In
the endless public wars between science and religion, Buddhism has
mostly been given a pass. The genesis of this cultural tolerance began
with the idea, popular in the 1970s, that Buddhism was somehow in
harmony with the frontiers of quantum physics. While the silliness of
“quantum spirituality” is apparent enough these days, the possibility
that Eastern traditions might have something to say to science did not
disappear. Instead, a more natural locus for that encounter was found in
the study of the mind. Spurred by the Dalai Lama’s remarkable
engagement with scientists, interest in Buddhist attitudes toward the
study of the mind has grown steadily.
But
within the Dalai Lama’s cheerful embrace lies a quandary whose
resolution could shake either tradition to its core: the true
relationship between our material brains and our decidedly nonmaterial
minds. More than evolution, more than inexhaustible arguments over God’s
existence, the real fault line between science and religion runs
through the nature of consciousness. Carefully unpacking that
contentious question, and exploring what Buddhism offers its
investigation, is the subject of Evan Thompson’s new book, “Waking,
Dreaming, Being.”
A
professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, Thompson
is in a unique position to take up the challenge. In addition to a
career built studying cognitive science’s approach to the mind, he is
intimate with the long history of Buddhist and Vedic commentary on the
mind too. He also happens to be the son of the maverick cultural
historian William Irwin Thompson, whose Lindisfarne Association proposed
the “study and realization of a new planetary culture” (a goal that
reveals a lot about its strengths and weaknesses). Growing up in this
environment, the younger Thompson managed to pick up an enthusiasm for
non-Western philosophical traditions and a healthy skepticism for their
spiritualist assumptions.
“Waking,
Dreaming, Being” begins with an appreciation of neuroscience’s
revolutionary impact on our understanding of the brain. Armed with
high-resolution digital tools, researchers have mapped critical steps in
cognition and vision, language and even memory.
The
success of these studies, however, leads some to claim them as proof in
favor of “neuro-reductionism” — the proposition that we’re all nothing
but the goop of our brains. From this standpoint, minds are never more
than just brain function. Once the working brain stops working, our
consciousness ends, we end, end of story.
But
for others, including Thompson, something essential is left out of this
neuro-reductionist account. The vividness of our experience is neither
corralled nor exhausted by fM.R.I. maps or the traces of brain waves in
an EEG. There is an “explanatory gap” hanging between neural activity
and conscious experience. While that gap has led some philosophers, like
Colin McGinn, to argue that consciousness is simply beyond scientific
explanation, Thompson moves in a different direction. He begins by
reminding us that long before Socrates, the philosopher-meditators of
northern India were already investigating consciousness and its
dynamics. Almost 3,000 years ago, first Vedic and then Buddhist
practitioners articulated sophisticated first-person accounts of
cognitive function. Thompson argues that these contemplative practices
are relentlessly empirical. “In the yogic traditions,” he writes,
“meditation trains both the ability to sustain attention on a single
object and the ability to be openly aware of the entire field of
experience without selecting or suppressing anything that arises.”
This
training makes contemplative practice unlike anything in the
neuroscientist’s toolbox. Neuroscience’s reliance on instrumented,
third-person descriptions from brain scans means the essential and
essentially nuanced experience of subjectivity is filtered out. As
Thompson insists, our consciousness — our self — is simply not the kind
of “thing” science is used to studying.
The
book’s title underscores Thompson’s thematic approach. Sections on
“Waking” explore normal cognitive function underpinning day-to-day
activity. Thompson walks us through the Abhidharma school of Buddhism.
For the Abhidharma, our perceived stream of consciousness can be
resolved into bursts of attention or “mind moments.” Thompson shows us
modern neuroscience experiments that seem to support this discrete
nature of perception.
The
sections on “Dreaming” find Thompson going deeper. He rejects the
often-held scientific view that dreams are simply hallucinations of the
brain: “When we dream, we don’t have pseudo-perceptions that form the
basis for false beliefs; we imagine a dream world and we identify with
our dream ego.” Most of us have had a few experiences of “lucid
dreaming” — recognizing we’re awake to the dream while still asleep. But
within Buddhist “dream yoga” traditions, lucid dreaming is considered a
trainable skill essential to the aspirant’s progress as a meditational
adept: “Dream yoga tries to show us how the waking world isn’t outside
and separate from our minds; it’s brought forth and enacted through our
imaginative perception of it.”
This,
for Thompson, is how true East-West dialogues can present fundamental
challenges to science. All knowledge of the world, even knowledge
eventually transformed into scientific form, depends on experience. We
live through a perspective that can never be fully escaped. According to
Thompson, coming to terms with that boundary, rather than sweeping it
under the rug, requires treating experience as primary and irreducible, a
notion quite native to contemplative traditions.
Thompson
is, however, happy to spread the challenges around. It’s a balance most
apparent in his thoughtful discussion of “Being” and, specifically,
dying. Both Buddhist and Vedic traditions are deeply committed to the
idea that consciousness persists independently of the brain. Thompson
looks carefully at evidence for out-of-body experiences, reincarnation
and, in particular, near-death experiences of the kind heralded in
“Heaven Is for Real.” In all cases, he argues, evidence points to these
experiences originating in brains that are either shutting down (dying)
or starting back up (resuscitation). Thompson’s dogged balance in these
presentations makes his doubts that “consciousness — even in its most
profound meditative forms — transcends the living body and the brain”
all the more resonant.
Neuroscience
considers dying to be nothing more than the ending of brain function,
but Thompson argues forcefully that contemplative traditions still offer
science a powerful new perspective. In Buddhism, rich and precise
accounts are given of the mind’s dissolution in layers during dying,
similar to what occurs while falling asleep. As hospice workers well
know, the dying process can take hours or days. Thus a phenomenology of
dying — meaning detailed first-person accounts by those trained to watch
their own minds (including dying minds) — would be fertile territory
for future neuroscientific studies. Speaking specifically about accounts
of near-death experiences, Thompson presses a point that is often
missed:
“What
this means in pragmatic terms is to stop using accounts of these
experiences to justify either neuro-reductionist or spiritualist agendas
and instead take them seriously for what they truly are — narratives of
first-person experience arising from circumstances that we will all in
some way face.”
That
quotation summarizes everything right about Thompson’s excellent book.
Walking through the wreckage of a thousand atheism-versus-religion
debates, he asks us to do something truly radical and withhold judgment
on the big (perhaps unanswerable) metaphysical questions as we carry out
our explorations. Instead, we can focus with honesty and integrity on
where the empirical, experiential information actually lies. It’s there,
he says, right before us, in the lives we inhabit.
WAKING, DREAMING, BEING
Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy
By Evan Thompson
453 pp. Columbia University Press. $32.95.
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