The Dalai Lama has said that Buddhism and science are deeply compatible and has encouraged Western scholars to critically examine both the meditative practice and Buddhist ideas about the human mind. A number of scientists and philosophers have taken up this challenge. There have been brain scans of meditators and philosophical examinations of Buddhist doctrines. There have even been discussions of Darwin and the Buddha: Do early Buddhist descriptions of the mind, and of the human condition, make particular sense in light of evolutionary psychology? This course will examine how Buddhism is faring under this scrutiny. Are neuroscientists starting to understand how meditation “works”? Would such an understanding validate meditation—or might physical explanations of meditation undermine the spiritual significance attributed to it? And how are some of the basic Buddhist claims about the human mind holding up? We’ll pay special attention to some highly counterintuitive doctrines: that the self doesn’t exist, and that much of perceived reality is in some sense illusory. Do these claims, radical as they sound, make a certain kind of sense in light of modern psychology? And what are the implications of all this for how we should live our lives? Can meditation make us not just happier, but better people? All the features of this course are available for free. It does not offer a certificate upon completion.
Choosing ‘Selves’ Through Meditation
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Del curso dictado por Princeton University
Buddhism and Modern Psychology
3005 calificaciones
De la lección
Mental Modules and Meditation
Conoce a los instructores
Robert WrightVisiting Lecturer
Religion Department and the Center for Human Values
In the last lecture we fleshed out this modular view of the mind,
this idea that there's no chief executive in your brain but
rather there are a lot of modules that take turns exerting
dominant influence on your thought and your behavior and we
saw that this view dovetails pretty nicely with this Buddhist idea of not self.
The idea that there is no kind of solid self at your core
that persists coherently through time and keeps things under control.
There is a pretty close correspondence between
this particular model within modern psychology and this particular Buddhist doctrine.
OK, but what about Buddhist practice?
What about meditation?
Can the modular view of the mind illuminate meditation
and help explain what's going on when people meditate,
what's going on in their minds?
Well, I do think there are some illuminating connections between
the modular view of the mind and
meditation and in fact in the last lecture there was buried,
a kind of clue about the nature of that illumination.
It was in something that Linda Cosmidy said,
you may remember she's a pioneer in evolutionary psychology and
also in developing modular views of the mind.
She was talking about a jealous state of mind and describing it as a kind of
a modular mechanism that coordinates various thoughts and perceptions to a specific end.
She said something and I want to flash back to it here that may give you
a clue about this connection between meditation and the modular view of the mind.
That it's taking over from the point of view
of the state that we're usually in where there is not
a specific kind of coordination that's going on but a lot of
different mechanisms are bubbling up and down in terms of their activation.
OK, so she talked about mechanisms
bubbling up and down in different levels of activation.
Now, I'm hoping that as I repeat that phrase you may be
thinking of a phrase that we heard earlier in an earlier lecture.
I'll pause now and give it a chance to spring to mind.
Phrases, default mode network,
the default mode network as you may recall is this thing that
gets activated when the mind isn't engaged in anything in particular,
it's not absorbed in any task.
It's kind of just the mind wandering.
We also saw that the default mode network gets quieter during meditation.
That's what brain scan studies have shown us.
If you've done much meditating at all you probably
know that sometimes the default mode network doesn't quiet down easily.
You may sit down to meditate,
try to focus on your breath and suddenly you're thinking,
"Oh I hope I didn't offend that person yesterday when I said that thing
or oh that was an attractive person I met the other day.
I wonder if maybe he or she would go to dinner with me.
I wonder where we could go.
What kind of clever things I could say.
What would happen after dinner."
Now, as Linda's phrasing may suggest,
somebody who has a modular view of the mind might be inclined to
view the default mode network as just a bunch of
modules kind of trying to get your attention.
I mean, trying metaphorically.
Presumably they're not conscious but they're kind of vying,
competing for your attention.
So when you think,
I wonder if I offended that person yesterday,
that would presumably be a module in the realm that
Douglas Kenrick in the last lecture called the affiliative module.
In other words, the larger module in charge of kind of making and
keeping friendships and doing various other things and navigating the social landscape.
And when you're thinking about having dinner with
that attractive person and rehearsing what you might say,
then that presumably is part of the mate attraction module.
Now, I want to take this opportunity to qualify
something that I said in the previous lecture.
There we talked about modules being
activated by information out there in the environment.
You might be in the presence of someone attractive and that activates
your mate attraction module for example
but as some of these examples suggests for example thinking,
"Oh did I offend that person?"
It isn't always the case that information right in
your immediate real time environment is what triggers a module.
I mean, the information came into your system at some point from
the environment but apparently modules can kind of ruminate on information,
the information works itself through the process before it actually
gets presented to your consciousness in a particular form.
Now, this quieting of
the default mode network can happen with various kinds of meditation.
It can happen with mindfulness meditation and with
concentration meditation as we discussed earlier.
Concentration meditation is particularly effective at quieting
the default mode network in the first instance because if you're focused on
something that's a good way to kind of short circuit
the default mode network which after all is something that kind of perks up when you're
not focused on anything and for that reason in
mindfulness meditation you often start with concentration meditation.
But at some point in mindfulness meditation,
once you've established kind of a concentration in the equilibrium,
then you head off in a different path from
the concentration meditator and we've talked about
that and here you see a particular connection between meditation in modules.
They're kind of second connection between meditation and modules that
applies specifically to mindfulness meditation.
Because remember, mindfulness meditation as we described it,
consists of looking at things,
things inside your mind and also things in
the outside world in a kind of a new way when you might say
more objectivity less attachment in carrying
that view into everyday life ideally beyond outside of the meditation haul.
One of the things that you may view in
a new way that is of special consequence is your feelings.
As we said, you view your feelings with
less attachment and they may not get the same kind of traction with you.
They may not have the same kind of power to drag your mind in a particular direction.
Well, the other thing we've learned about feelings very
recently is that feelings are what trigger modules.
If you show people a scary movie it seems to
activate a self-protection module by making them feel fear
and if you show people a romantic movie it seems to give them feelings that
activate a different module and make them behave differently.
This is also true with some things we were calling sub-modules in the last lecture.
For example jealousy is a very strong feeling that triggers
a certain set of modular operations.
Now, I would contend that actually there are always feelings associated with
modules and that if when you start
meditating and these modules are bidding for your attention,
if you pay close attention,
I think that you'll see that the way they bid for your attention is with feelings.
For example, if you're suddenly thinking,
"Did I offend that person the other day?"
Well, that's a kind of a negative feeling that gets
your attention and the way to make it go away,
the natural way to make it go away is to come up with a solution to the problem.
If you say, "I know what I'll do.
I'll send an e-mail to that person ostensibly about
something else but in the course of it I'll refer to
the conversation we had in a way that will make it
clear what I intended and that I didn't intend any offense."
Then the bad feeling goes away,
the module has done its work and you're now vulnerable to some other module, right?
Similarly, if you're fantasizing
about that dinner you're going to have with that attractive person, well, that's it.
That's a good feeling for the most part and it's
a pleasant thing to think about and that keeps you thinking about it.
I think that by and
large feelings are the things that give modules power over you.
So you could view mindfulness,
both mindfulness meditation and mindfulness as you carry it out into
the world as a way of kind of determining which modules do
and don't get to be in control by being mindful of
the feelings that usher modules in, that trigger modules.
You can influence which modules win and which modules lose.
Now, is this a useful way of talking about mindfulness?
I mean, after all we've already said something kind of related.
We've said earlier in the course that
mindfulness does give you some control over feelings.
You decide which feelings get traction and which don't
and we've said that feelings can change your perceptions.
We saw that fear can make you think that something that's not a snake is in fact a snake.
Does it do any good to kind of describe this in
terms of modules rather than in terms of the feelings that trigger the modules?
I think there is some value because I think it drives
home that when you're being mindful you're influencing
whether an entire frame of mind sets in that influences thoughts and perceptions
and that can influence those thoughts and
perceptions in really subtle ways and for a really long time.
A good example of this I think is hatred.
Now, hatred from the point of view of an evolutionary psychologists is
among other things a feeling that defines enemies.
If you hate someone they are an enemy.
You can be angry at someone who is a friend but if you hate them they're not your friend.
Natural selection seems to have equipped the human mind to deal in
particular ways with enemies and in particular ways with friends.
Behavioral scientists have discovered
one very interesting feature of
the different ways that we look at enemies and friends and it's this.
When our friends do something good we attribute it to their inner essence.
This is just the kind of thing they do.
They're good people.
If they do something bad we attribute it to some externals factor, some circumstance.
We say, "Oh well it is just peer group pressure or they hadn't had
sleep in days so they weren't really themselves."
By the way you may recognize this is the way we think about our own behavior, right?
When we do something good that's us and when we do something
bad there's some external explanation for it.
Well, when we think about our enemies it's actually the opposite it turns out.
When they do something bad we attribute that to their essential nature.
That's the way they are, they're bad.
When they do something good we explain it in a way in terms of something external.
Well, they were just doing it to please so and so who happened to
be there or they were coerced into doing it or whatever.
Now presumably this feature exists in our mind,
was designed by natural selection presumably to among
other things encourage us to talk about enemies in this particular way.
When we talk about enemies to other people it's in
our interest in kind of strategic terms to talk about them in
very unflattering terms because it's in our interest to undermine
the stature of our enemies who
are people who can do us harm and the more stature they have,
the more harm they can do us.
This may be very much a propaganda tool but it does seem to
be the case that in order to spread
the propaganda more effectively we actually believed this.
We actually believe that our enemies are these people
who do bad things by nature and good things for other reasons.
One reason this can be really important is
because when a nation is deciding whether or not to go to war,
it really matters how the people in
the other country and the leader of the country are framed.
This helps explain why people who are trying to encourage you to go to war will
tend to frame the leader in the country they want to invade as evil as possible.
The Iraq war in 2003 was a good example.
People who supported the war in America,
some of them at least not all of them,
compared Saddam Hussein to Hitler who of course is as evil as it gets and
if you're going to try to really firmly entrench hatred in someone's mind,
that's a good comparison to make.
Once you've framed the leader of the nation you hope to invade as an enemy,
once you've got that frame firmly set,
it's very hard for him to get out of
it because if he does anything good or anything accommodating
it'll be attributed to external circumstances
but whenever he does anything bad it will be
taken as more evidence of how bad he is.
Now, hatred is a very strong emotion.
You know it when you feel it and it's very
dramatic but I do think that the kind of frame that it creates,
the enemy frame can be sustained with subtler feelings of antipathy.
It's not like every time you think of your enemy you fly into a rage.
No, it can be a lot subtler than that and
that's one reason mindfulness meditation can be valuable and
a mindful attitude can be valuable because you pick up
on feelings that are sufficiently subtle that you might otherwise miss them.
I guess I'd say that in some the case for
viewing mindfulness meditation in the context of this modular view of the mind is,
first of all it drives home that there's a whole frame kind of
being installed in your mind and you can influence
which frame it is through mindfulness and that
this frame can influence your perceptions very subtly.
It's a lot subtler than seeing a snake that's not
there and the feelings that sustain the frame can be
pretty subtle and in fact you may become aware of them only if you
are carrying a mindful attitude into the world.
Now, in a way this brings us back to the not self doctrine.
We saw earlier that the Buddhist kind of famous discourse
on the not self is amenable to differing interpretations.
There's the full bodied interpretation that he was
emphatically denying the very existence of the self.
We saw that there is also a kind of minority interpretation that views his aims as
somewhat less ambitious and there
the idea is that one way you could look at that discourse as saying,
there's no part of your mind that has to be part of yourself.
There's no feeling you have to own,
there's no thought you have to own and you can choose which things to let go of.
Well, to translate that into modular terms,
you might say that the idea is there's
no module you have to own or there's no module you have to be because remember,
modules are these things that are in some sense kind of trying
to become the self for a while and
that's one reason that Douglas Kenrick in
the previous lecture was referring to them as sub cells.
As for the deeper notion of not self,
the idea that the self really does not exist.
There are people who have
meditative experiences that convinced them of the truth of this doctrine.
They say they have seen the absence of a self kind of in "themselves."
I guess I should put that last selves in quotes maybe but
they experientially come to know the doctrine of not self.
Now, near the end of this lecture we're going to look at whether the modular view of
the mind make sense of what's going
on in the minds of these people as they have these experiences.
We're going to look at some of the kinds of reports you
get from these people but first we're going to take a little detour and I think
it's going to be a detour that helps us answer this question about what's
going on in the minds of these people at least helps us frame it a little more firmly.
What we're going to do and this is in the next segment in this lecture,
is we're going to look at the issue of self control,
of controlling our appetites and we're going to ask,
"Well, how does self control happen if in fact there is no self?"
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