Mind, knowledge & consciousness
Perception, inference, selfhood and consciousness in Buddhist texts and the work of John Dunne, Evan Thompson and David Chalmers.
Perception and inference
In What Is Inner Science?, John Dunne explains Dharmakīrti’s account of knowledge: perception and inference grounded in perception establish whether something is real. An object beyond direct perception can be known through observable effects.
Dunne distinguishes this from claims that Dharmakīrti calls extremely remote—claims whose objects have no detectable effects. On his account, neither their existence nor their nonexistence can be established by those means. Dunne also examines tensions among Buddhist accounts of perception and the proposed use of contemplative observation in a contemporary science of mind.
The five aggregates and not-self
SN 22.59 examines form, feeling, perception, choices and consciousness. The discourse asks whether each is permanent or impermanent, whether what is impermanent is suffering or happiness, and whether it is fitting to regard what changes as oneself or as one’s possession.
Its account moves from this examination to disenchantment, dispassion and liberation. The five aggregates supply the terms of the inquiry, and release from attachment supplies its direction.
Conceptual and nonconceptual experience
Evan Thompson’s What’s in a Concept? compares Abhidharma, the Buddhist epistemological tradition and Yogācāra with philosophy and cognitive science. He begins with a problem in the comparison: an account of nonconceptual experience requires an account of what a concept is.
Thompson argues that Yogācāra offers a distinctive account. In the texts he discusses, experience free of the division between a subject that grasps and an object that is grasped is called nonconceptual. His argument concerns that subject–object structure, rather than equating nonconceptual experience with the mere absence of verbal thought.
The hard problem of consciousness
David Chalmers distinguishes explaining mental functions, such as discrimination, attention and reporting, from explaining why those functions are accompanied by subjective experience. His 1995 paper argues that a functional explanation alone leaves this further question unanswered, and proposes a nonreductive account of consciousness.
The unanswered questions in MN 63
In MN 63, Māluṅkyaputta asks the Buddha to settle questions about the world, the relationship between life and body, and a realized person after death. The Buddha compares delaying practice until those questions are answered to refusing treatment for a poisoned arrow until one knows who fired it.
The discourse states that those positions have not been declared because they do not lead to dispassion, cessation and awakening. What the Buddha has declared is suffering, its origin, its cessation and the path.
Further reading & notes
The sections summarize the positions of the named authors and texts. Chalmers’s argument is a contemporary philosophical account, not a Buddhist teaching.