What the Buddha Can Teach Us About the Mind-Body Problem | Zizek, Chadha, Faggin, Nida-Rümelin

The Buddhist says do not think of you as a separate being, just think for a moment what kinds of relations do you have with other bundles of physical and mental states around you. Causal relations, I'm saying things that's having an effect of it in your minds, there are causal relations everywhere and why should we give priority to this stream of causal relations just because there's more of them. You know, yes I'm more intimately, what Descartes called intimately connected, feel more intimately connected, but it's just causal relations all the way down. So modern western thought is often seen as beginning with Descartes and the notion that the thinking self and the physical body are fundamentally distinct substances. But this makes a mystery of how one affects the other and many have sought to get rid of the two substances in favor of a single underlying stuff of the universe. The western scientific tradition has favored the physical, often denying the self altogether, while idealist and some eastern traditions have focused on consciousness, sometimes denying the physical. But in a world with a single sort of stuff, be it physical or mental, human experience becomes inexplicable since it requires both a subject that has experience and something other that is experienced. So do we have to accept that a single substance, both in its materialist western form or in its eastern idealist form, is mistaken? Should we return to dualism or adopt a buddhist stance of abandoning all categories in favor of flux and process? Or must the world consist of one substance and materialism capable of explaining thought or idealism capable of accounting for the physical? So to discuss this timeless debate we have Martine Nuda-Rumelin on the far left, my far left, who is a philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of Freiburg in Switzerland. Her work develops and defends what she calls the subject-body dualism. To my immediate left, Manuma Chadha, who's a professor of Indian philosophy at the University of Oxford, a leading figure in cross-cultural philosophy. Her work brings classical Indian traditions into dialogue with contemporary epistemology and philosophy of the mind. To my right, Federico Faggin, an Italian-American physicist and engineer who led design of the world's first commercial microprocessor at Intel in 1970s, earning him the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. And Slavoj, joining us from a conspiracy to keep air conditioning on him, is a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana and the author of more than 50 books applying Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian philosophy to politics, film, and culture. So, busy stage, so let's keep these to two minutes if we can. I'm going to start with Martine for the initial pitch, which is, does the fact of conscious experience make monism, or the view that the world consists of a single substance, be it purely physical or mental, implausible? Take it away. Okay. So I will immediately respond to their question, but I would like to make a remark before I respond to it. And that's a remark about this notion of the self. A lot of very interesting discussions are going on under this heading, but I don't think it's a good terminology. I think that it's very misleading. I think we should agree that if there is a self, then it's what the person refers to when it talks in the first person. I am sad, I am seeing something, so when we say, I am sad, we refer to ourselves. And if there's any useful way of talking of the self, that should be one of the selves, right? But then it's simply, in our case, this human being or the person. Then there are other conscious subjects such as elephants and dolphins that do not talk. But in the same sense in which we are subjects of experience, they are certainly. So if we talk about subjects of experience, I think that's better. And why? If you talk of the self, then you are tempted to think that the person has a self. And people talk in this way. They say, we have a self or do we not have a self? And then we consider, oh, could I not have a self? What? And now we are in confusion, right? So I think we have to identify the person with the self and then just talk about experiencing subjects and broaden that notion to the animal kingdom and to everything that is there. Now to respond, do I still have 10 seconds or something? Give it 10, implausible or not. Okay. So I think it's implausible and that we can find arguments against any sort of monism and in favor of some kind of subject-body dualism. And I do think that the best arguments for this are based on experience, on the way we are aware of ourselves in our experience. And now it's not to say we are aware of our selves, but we are aware of the subject that we are as a subject in our experience. And when we then reflect on this and do some theoretical reflection, then we can discover that what we are cannot just be physical thing. Okay. So dualism, probably inescapable in that view. Federico, can you go next? Sure. Can you hear me in the back? Great. So I think the question is posed in a way that one should choose one or the other, and I choose neither in the sense that I start with the monism, and the monism is the universe. One, the totality of what exists, and the totality of what exists is not made of separable parts. This is what quantum physics is already saying. So what is one doing? What's the purpose of one? Well, physics doesn't have any purpose of one, but I tell you that the purpose of one, if we are sons of God, but take it in a very, not in a deep way, in a very deep way, take it whatever you want. But anyway, if we are sons of one, one must have the same desire within itself that we have, which is to know ourselves. So I start with a postulate that says, one, the totality of what exists is dynamic, meaning it's never the same instant after instant, is holistic, means it's not made of separable parts. And so far I've told you what quantum physics is saying, but I say one wants to know itself. So the wanting to know itself means that there is a will and that there is a capacity to know itself. The capacity to know itself is what we call consciousness. Consciousness is the capacity of one to know itself, which is also the capacity that we have to know ourselves and the others, to know the world that has two faces, the inner and the outer. But it goes beyond that because to explain, once you say one is all there is, one is not made of separable parts, so we are all within one, but one then manifests in three different ways. It manifests as matter, as mind, and as spirit. And those three aspects are so intertwined that they're not separable. And they are in a way, is the way in which a monism, a single entity that is all there is, manifests itself in any of its manifestations. The matter is what classical physics in science describes. Computers are matter. The body is both mind and matter because the body is quantum and classical. And mind is actually represented by quantum physics. Quantum physics is probabilistic. It doesn't tell you what happens. It can only tell you the probability of what might happen. And then there is spirit, which is where consciousness is, the capacity to know. We are conscious. We experience. What we experience, however, is just the entry door to the inner sanctum, if you want to call it that way, the inner door, because it reveals the meaning of what we experience. The meaning is what we then put in symbols to communicate with each other. And so the spirit is the capacity to experience and know. Knowing is the capacity to get the meaning of the experience. And free will is the capacity to decide what to manifest in this shareable world by free will, which is part of this entity. Okay. So a monism that kind of splits into different things of experience. And those three parts are all interconnected. They are not separable. Every manifestation contains all three aspects. Fantastic. Flavoy, you're next. I will begin in a way similar to others. I also have the problem with the title soul and body. For me, soul is too close to the body. Soul is not a platonic, I'm absolutely a partisan of Plato, but an Aristotelian notion that every matter body has a form. The form of a body is what is usually referred to as soul. What is my position now to antagonize everybody on and off stage? I would define myself as totally pro-European Cartesian materialist. First, why Cartesian? Forget about all that stuff, res cogitans. Cartesian cogito is, as it was later developed, forget about res cogitans, by Kant and later, what Kant calls transcendental apperception is basically a zero, a self-negating void. I think what Europe can contribute is to this nirvana, cosmic void, to act in absolute tension with it, the void of absolute singularity, materialism. Yeah, but materialism without matter. I don't have any problem with waves and all that stuff. I think we shouldn't confuse materialism with this primitive idea which you don't find in Democritus. He's much more complex that, you know, there is empty space and then some mysterious small chunks of matter floating there. Next point, just provoking, I don't think, at least our human basic stance is to know. There are very important, maybe even crucial things that we try to avoid to know. We have to work actively, not being spontaneous, when we want to know. The last point, as a psychoanalyst I would like to introduce the notion of the unconscious, not as some instinctual half-biological stuff, but as a place of thinking, where it's not me as a self, but it thinks. That's the Freudian unconscious. So if we take all this into account, I don't think, with Martina I would probably here agree, I don't think that we can, even at an abstract level, oppose materialism and idealism versus West and East. Listen, the first symbolically statement of philosophy, Parmenides, is thinking and being are the same. And this is the motive fundamental through all of Western philosophy. Second thing, look at the Stoic tradition. Their name for thinking is becoming without being. It's a pure flux. They call it even me-on. You have somata bodies, you have me-on. So I think, again, I agree here maybe with all of you, that we should learn to not be afraid to be more precise. Avoid these generalities, East, West, and so on. Buddhism here has nothing to do originally with idealism. Buddha says, I care about human suffering, I don't care about gods, do they exist or not. But what interests me there, we will not have time to approach it. How come then, in a couple of generations already, Buddhism was all of a sudden inhabited by hundreds of divinities and so on and so on? So I just wanted to complicate things. Thank you. We're going to get more into the East-West complications, I promise you for that. But to finish off the pitches, Monima. My view is influenced by Buddhist philosophers. As was rightly said, Buddhism begins with thinking about the problem of suffering. It's not metaphysics, what is there in the world, that is the starting point. The starting point here is there is suffering in the world and what can we do to eradicate it? That's the four noble truths that the Buddha begins with. The very next sermon he gives is the no-self view. Why that? And I think he gets into metaphysics in order to address the problem of suffering. It's because the main point, if I can put simply, is because the metaphysics, the self, you know, all these notions, we are assuming a substance metaphysics. Substance was the word that was used in dualism to introduce this. What does the notion of substance mean? I was not happy. Jay said substance and then he said stuff, as if they're the same thing. No, they're not. I didn't write it, but... For philosophers, if you carefully define the notion of substance, substance is something that is capable of existing independently. According to Buddhists, there are no substances. Nothing in this world exists independently. So, of course, the self, if you think of it as an independent substance, does not exist. That was his reason for challenging the notion of self. All the problems that arise in this world, according to the Buddha, are because of this substance metaphysics. And the Buddha was not responding to, you know, Western philosophy at that time. There is a tradition in India, the Hindu philosophers, and these philosophers, scholars, monks, you know, they're not just in the forest meditating. They're not just idealists. I do not like that description. They're arguing with each other. And the Buddha's focus was on the notion of substance, that, you know, the substance is an independent thing, but there are no other independent things. Both mind and matter exist. There are conscious, there's conscious experiences, and there is physical stuff, atoms, and they interact with each other. I'm kind of on the relationality view, but, you know, not going into spirits, bit too heavy for me and for the Buddhist in general. Mind and matter both exist, but they both exist relationally. The nature of the universe is relational. And problems arise because we, as human beings who are self-conscious beings, and I can say something about that later, draw these artificial boundaries between us, thinking of ourselves as me as opposed to you, East as opposed to West, this as opposed to that. These dualities are the source of the problem. Everything arises because of interactions. So it's kind of an emergentism. Mind arises from matter, call it a materialist view, but both mind and matter are real, just like, you know, money. It is an emergent entity. Buildings are constructed entities, but they're real things, right? Great. So there's a lot there that I think we're going to have to choke for half of this debate until we get to the East-West stuff, but it's really good and ripe. I think people could hear it and it's really important because this, just to set the stage here, this mind-body problem has been discussed a million times. I do want to do something different with this one that talks about East-West, but before we go fully there, can we talk a little more in the metaphysics? I'm going to go back to you, Martine, about you started with this idea of you don't like the word self because it confuses people, but I did hear from everybody this, maybe I'm getting it wrong, a kind of inescapable experiential dualism that I'm still not sure what to do with. Okay. So I wouldn't call it experiential dualism, but perhaps I can respond to your question by reacting to what Monima just said about the substance, and I will follow Slavoj Zizek in making things even more complicated. So you introduced the notion of substance, as you said, that philosophers are using the notion of a substance, and you said, and of course, this is exactly what people do in the tradition, that it's an essential condition that something can be a substance only if it's capable of independent existence, right? Okay. And then you said people, no, Buddhists, take this as a reason to reject the view that there is a self, okay, because there are no things that can independently exist, and so the self is not a substance, and so it doesn't exist. So here I would propose to be careful with the notion of substance and propose a weaker notion of a substance so that one can still be a substance dualist and someone who believes in the existence of an experiencing subject that exists across time even. Namely, you define a substance as something that is capable of existing at different times, and you skip the notion of independent existence. And I think it makes sense to get clear about the possible positions one can take, and the position I would like to propose is that what I am, what you are, what experiencing subjects are, is something distinct from the rest. If they come, when they come into existence, in evolution, then something totally new occurs. However, they do not have the capacity to exist without something else. There is a necessary connection between the existence of a subject, an experiencing subject, and somebody that is the physical basis for it. And that's a perfectly possible position that does not collapse into a no-self view. So I'm not sure. Did I respond to your question? Yeah, it's a challenge. I'm going to respond to that challenge by spelling out the Buddhist view a little more. So the Buddhists have a notion of an experiencer, of experience as very important. I said mind and matter are both very important. But here's the metaphysical picture, if you like, of what we are. I said we are not substances, and we are not beings that continue over time. The Buddhists agree with Frederico, everything is in a flux, everything, nothing is permanent. So here's one way to think about what a human being is. You are, I am just a bundle of mental and physical states, at this place, here, now. Nothing more than that. This bundle is connected to future bundles and past bundles that this inhabited, you know, in this place. They're causally connected, they're causal connections. And the kinds of things I do to my body, I do to my mind, will have effect on my future bundles. But the Buddhist says, do not think of you as a separate being. Do not put money in your superannuation, rather than helping other people around you. Because just think for a moment, what kinds of relations do you have with other bundles of physical and mental states around you? Causal relations. I'm saying things that's having an effect on your minds. I hope it's having an effect on your minds. You know, you might be disagreeing with me, but it's having an effect. There are causal relations everywhere. And why should we give priority to this stream of causal relations? Just because there's more of them. You know, yes, I'm more intimately, what Descartes called intimately connected, feel more intimately connected. But it's just causal relations all the way down. So, so the thing you're really rejecting too, maybe not non-ism, but the substance is just such a bad conception of what the... A brief question when I can. Slavoj, come in and then I want to bring you in Federico. Sure, Slavoj. Yes. You know, I see your point, Buddhism and so on. But what bothers me a little bit is the self-evidence of it. So we're asking you a frank question. You said substance cannot be, there is nothing that can stand alone, everything is interrelated. Well, it reminded me of Stalin's historical and dialectical materialism. If you were to ask 99% of the people, I claim, common sense, nobody would have said, oh, I think there are independent substances. Everybody would have said it's interrelated. So for me, that's the basic point. Yes. What interests me as is exactly the opposite. How does out of this flux, mixture, and so on, something that we experience as a substantial entity emerge? And can it be reduced to a simple illusion? Second thing, very brief. When you mentioned, it's very important, language interconnection and so on, I think the basic dualism in which we live, it's not body-soul, it's that the universe, it's very narrow view to provoke you, the universe of language has its own logic. Language is not organic part of our biological being. Language is, if you want, like a parasite. It does horrible things to us. It makes us act against our nature and so on and so on. But that's another topic. It was to you as well, but I want to bring one to Federico, because you said that the Buddhists agree with him. Do you agree with the Buddhists? I agree with a lot of what Buddhists are saying. But for example, I start with the idea that there is only one. However, one wants to know itself. One wants to know itself. So knowing is fundamental in the nature of one and cannot be explained with anything other than the fact that one can know itself, meaning that consciousness comes first. It's part and parcel of one. It cannot be explained with mathematics, with anything else. Consciousness is part of ontology. A language describes ontology. A language is the map of a territory. The territory is one that knows itself, and the knowing comes through an experience of itself. So the experience of itself is crazy, if you think about it for a second, because it means that one can actually divide into an observer and an observed. But if one is one, how can there be two separate entities? Now we've got a problem. Well, look, before one splits into two, one is actually struggling to know itself, and so to know itself, it splits into two. Now, the sense that it's the only one is actually influencing the observed, and he thinks that it is the only one, and the observed is part of itself. Now the observed is influenced by this initial movement of one, but since it's a part whole of one, it's another part, it is not separate from the other. The observed is actually observing the observer, because it is another part of one that has consciousness, has free will, wants to know itself. But what does it do? It was influenced in the beginning by the fact that one knew itself, selfish in a way. Selfish, don't take it negatively, but selfish, and it looks at this as part of itself, but not completely itself. It's got to understand that. This one, God considers like he's selfless by the one, and so he starts with selflessness, and looks at one as his own reality, God. So now you have matter, no matter, but you have some two aspects which are complementary. You have selfishness and selfness, and they are both wrong. They are both extremes. They are complementary, and they need to be balanced. So the evolution of one to know itself is to bring into balance these two opposite views, which is exactly what we do. I really like this. I want to be a stickler for the moment. And the substance of one is love, guys. The substance of one is love. That's how love is and meaning is the essence of self-knowing. It's beautiful. I want to be a stickler for the monism. I think you may have just answered it. I was going to ask if you try my view. Substance is not the right word because it's not contingent. You're saying it desires to know itself, therefore it becomes dual and knows itself, which proves that it couldn't have been mindless matter. It must have been something like mind. Am I getting this somewhat correct? Without too much because I want to end it. Well, no. See, any manifestation of one must contain all the aspects of one. In other words, just like every cell of our body contains the genome of the entire organism, we are parts whole of one. One is the totality of what exists. Every cell of our body, as the informational basis, is an holographic principle. The part contains the whole. That's incomprehensible if you think about it, but physics has discovered that reality is holographic. Holographic means that the whole is containing the parts. But if you think a second, it must be in order for one to know itself because to know itself, one could be anything that he wanted, anything. It could never know itself. But if it is holographic, there is something that repeats at different scales. It's fractal, holographic in the sense of fractal. And therefore, one can know itself and also the parts can know themselves like one. Let me hand this back this way. I know there were some questions your way, but I haven't gone to Martina in a while. Do you want to slip in on that before? I have so many questions for each of the other speakers. I'm getting so curious about their position. Do we have a preference? Perhaps I will address you again. You described so beautifully the Buddhist position, saying that they insist that the relation between these different mental states or occurrences is just a causal one. No underlying substance that is common to all of them, so to speak, in one life. So if this is true, then it's true for the special case of experiences as well. So for pains, perceptions, and so on and so forth, right? Now, I would just like to try to articulate why I cannot believe this. And this is because when I think of experiences, or I think when anybody thinks of experiences, what that person really has in mind is cases where there is a way it's like for someone to undergo them. So there wouldn't be a pain if there wouldn't be someone for whom it feels a certain way. There wouldn't be a perception if there wouldn't be someone for whom it looks or seems a particular way, and so on and so forth. So it seems to me that experiences require that there is someone. Now, the only possibility to make this compatible with what you said is to go for momentary selves. And that's what some philosophers do. Like Galen Strawson, they say, oh, there's a subject at this very, very small time, just big enough to realize one experience, and then in the next moment, it's another one. That's a coherent thought, but I simply think we have no reason to believe in it. I have every reason to believe that the person who sat down here and saw these people sitting there, for whom it was like something to see all those people, it's the very same subject for whom it's like something to see these people now. Can I have Monima respond to that? That's still on the subject that you're still defending while you're okay with erasing the silly self word, but subject you still want to keep. Well, people mean the subject when they talk of the self. Then they could keep it. Then they can keep it. But often I think people have something else in So I think you want more than just a subject. You want a continuing subject, right? A continuing subject of experience. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Just getting clear, just to make sure. So the Buddhists, yes, the Buddhists want to deny this continuing subject of experience. How are they going to make sense? Very important challenge, you know, pain is for whom? There needs to be a subject who's feeling pain. So, you know, one guiding thought for Buddhism is that, you know, think of, I mean, I said, you know, all things are interrelated. We have this notion of thinking of ourselves as experiencing subjects. And there's where we begin. We begin with the human subject and then think about, you know, what about consciousness of other beings? You know, what about octopuses? Now they're very famous these days because of Peter Godfrey Swift's work, right? Octopuses, how do they, you know, handle pain? Should we eat meat? Or those are, you know, these, those animals are also in pain. But it's because we are beginning with the human subject and we think of ourselves, this is a Western assumption. We are the center of the universe, an enlightenment, you know, assumption that we are the experiencing subject. Think about more simpler experiencing subjects. You know, there are animals that are experiencing subjects. Go all the way down. There is, there's just the notion of feeling, you know, that arises even in cells. You know, there is a cell contracts. But there is someone who feels. Why do we need there to be a someone over and above? I did not deny the notion of matter. I did not deny the notion of consciousness. I don't even deny the notion of organism. We are all organisms, right? All I'm denying is why do we need this conscious subject? But an experiencer. Yeah, over and above. It's interesting that you said, why do we need, in addition to the feeling, the subject? Not in addition. It's included in the feeling. There couldn't be a feeling if there wasn't. Now, someone is strange because we normally reserve it to human beings. But there must be an individual for whom it feels. Otherwise, we cannot even make sense of what it would be to feel. That's the kind of response that I like to give. Why can't the individual just be an organism? That's another issue.