebirth requires a form of mind-body dualism (Batchelor 2011: 38; Edwards 1996: 14–15. Batchelor 2015: 300 considers the Buddhist belief in rebirth as based on a form of substance dualism). Early Buddhist sources like the Mahānidāna-sutta explicitly speak about the mutual conditioning of the physical and the mental (Bhikkhu Anālayo 2018: 9, 58), something that the metaphysical independence of the material and the mental which is characteristic of various forms of dualism does not allow. The Buddhist conception of mind is compatible with functionalism, however, unless we either assume that there can be non-physical bases for the realization of mental activity, or that entire minds could somehow be moved from one physical basis to another it could not provide an account of rebirth on such a functionalist basis.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
For a discussion supportive of this point see Bhikkhu Anālayo (2018), chapter 1.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
‘As nothing is at rest or is in motion apart from a frame of reference, so nothing is primitive or derivationally prior to anything apart from a constructional system.’ (Goodman 1978: 12), ‘And this, as I have mentioned earlier, goes all the way down. Not all differences between true versions can be thought of as differences in grouping or marking off within something common to all. For there are no absolute elements, no space-time or other stuff common to all, no entity that is under all guises or under none.’ (Goodman 1983: 107, note 6), ‘We cannot find any world-feature independent of all versions. […] No firm line can be drawn between world-features that are discourse-dependent and those that are not.’ (Goodman 1980: 212), ‘The line between convention and content is arbitrary and variable’ (Goodman 1980: 214).
- 11.
‘We might take construction of a history of successive development of worlds to involve application of something like a Kantian regulative principle, and the search for a first world thus to be as misguided as the search for a first moment of time.’ (Goodman 1978: 7, note 8), ‘The many stuffs – matter, energy, waves, phenomena – that worlds are made of are made along with the worlds. But made from what? Not from nothing, after all, but from other worlds. Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is remaking. Anthropology and developmental psychology may study social and individual histories of such world building, but the search for a universal or necessary beginning is best left to theology.’ (Goodman 1978: 6–7).
- 12.
Lewis (1991: 42–45).
- 13.
Dennett (1995: 68–73).
- 14.
“Consciousness is the appearance of a world. The essence of the phenomenon of conscious experience is that a single and unified reality becomes present: If you are conscious, a world appears to you.” (Metzinger 2009: 15), “The activation of a unified, coherent model of reality within an internally generated window of presence, when neither can be recognized as a model, is the appearance of a world. In sum, the appearance of a world is consciousness” (Metzinger 2009: 192).
- 15.
Nothing we have said here rules out the possibility that such intentional agents may be artificial intelligences constructing their own world-version.
- 16.
Goodman (1980: 213).
- 17.
Goodman (1983: 103–104).
- 18.
‘The worldmaking mainly in question here is making not with hands, but with minds, or rather with languages or other symbol-systems’ (Goodman 1980: 213).
- 19.
Note that we do not have to assume that a construct is always more complex than what it is constructed from. A construct does not have to be more complex than each member of its basis, as it is if e.g. we merge two libraries. We can equally construct a new library by splitting one into two, or create a new one by splitting off parts from two old libraries and merging these.
- 20.
Note that because of our very permissive conception of what counts as a constructor in the discussion of premiss 2.b this does not entail the falsity of physicalism, at least as long we do not assume that matter has not always existed, and was preceded by some non-material stuff.
- 21.
‘We start, on any occasion, with some old version or world that we have on hand and that we are stuck with until we have the determination and skill to remake it into a new one. […] Worldmaking begins with one version and ends with another.’ (Goodman 1978: 97); ‘All we have available is scrap material recycled from old and stubborn worlds’ (Goodman 1980: 213).
- 22.
‘Does he ask how we can have made anything older than we are? Plainly, by making a space and a time that contains those stars.’ (Goodman 1980: 213). Note that this also resolves the problem of the ‘ancestral world’ raised by philosophers like Quentin Meillassoux against various forms of constructivism (see James 2017).
- 23.
Goodman (1978: 96).
- 24.
- 25.
Dawkins (1999: 284).
- 26.
Westerhoff (2016).
- 27.
Hoffmann (1998: 195–196) describes a virtual tour of the underlying hardware of a computer simulating this very virtual tour.
- 28.
Fredkin/Toffoli (1982).
- 29.
Taberlet et al. (2018).
- 30.
Westerhoff (2016). I take this to be analogous to the denial of the ultimate reality of ultimate truth implied by the Madhyamaka’s idea of the ‘emptiness of emptiness,’ and the consequent subsumption of ultimate under conventional truth.
- 31.
See Button (2013: 80–81) for an inconsistent way of describing a similar position. The inconsistency results from the fact that this view (which Button calls ‘nonrealism’) cannot be combined with belief in the possibility of a god’s eye point of view.
- 32.
- 33.
Nichols (2007: 218–219).
- 34.
This seems to entail the peculiar consequence that we can never have a third person perspective on anything. This is not entirely correct. There is still an enormous difference between imagining, say, that I come to the parking lot and see my car is missing (a first person imagining), and me imagining that particular parking lot with a particular car missing (which happens to be identical to my car) (this is usually regarded as a third person imagining). In the second case I abstract from various features of my perspective on the world (such that I own this car) and hence the second scenario produces a different emotional response from the first (“Who stole my car?”). Nevertheless, even the second perspective presupposes a view of the world which is in some important way our view. A more differentiated way of seeing the situation would therefore be to say that we can abstract in various ways from features of our peculiar perspective on the world, but we cannot imagine anything without an imaginer that is somehow identified with us.
We can, therefore, imagine a universe without humans (Weisman 2007), but not one without observers. Suppose we imagine a universe with only two rocks in it. According to what we have just said, we can in fact only imagine a universe with two rocks and one observer in it. Can’t we then simply subtract the observer and leave the two rocks in place? In this case it is unclear what justification we still have to speak about a universe with two, rather than one rock in it. For it is not anything out there that guarantees the existence of a particular number of rocks (these are, after all, imagined universes). So it is the presence of the observer that allows us to distinguish between the two universes. Without the observer the two universes are simply two black boxes into which we cannot peek. And as such we cannot coherently say which is which (or whether there is even a difference between the two).
- 35.
See Bering (2002).
- 36.
- 37.
See Nichols (2007: 229).
- 38.
This would only be regarded as a kind of epistemological pessimism if we mistakenly regard the view from the outside of any representational framework as a more objective perspective we can never occupy. However, according to the present understanding the view from the outside of any representational framework is precisely not a more objective perspective, but no perspective at all.
- 39.
For further discussion on the metaphysical status of holes see Casati/Varzi (1994).
- 40.
As Nichols (2007: 229, note 18) points out, bringing in the impossibility of imagining our own non-existence to explain a belief in mental continuity after death also makes it the source of a belief in retrograde continuity, i.e. a belief in mental continuity before birth.
- 41.
Edward Craig (1985: 105) notes about the nature of imaginative limits that “[w]hat makes the limits of our imagination so important to us is the fact that they are also the limits within which reality must lie if it is to be intelligible.” If it is true that mental discontinuity lies beyond our imaginative limits this would then imply that the only way we can make sense of the mental is by conceiving of it in terms of mental continuity.
- 42.
This does not rule out the possibility of unconscious states during deep sleep or coma. The point is that even if we have a sequence of conscious (c) and unconscious (u) mind-moments c1, u1, …, un, c2, the first conscious moment after a period of unconsciousness (c2) is identified by us as belonging to the same person to which the last moment before the period of unconsciousness (c1) belonged.
We thus do not have to presuppose that our mental existence is continuous. Even if we assume that the stream of consciousness is essentially discontinuous (such as in Galen Strawson’s ‘pearl’ model (1997: 424)), we can conceive of consciousness as a constantly restarting process, but as one where the successions of restartings extends indefinitely into the future.
- 43.
“On the one hand, our powerful intellects come inexorably to the conclusion that we, like all other living beings around us, must one day die. Yet on the other, the one thing that these minds cannot imaging is that very state of nonexistence; it is literally inconceivable. Death therefore presents itself as both inevitable and impossible” (Cave 2012: 17).
- 44.
Bering (2012: 130): “The mind is what the brain does; the brain stops working at death, therefore the subjective feeling that the mind survives death is a psychological illusion operating in the brains of the living.”
- 45.
For the background of this idea see Carroll (2017).
- 46.
Skilling (1997: 254).
- 47.
Unger (1990: 70) proposes that survival of a person requires psychological processes to be “carried forward in ways that are, on the whole, not terribly different from the ways that psychological continuity is achieved in ordinary cases”.
- 48.
See Loew (2017: 765–766) for a fuller account of these assumptions and of the argument based on them. The third (and most controversial) assumption might be dispensable.
- 49.
Loew (2017: 768–772) also points out that the causal connection between us and our Boltzmann successor could also be established if we are somewhat less promiscuous regarding the causal relations we admit. The argument also goes through if we demand that not just any causal relations, but only law-like causal relations are admissible.
- 50.
Siderits (2007: 158).
- 51.
See Nozick (1981: 4).
- 52.
See Lewis (1983: x).
- 53.
Unless, that this, one accepts one of several proposal for watering down the Buddhist theories of karma and rebirth in such a way that the remainder does not generate any conflicts with naturalist assumptions. As I explained in greater details elsewhere (Westerhoff 2017), I am highly skeptical of these proposals.
- 54.
As Flanagan (2013: 4) describes Buddhist beliefs about rebirth and karma.
- 55.
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Westerhoff, J. (2023). How Can Buddhists Account for the Continuity of Mind After Death?. In: Coseru, C. (eds) Reasons and Empty Persons: Mind, Metaphysics, and Morality. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 36. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13995-6_8
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