This is great. You're the first Buddhist intellectual I've come across who's managed to use the scientific evidence here without falling into the freewill - determinism dichotomy. I also like the way your blog seems to be moving on more to core philosophical issues from your previous scholarly focus. My approach to frrewill-determinism is slightly different in some ways, emphasising the value of remaining decisively agnostic about freewill-determinism, but your argument that it is irrelevant may well take us to a similar place. What I think could be explored more is the possible negative effects of determinist commitment as well as freewill commitment. I'm just in the process of reading Rupert Sheldrake's 'The Science Delusion'. which is very good on the way that determinist assumptions can limit scientific investigation.
Thanks. I think the free will question only really makes sense in terms of Christian dogma. Time we dropped it altogether.
I'm at the limits of my philosophical reach here, and feel I can hardly do justice to the subject. In fact I've been feeling distinctly uncomfortable about how the blog has been going lately, and how far out of my depth I have got. I'm getting back to my core skills and doing more philology these days and feel happier for it. One can't really avoid philosophy all together, but I hope to avoid it as much as possible for a few months.
I'm not much bothered by determinism because apart from Stephen Hawking I don't know of any determinists - and his physical condition has a lot to do with that view I'm sure! I've never been able to take Sheldrake's woo seriously either. My world is a lot less woo than Sheldrake's, and a lot more agency than Hawking's.
Friday, March 02, 2012
Gambhiradaka said...
A while ago i decided that my view was that free will or lack of it is similar to weather the Earth is flat or not. The point being that for day to day living it is irrelevant. The common sense experience of having choices is irrefutable. That the scope of those choices we are aware of is conditioned is a factor. I thank Jayarava for introducing me to the notion of mu thinking. (i think thats what it was!). That we are aware of a limited set of choices and possible outcomes but we can include the mu factor which is all the stuff we cannot be aware of. I think that there is more mu than we often like to admit.
I'm not sure that discussion about free will is very common in Buddhist circles, it certainly doesn't crop up that often in my experience.
I think from a practice point of view mindfulness is very important here. MBCT draws our attention to the fact that when we lack mindfulness our actions are most often automatic reactions which rarely lead to benefit. Mindfulness is the first step which allows us to get clear information about what is happening which we can then base our response upon. Analyo points out that sati is not the whole story but that other factors need to come in afterwards such as the four right efforts. Mindfulness is essentially receptive, but then in the majority of situations we need to act and the degree of mindfulness we have conditions the skilfulness of whatever actions we then take. Obviously the opposite is also true; without mindfulness our actions are conditioned by greed, hatred or delusion.
It was 'po' the Edward de Bono place holder... mu 無 is the Japanese word for 'no, nothing, naught'.
It is interesting that we have this capacity to act without awareness - can you imagine driving a car, or even using a keyboard, without it? But it's a two edged sword. Very useful to be able to walk and scan the horizon, or follow animal tracks at once. Troublesome in a world where there is a veritable war for our attention, and a blizzard of intense stimulation at any given moment - where self-awareness struggles to get a look in. How to be mindful in the blast of modern life, eh?
In my experience there are still plenty of determinists in scientific and philosophical circles, but it's not just others having explicit commitment to determinism that provides a reason to beware of it. I think we can all slip into implicit determinism at those points where we fail to take responsibility for our response to conditions. A philosophical awareness of the lack of justification for determinism can help one to work with this, though of course it is not the only tool in the toolbox.
I suppose people are free to conclude that they have no freedom to conclude anything - but having come to that conclusion there can be no further discussion with them - all they could possibly say is "well, you would say that, wouldn't you". Apart from Hawking, and he really is not very free, I have yet to meet a determinist in person. So it has never struck me as a problem that needed solving. I still assume that most of my readers are Buddhists.
Great post. Clear as a bell. Thanks. Good idea to apply neuroscience to decision making, opinions & compulsions.
For me, it is evident that a lot of our decision-making is pre-conscious. So it rings true to place vendana with it's attributing of feeling-tone before consciousness (vinnana) & volition (sankhara) in the order of the khandhas sequence... Amygdala before neocortex... habits & opinions before freedom to choose... pre-consciousness before mindfulness.
It gives me hope to remember that ditty about the brain's plasticity i.e. our potential to change & increase our inner freedom : "what you fire, you wire."
Thanks. Did you see my response to your comment on Phenomenon?
I'm still not convinced by the term 'feeling tone'. I'm not sure it applies, and the texts make it very specifically: sukha, dukkha, adukkhasukkha. I would suggest that there would need to be a lot more to "feeling tone" than this to warrant the term.
Contrarily I am convinced that "consciousness" is entirely misleading as a translation of viññāṇa, and have resolved to stop using it. As I see it there is no word in Pāli which corresponds to our concept of consciousness. The word I think best captures the activity of vijānāti is "discriminating" and viññāṇa = discrimination.
In the khandhas viññāṇa is always after saṅkhārā. If they are a sequence at all, which is by no means certain because the khandhas per se are *never* presented as a sequence in Pāli suttas, only as a group. I look at why we might consider them a sequence on Friday - but there are gaps that wreck any theory that we should think of them as occurring in sequence. And if they are a sequence as viññāṇa follows saṅkhāra in some kind of conditional or causal relationship the that strikes me as incoherent.
I'm more cautious than you collating models from Buddhism and Neuroscience together. I'm discovering in recent days that I don't really understand the details of the Buddhist model - as might be clear on Friday. I already know I don't understand neuroscience. Remember that uncertainty multiplies when you add two uncertain quantities.
The Buddhist model is a pragmatic, prescientific model aimed at meditators; the neuroscience model is at attempt at an objective description of brain processes which are not accessible to introspection. If the two match up it can only be by purest chance.
Sorry to be wet blanket, but I think caution is essential in making a meaningful synthesis - I mean look at all the deleterious rubbish written about quantum mechanics!
Wow! Jayarava I think you are getting ever so masterful at writing about philosophy and other issues that i think you should not altogether abandon these tasks, even if you need a break. Whatever reticences I have about some issues or attitudes is not even worth mentioning, as your posts are all worth reading and pondering. But if you go back to philology I will be nearly just as pleased. Alain.
IMHO "Discrimination" is a good choice for vijnana and another one I like is "recognition" -- as in recognizing a familiar face, or an object (alambana?) by its partial sensory data (visaya?). Regarding free will though, I agree it's an important thing to get straight, because of its relation with the question of agency. From my perspective, global determinism does not negate local agency, e.g. in a computer game a NPC (Non Player Character) is an software agent making quasi-independent decisions, even though the whole program is a fully deterministic piece of software. As quasi-agents we still make decisions, and our future still fully depends on our decisions, even though us making them is a fully deterministic process. That said, the reason the non-agency doctrine did not make it to the Noble truths, is exactly because it is too controversial / easy to get wrong (fatalism), and therefore not "noble" enough :) Forgive me any arrogant mistakes, just trying to partake of the Dharma fun party you have going on here.
Thanks for that assessment. I appreciate your enthusiasm! But one only has to read what real philosophers have to say to understand that I am a dillettante, and often out of my depth. I do think about things, and I'm always pleased when my thinking out loud (in blog posts) gets someone else thinking. Thinking is good.
I have no plans to stop writing, but will be getting back to more obviously Buddhist matters for a while. Starting next week with a sutta translation and commentary - though as you will see the content is all about types of knowledge, so not without a philosophical angle.
Thanks again. Jayarava
Wednesday, March 07, 2012
[Image]For the Abrahamic religions-- Judaism, Christianity and Islam--free will is central to the problem of theodicy or 'God's justice', aka the Problem of Evil. Theists have a hard time explaining why bad things happen to good people (and vice versa). If God is both omnipotent and good (i.e. compassionate), then why doesn't God do a better job? Why allow people, even the supposedly chosen people, to suffer? Surely suffering is bad? Surely, even if there were some grey area, the suffering of the Jews (aka God's chosen people) in Nazi Germany was bad? Yes?
The theist answer is that God set the world up, created us, commanded us to worship and obey him, and then gave us the choice of whether to do so or not. What they play down is that God also gave us propensity not to obey God. As Christopher Hitchens put it: "we have been created diseased, by a capricious despot, and then abruptly commanded to be whole and well, on pain of terror and torture." [Washington Post] So evil from this point of view is not God's problem, but Humanity's problem, and the answer to the problem is to worship and obey a God whose actions are inexplicable in human terms. Except that bad things continue to happen to those who actually do worship and obey God. So really there is no satisfying answer to why we suffer from a theistic perspective.
Buddhists have little interest in the issue of God, but we are still interested in the Problem of Evil. Suffering is at the forefront our various discourses, and our program relies on the notion that we are free to chose our actions, and therefore our destiny. However I think the issue of free will is a red-herring.
What seems more salient is that we can and do assign value to experiences - to some extent all animals do this. It's called "learning". Assigning value to experiences makes us want to repeat them or avoid them, and this builds habits and characters. When we have an experience information about the urgency, relevance and attractiveness of the experience is registered by the amygdala which gives our memories an emotional flavour. This is why memories can provoke emotional reactions just like the original experience, and at the same time why we have stronger memories of emotionally charged events. We can change the value that we give to experiences, by over-riding the amygdala's first reaction with our neocortex. We can do this unconsciously as in Post Traumatic Shock where the value of certain experiences is amplified so that the strength of the arousal associated with the memory provokes a strong fight or flight response each time we bring it to mind. In Clinical Depression the value of experience is dramatically reduced and we no longer feel a sense of reward from doing the things we normally enjoy doing. We can also alter the value of experiences consciously to some extent as when we learn that traffic speeding by us on the road is not a threat unless we step onto the road, or if we learn that the vicious scary dog is always chained up and can't get to us. In both cases the apparent threat turns out to be minimal and the appropriate response might be mildly elevated alertness rather than, say, a fight or flight response.
If we look at this in terms of reason and emotion we find that neither can exist without the other. Facts alone do not make for reason. Reasoning is just assigning value to facts, and value is a function of how we feel about the thing. We know for instance that a person with an intact intellect who, through brain damage, is not able to link facts to emotions is more or less incapable of making a decision because they do not give facts different value. Without the ability to weight facts they all seem equally important. Such cases have been reported by Antonio Damasio (Descarte's Error) and Thomas Metzinger (The Ego Tunnel). So reasoning is absolutely dependent on emotions! If I over-value or under-value a fact with respect to the value you place on it, then we may be in conflict - like Atheists and Christians. If I assign a different value to the consensus of society then I am an eccentric or perhaps mad. A person who fails to acknowledge the values of the society around them, and consciously and actively works against those values might even be termed evil.
One of the important tenets of neuroscience is that the brain is made up of many parts all working together. This is true of the supposed left-brain, right-brain split as well. The brain can be looked at as separate systems, but it only works as a whole, which we discover to our cost when we sustain damage to our brains! Neuroscience is a lot more holistic than popular presentation of ideas like left/right brain specialisation would suggest, and it's a shame these distortions propagate at the expense of the true picture.
This idea about the value of facts being a function of emotional explains, to some extent, why people cannot agree on the facts, or can remain unconvinced in the face of a killer self-evident argument such as the idea of evolution to the explain the diversity of life on earth. For the Christian fundamentalist the Bible and traditional Christian narratives have assumed an over-whelming value. The facts of evolution simply cannot carry the same weight, and since the two ideas cannot co-exist evolution must be wrong or at best irrelevant. Some fundamentalists take the approach of co-opting evolution as proof of intelligent design. Anything as long as nothing takes on a higher value than God. I suggest that this is linked to the very strong emotions we experience around the fact of death, which should not be trivialised.
The question people are often implying when they ask "do we have free will?" is "are we free to make any arbitrary decision?" Clearly the simple answer to this is no, we aren't free to make arbitrary decisions. Because the value that we assign to experience is partly genetic, partly determined by our previous experience and our conditioning, and only partly under our conscious control (in order of decreasing influence), but largely assigned unconsciously. When someone says "I had no choice" this is almost never objectively true. We always have arbitrary choices, but we feel constrained. The constraints operate at different levels. We value our own survival over most things for instance, but a mother may value the survival of her infant over herself, or a solider may value the life of his team over his own. To me this seems to derive from our genetic inheritance. Some people value straight talking regardless of emotional impact, and others will sacrifice clarity for politeness, while still others will lie rather than directly disagree with you. I would call this a feature of cultural conditioning. Some people decide to go on a diet, and stick to it for a while, but after a while start falling back into old habits. This is the extent of our conscious influence on decision making.
I have will, or better: I experience 'willing'. I value this experience of willing quite highly. However willing appears to operate on different levels, many of which are unconscious or barely conscious. I am free to the extent that I can make my willing conscious. I can be more free by paying attention to the way I make choices and decisions, the way I place value on experiences. I can inquire into what my values really are, based on how I actually behave (rather than what I say my values are). Meditation is one of the most powerful tools for obtaining this kind of self-knowledge. Is there a magical point beyond which I will be completely free? I don't know. But I do know I feel more free than I used to be, and I'm not sure if there are inherent or practical limitations on how free I can become. Why imagine limits when none are apparent?
11 Comments
Close this window Jump to comment formThis is great. You're the first Buddhist intellectual I've come across who's managed to use the scientific evidence here without falling into the freewill - determinism dichotomy. I also like the way your blog seems to be moving on more to core philosophical issues from your previous scholarly focus. My approach to frrewill-determinism is slightly different in some ways, emphasising the value of remaining decisively agnostic about freewill-determinism, but your argument that it is irrelevant may well take us to a similar place. What I think could be explored more is the possible negative effects of determinist commitment as well as freewill commitment. I'm just in the process of reading Rupert Sheldrake's 'The Science Delusion'. which is very good on the way that determinist assumptions can limit scientific investigation.
Friday, March 02, 2012
Hi Robert,
Thanks. I think the free will question only really makes sense in terms of Christian dogma. Time we dropped it altogether.
I'm at the limits of my philosophical reach here, and feel I can hardly do justice to the subject. In fact I've been feeling distinctly uncomfortable about how the blog has been going lately, and how far out of my depth I have got. I'm getting back to my core skills and doing more philology these days and feel happier for it. One can't really avoid philosophy all together, but I hope to avoid it as much as possible for a few months.
I'm not much bothered by determinism because apart from Stephen Hawking I don't know of any determinists - and his physical condition has a lot to do with that view I'm sure! I've never been able to take Sheldrake's woo seriously either. My world is a lot less woo than Sheldrake's, and a lot more agency than Hawking's.
Friday, March 02, 2012
A while ago i decided that my view was that free will or lack of it is similar to weather the Earth is flat or not. The point being that for day to day living it is irrelevant. The common sense experience of having choices is irrefutable. That the scope of those choices we are aware of is conditioned is a factor. I thank Jayarava for introducing me to the notion of mu thinking. (i think thats what it was!). That we are aware of a limited set of choices and possible outcomes but we can include the mu factor which is all the stuff we cannot be aware of. I think that there is more mu than we often like to admit.
I'm not sure that discussion about free will is very common in Buddhist circles, it certainly doesn't crop up that often in my experience.
I think from a practice point of view mindfulness is very important here. MBCT draws our attention to the fact that when we lack mindfulness our actions are most often automatic reactions which rarely lead to benefit. Mindfulness is the first step which allows us to get clear information about what is happening which we can then base our response upon. Analyo points out that sati is not the whole story but that other factors need to come in afterwards such as the four right efforts. Mindfulness is essentially receptive, but then in the majority of situations we need to act and the degree of mindfulness we have conditions the skilfulness of whatever actions we then take. Obviously the opposite is also true; without mindfulness our actions are conditioned by greed, hatred or delusion.
Saturday, March 03, 2012
Hi Gambhiraḍāka
It was 'po' the Edward de Bono place holder... mu 無 is the Japanese word for 'no, nothing, naught'.
It is interesting that we have this capacity to act without awareness - can you imagine driving a car, or even using a keyboard, without it? But it's a two edged sword. Very useful to be able to walk and scan the horizon, or follow animal tracks at once. Troublesome in a world where there is a veritable war for our attention, and a blizzard of intense stimulation at any given moment - where self-awareness struggles to get a look in. How to be mindful in the blast of modern life, eh?
Saturday, March 03, 2012
In my experience there are still plenty of determinists in scientific and philosophical circles, but it's not just others having explicit commitment to determinism that provides a reason to beware of it. I think we can all slip into implicit determinism at those points where we fail to take responsibility for our response to conditions. A philosophical awareness of the lack of justification for determinism can help one to work with this, though of course it is not the only tool in the toolbox.
Sunday, March 04, 2012
Hi Robert
I suppose people are free to conclude that they have no freedom to conclude anything - but having come to that conclusion there can be no further discussion with them - all they could possibly say is "well, you would say that, wouldn't you". Apart from Hawking, and he really is not very free, I have yet to meet a determinist in person. So it has never struck me as a problem that needed solving. I still assume that most of my readers are Buddhists.
Regards
Jayarava
Sunday, March 04, 2012
Hello Jayarava
Great post. Clear as a bell. Thanks. Good idea to apply neuroscience to decision making, opinions & compulsions.
For me, it is evident that a lot of our decision-making is pre-conscious. So it rings true to place vendana with it's attributing of feeling-tone before consciousness (vinnana) & volition (sankhara) in the order of the khandhas sequence... Amygdala before neocortex... habits & opinions before freedom to choose... pre-consciousness before mindfulness.
It gives me hope to remember that ditty about the brain's plasticity i.e. our potential to change & increase our inner freedom : "what you fire, you wire."
Tuesday, March 06, 2012
Hi Adam
Thanks. Did you see my response to your comment on Phenomenon?
I'm still not convinced by the term 'feeling tone'. I'm not sure it applies, and the texts make it very specifically: sukha, dukkha, adukkhasukkha. I would suggest that there would need to be a lot more to "feeling tone" than this to warrant the term.
Contrarily I am convinced that "consciousness" is entirely misleading as a translation of viññāṇa, and have resolved to stop using it. As I see it there is no word in Pāli which corresponds to our concept of consciousness. The word I think best captures the activity of vijānāti is "discriminating" and viññāṇa = discrimination.
In the khandhas viññāṇa is always after saṅkhārā. If they are a sequence at all, which is by no means certain because the khandhas per se are *never* presented as a sequence in Pāli suttas, only as a group. I look at why we might consider them a sequence on Friday - but there are gaps that wreck any theory that we should think of them as occurring in sequence. And if they are a sequence as viññāṇa follows saṅkhāra in some kind of conditional or causal relationship the that strikes me as incoherent.
I'm more cautious than you collating models from Buddhism and Neuroscience together. I'm discovering in recent days that I don't really understand the details of the Buddhist model - as might be clear on Friday. I already know I don't understand neuroscience. Remember that uncertainty multiplies when you add two uncertain quantities.
The Buddhist model is a pragmatic, prescientific model aimed at meditators; the neuroscience model is at attempt at an objective description of brain processes which are not accessible to introspection. If the two match up it can only be by purest chance.
Sorry to be wet blanket, but I think caution is essential in making a meaningful synthesis - I mean look at all the deleterious rubbish written about quantum mechanics!
Tuesday, March 06, 2012
Wow! Jayarava I think you are getting ever so masterful at writing about philosophy and other issues that i think you should not altogether abandon these tasks, even if you need a break. Whatever reticences I have about some issues or attitudes is not even worth mentioning, as your posts are all worth reading and pondering. But if you go back to philology I will be nearly just as pleased. Alain.
Tuesday, March 06, 2012
IMHO "Discrimination" is a good choice for vijnana and another one I like is "recognition" -- as in recognizing a familiar face, or an object (alambana?) by its partial sensory data (visaya?). Regarding free will though, I agree it's an important thing to get straight, because of its relation with the question of agency. From my perspective, global determinism does not negate local agency, e.g. in a computer game a NPC (Non Player Character) is an software agent making quasi-independent decisions, even though the whole program is a fully deterministic piece of software. As quasi-agents we still make decisions, and our future still fully depends on our decisions, even though us making them is a fully deterministic process. That said, the reason the non-agency doctrine did not make it to the Noble truths, is exactly because it is too controversial / easy to get wrong (fatalism), and therefore not "noble" enough :) Forgive me any arrogant mistakes, just trying to partake of the Dharma fun party you have going on here.
Wednesday, March 07, 2012
Hi Alain.
Thanks for that assessment. I appreciate your enthusiasm! But one only has to read what real philosophers have to say to understand that I am a dillettante, and often out of my depth. I do think about things, and I'm always pleased when my thinking out loud (in blog posts) gets someone else thinking. Thinking is good.
I have no plans to stop writing, but will be getting back to more obviously Buddhist matters for a while. Starting next week with a sutta translation and commentary - though as you will see the content is all about types of knowledge, so not without a philosophical angle.
Thanks again.
Jayarava
Wednesday, March 07, 2012