Letters to the Editor
-
studying subjective experience
western science has been dominated by reductionist, materialist inquiries, but there is a tradition in western culture that grapples with individual consciousnessness that is neither neuroscience or cognitive psychology.
Wallace has a blind spot for the post-Freudian psychoanalytic tradition.
no one claiming to bridge east/west approaches to Mind should be so ignorant of the psychology of intersubjective states, how we generate meaning and the ways we organize experience which have been the primary interests of modern psychoanalytic thinkers since 1950.
maybe Wallace prefers more either/or instead of both/and.
-
Does it take years of meditation
to start calling yourself by a really stupid name?
-
Where to begin...
I'm a psychologist, a Buddhist, & an admirer of William James and all I can say is that Wallace is a rather "curious" man. He seems unusre whether Buddhism is a religion, betraying some of that ambivalence with squrely embracing a "religion" that has become so common. As others have noted, he has trouble seeing beyond his Buddhism. There are two major branches of Buddhism, and the larger of the two has numerous smaller units including Zen and Tibetan Buddhism. The conception and role of conciousness varies widely across and even within these different schools of Buddhism. The same is true of the role and significance of an afterlife. Buddhism was, in part, a reaction to Brahminism and so it evolved from beliefs common to the Hindu faith and the understanding of those beliefs has changed over time. Wallace's grasp of psychologys is tenuous at best, although the institution where he is affiliated has published some very good papers on Buddhism and what we know from scientific psychology.
As for William James, he was the first American psychologist. He also was a seeker. He trained in the laboratory of Wilhelm Wundt and had a full grasp of the early experimental methods. He was a eeker and someone we see as suffering a psychophysiological ailments and some degree of clinical depression. He sought an understanding of the metphysical as well as physical world. He ultimately embraced introspection as a research method, which might be a useful stance for a personal spiritual voyage, but not the best way to understand a range of human experience.
A cliche in the world of meditation is that when the novice approaches his mentor (even after many years) and poses a problem, the mentor will suggest that the novice meditate some more. It may be that Wallace's meditation has simply enabled him to narrowed his focus rather than providing "vipassana" (insight). There are modern Buddhist thinkers like Buddhahasa (a Thai thereavada Buddhist monk) who attempted to see how meditation could be part of real life and animate a concious leading to social good. Wallace seems to have gone the opposite way, away from the messy reality.
Buddhism can contribute ideas to scientific exploration. As a way of life, it is one that is ultimately pragmatic and empirical, yet timeless. At the same time, it questions the materialism (particularly the shiny consumerist variety) and brings into question the ways in which we have used science. There are Christians who have attempted to see how thei faith can be reconciled with science and a material world. Christianity does not have to be absolutist and conc accomodate scientific thought, although Christian practice often has gone a different way. Wallace's interview should provoke us, but he seems a thoughtless, self-involved Buddhist with only cartoonish ideas of Christianity or science. Someone like his mentor, the Dali Lama, who must constantly wrestle with the modern and the timeless would be better a subject for this kind of discussion.
-
"Emergent" is not a dirty word
One is taken with the absence of divisive tirades resulting from this article. Publish any discussion whatsoever about evolutionary theory instead of neurophysiology and there would be a food fight with each side denying not only the others position - but the right of others to hold that position.
Folks of whatever faith are fond of challenging the implications of various scientific observations and theories. Just goes with the territory. Someone pointed out that mathematics is the queen of the sciences. Elementary mathematical induction leads one to observe a difficulty with metaphysical explanations for human consciousness.
The question of "place" has already been raised. What do we deem to be so special about this small blue marble? Any metaphysics specific to humans is immediately subject to innumerable gedanken experiments challenging us with alien possibilities. That is - unless you are willing to limit the wealth of a large universe to one not-so-turbo neuroanatomical architecture. (One won't even belabor the likeliness of widespread animal consciousness all around us.)
But what about the question of "time"? If a substrate consciousness must precede and follow the contingent psyche, then we're led to a chicken and egg problem. Sometime during the rise of the genus Homo there must be an inductive collapse. Julian Jaynes questioned whether Cro-Magnons were conscious (in fact, whether the Greeks and Trojans were conscious) - some of us might take Lascaux contrarily as solid evidence of consciousness. The intrepid adventurers among Homo erectus might convince others. Or perhaps one is willing (as I am) to entertain the possibility that australopithecus, or even some distant common ancestor with Pan troglodytes, first gained self-awareness. But no matter how far back you go, eventually you reach a definitively non-conscious entity, even if it takes you all the way to Archaea or before.
Who then breathed the stuff of consciousness (the agar of the substrate in consciousness's petri dish) into that first self-aware, non-human individual? Or is it possible that the wonder some find in transcendentalism also pertains to the apparently drab mud of pedestrian existence? Modern ("21st century") physics shook off its shackles when the theory of the aether was replaced with Relativity. But plenty of 18th century physics is as sound as the day it was conceived in some happy satori. The solution of the hard problem hasn't advanced much since Descartes.
That we're the beneficiaries of a spark of the divine is undeniable. To jump from this observation to the conclusion that worldly deductions are somehow less capable of leading us to self-knowledge than are intuitions from subjective bias seems - well - unwise. The divine is all around us. We share that spark with the rutabaga and with the horseshoe crab.
Another thing we all share is the common place and time of our existence.