(Natural selection designed the brain to mislead us)
The only way to get the whole picture, says Morpheus, is “to see it for yourself.” He offers Neo two pills, a
It is the study of how the human brain was designed—by natural selection—to mislead us, even enslave us.
No, at the most basic level the answer is “The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that helped our ancestors get genes into the next generation.”
Our brains are designed to, among other things, delude us.
The second reason junk food is a good example to start with is that it’s fundamental to the Buddha’s teachings.
(The happiness delusion: dopamine, the hedonic treadmill, and junk food)
There are different illusions associated with different pursuits, but for now we can focus on one illusion that’s common to these things: the overestimation of how much happiness they’ll bring.
We spend more time envisioning the perks that a promotion will bring than envisioning the headaches it will bring.
Similarly, when we see that doughnut sitting there, we immediately imagine how good it tastes, not how intensely we’ll want another doughnut only moments after eating it, or how we’ll feel a bit tired or agitated later, when the sugar rush subsides.
We were “designed” by natural selection to do certain things that helped our ancestors get their genes into the next generation—things like eating, having sex, earning the esteem of other people, and outdoing rivals. I
The animal’s brain should focus more on (1), the fact that pleasure will accompany the reaching of a goal, than on (2), the fact that the pleasure will dissipate shortly thereafter. After all, if you focus on (1), you’ll pursue things like food and sex and social status with unalloyed gusto, whereas if you focus on (2), you could start feeling ambivalence.
Natural selection doesn’t “want” us to be happy, after all; it just “wants” us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.
it—you’ll get a big blast of dopamine after the taste of the doughnut sinks in. But later, once you’re a confirmed powdered-sugar-doughnut eater, the lion’s share of the dopamine spike comes before you actually bite into the doughnut, as you’re staring longingly at it; the amount that comes after the bite is much less than the amount you got after that first, blissful bite into a powdered-sugar doughnut. The pre-bite dopamine blast you’re now getting is the promise of more bliss, and the post-bite drop in dopamine is, in a way, the breaking of the promise—or, at least, it’s a kind of biochemical acknowledgment that there was some overpromising. To the extent that you bought the promise—anticipated greater pleasure than would be delivered by the consumption itself—you have been, if not deluded in the strong sense of that term, at least misled.
do you expect from natural selection? Its job is to build machines that spread genes, and if that means programming some measure of illusion into the machines, then illusion there will be.
evolutionary psychology provides it, doesn’t necessarily make your life any better. In fact, it can actually make it worse. You’re still stuck in the natural human cycle of ultimately futile pleasure-seeking—what psychologists sometimes call “the hedonic treadmill”—but now you have new reason to see the absurdity of it.
In other words, now you see that it’s a treadmill, a treadmill specifically designed to keep you running, often without really getting anywhere—yet you keep running!
(Buddhism’s diagnosis and cure: mindfulness as the red pill)
“Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.”
What he meant is that if you want to liberate yourself from the parts of the mind that keep you from realizing true happiness, you have to first become aware of them, which can be unpleasant.
I got from evolutionary psychology was the worst of both worlds: the painful self-consciousness without the deep happiness.
I had both the discomfort of being aware of my mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.
If you follow the underlying logic of either of them far enough, you will find a dramatic claim: that we are, metaphorically speaking, living in the Matrix. However mundane mindfulness meditation may sometimes sound, it is a practice that, if pursued rigorously, can let you see what Morpheus says the red pill will let you see. Namely, “how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
touches everyday perceptions and thoughts in ways subtler and more pervasive than I had imagined.
Buddhism offers an explicit diagnosis of the problem and a cure. And the cure, when it works, brings not just happiness but clarity of vision: the actual truth about things, or at least something way, way closer to that than our everyday view of them.
In sum: you can best achieve success at meditation by not pursuing success, and achieving this success may mean caring less about success, at least as success is conventionally defined.
them. This altered perspective can be the beginning of
fundamental and enduring change in your
critical distance from it that winds up diminishing the unpleasantness.
accepting, even embracing, an unpleasant feeling can give you a
Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point.
Strictly speaking, there is no “Buddhist view of the world.” Buddhism began to split into different schools of interpretation
The most basic division in Buddhism is between the Theravada school and the Mahayana school. My own meditative tradition, Vipassana, derives from the Theravada lineage. It is within the Mahayana lineage (to which Quang Duc belonged) that you find the most radically broad conception of illusion. Some Mahayana Buddhists even subscribe to a “mind-only” doctrine that, in its more extreme incarnations, dismisses the things we “perceive” via consciousness as, pretty literally, figments of our imagination. This strand of Buddhist thought—the strand that most obviously resonates with the movie The Matrix—isn’t dominant within Mahayana Buddhism,
If you put these two fundamental Buddhist ideas together—the idea of not-self and the idea of emptiness—you have a radical proposition: neither the world inside you nor the world outside you is anything like it seems.
(Feelings as evolutionary judgments: true, false, and illusory)
Feelings are designed to encode judgments about things in our environment.
So we could say that feelings are “true” if the judgments they encode are accurate—
We could say feelings are “false” or perhaps “illusory” if they lead the organism astray—if following the feelings leads to things that are bad for the organism.†
The Buddha said anger has a “poisoned root and honeyed tip.”
So you could call road rage “false.” It feels good, but the aura of goodness is illusory, because succumbing to its attraction leads to behavior that will not, on average, be good for the organism.
This is a reminder that natural selection didn’t design your mind to see the world clearly; it designed your mind to have perceptions and beliefs that would help
take care of your genes. Which brings us to a third difference between the doughnut and road
We’re designed by natural selection to care—and care a lot—about what other people think of us.
But in a hunter-gatherer village, your neighbors would have had a vast database on your behavior, so you’d be unlikely, on any given day, to do anything that radically revised their opinion of you, for better or worse.
Modern life is full of emotional reactions that make little sense except in light of the environment in which our species evolved.
If you accept the idea that many of our most troublesome feelings are in one sense or another illusions, then meditation can be seen as, among other things, a process of dispelling illusions.
The fact that we’re not living in a “natural” environment makes our feelings even less reliable guides to reality.
3. Underlying it all is the happiness delusion. As the Buddha emphasized, our ongoing attempts to feel better tend to involve an overestimation of how long “better” is going to last. What’s more, when “better” ends, it can be followed by “worse”—an unsettled feeling, a thirst for more. Long before psychologists were describing the hedonic treadmill, the Buddha saw
My attraction to apples, my aversion to grasping knife blades and scaling skyscrapers—all to the good. Still, I hope you can see the virtue of subjecting your feelings to investigation—inspecting them to see which ones deserve obedience and which ones don’t, and trying to free yourself from the grip of the ones that don’t.
One thing all feelings have in common is that they were originally “designed” to convince you to follow them. They feel right and true almost by definition. They actively discourage you from viewing
them objectively.
“default mode network.” This is a network in the brain that, according to brain- scan studies, is active when we’re doing nothing in particular—not talking to people, not focusing on our work or any other task, not playing a sport or reading a book or watching a movie. It is the network along which our mind wanders when it’s wandering.
if you want to take the red pill—you need to understand that staying in the present, though an inherent part of mindfulness meditation, isn’t the point of the exercise.
(The three marks: impermanence, dukkha, and not-self)
The first is impermanence. Who could deny that nothing lasts forever? The second mark of existence is dukkha—suffering, unsatisfactoriness. And who among us hasn’t suffered and felt unsatisfied?
But the third mark of existence, “not-self,” is different.
Yet according to Buddhist doctrine, it is crucially important to grasp not-self if your goal is vipassana: seeing reality with true clarity, such clarity as to pave the path to enlightenment.
Describing these aggregates precisely would take a chapter in itself, but for present purposes we can label them roughly as (1) the physical body (called “form” in this discourse), including such sense organs as eyes and ears; (2) basic feelings; (3) perceptions (of, say, identifiable sights or sounds); (4) “mental formations” (a big category that includes complex emotions, thoughts, inclinations, habits, decisions); and (5) “consciousness,” or awareness—notably, awareness of the contents of the other four aggregates.
I personally would be more inclined to think of my self as the thing that’s in control, kind of like the CEO of my being.”
In any event, we’ll get into the existence—or lack thereof—of the CEO self in the next chapter.
as the person fails to realize that the aggregates are “not-self.” The person clings to emotions, thoughts, and other elements of the aggregates as if they were personal belongings. But they’re not.†
This discourse—the Buddha’s discourse on engagement—suggests an appealingly simple model: liberation consists of changing the relationship between your consciousness and the things you normally think of as its “contents”—your feelings, your thoughts, and so on. Once you realize that these things are “not-self,” the relationship of your consciousness to them becomes more like contemplation than engagement, and your consciousness is liberated. And the “you” that remains—the you that, in that first discourse on the not-self, the Buddha depicts as liberated—is this liberated
I wish I could say this scenario cleanly and definitively answers the riddle I set out to answer. Namely, if the five aggregates are all there are to a person, where do you find the “he” who, in that first discourse on the not-self, is said to be liberated? Unfortunately, the more deeply you delve into the discourse on engagement—confront its ambiguities and seeming inconsistencies, ponder translation issues, and weigh ancient commentaries on it—the harder it is to confidently extract any such simple scenario.† Besides, there’s no denying that the Buddha repeatedly, in that first not-self discourse and elsewhere, does say that consciousness is not-self, something that “you” have to let go of for liberation to happen—which seems quite at odds with the prospect that “you”
consciousness.
can happily inhabit the consciousness aggregate once it is disengaged from the other four aggregates.
One is the kind of consciousness you’re liberated from, and the other is the kind of consciousness that stays with “you”—that is you—after the liberation.
The first kind of consciousness is deeply entangled with—fully engaged with—the contents of the other aggregates, and the second kind is a more objective awareness of those contents, a more contemplative consciousness that persists after the engagement has been broken.
Obviously, the feeling was still in some sense part of my consciousness, but now my consciousness was contemplating it in the way that it contemplates the trees that are swaying in the breeze beyond my window as I write this sentence. I had no sense of ownership toward the tension that had made me want to grind my teeth, so I could view it with dispassion and calm.
To look at this from a slightly different angle: the key to letting go of a chunk or two of my self was to separate the act of observation from the act of evaluation. I still experienced the anxiety, but I no longer experienced it as either good or bad.
natural selection “wants” you to experience things as either good or bad. The Buddha believed that the less you judge things—including the contents of your mind—the more clearly you’ll see them, and the less deluded you’ll be.
But once I followed that logic—quit seeing these things I couldn’t control as part of my self—I was liberated from them and, in a certain sense, back in control.
Maybe it’s actually useful to hang on to some conception of self for a while; maybe hanging on to it could help you get to the point where you no longer believe it exists.
Maybe by not-self the Buddha just meant something like “not usefully considered part of your self” or “not to be identified with.” In which case he was basically saying, “Look, if there’s part of you that isn’t under your control and therefore makes you suffer, then do yourself a favor and quit identifying with it!”
In a way we’re back to square one, Ajahn Chah’s opening advice about the not-self doctrine: Don’t think about it so much—just do it.
Like the “historical Jesus,” the “historical Buddha” is hard to discern through the mists of history.
In this light, it’s hardly surprising that there should be inconsistencies and outright contradictions within the Buddhist canon.
We associate the self with control and with firm persistence through time, but on close inspection we turn out to be much less under control, and much more fluid, with a much less fixed identity, than we think.
our commonsense conception of the self—as a solid, enduring core that keeps the system under control—is actually an illusion? Does it lend credibility to the Buddhist idea that “disowning” large chunks of the self—and maybe, someday, disowning the whole thing—could actually bring you closer to the truth? In my view, the answers are yes, yes, and yes.
(The conscious self is not in control: psychology corroborates not-self)
This is a matter of nearly unanimous agreement among psychologists: the conscious self is not some all-powerful executive authority.
Modern psychology is making a stronger point. It’s basically saying: You know how, on reflection, you conclude, along with Aggivessana, that you’re not in total control? Well, you’re actually in even less control than you conclude on reflection.
the retreat works as intended, by that point your mind is much calmer than usual, and you are viewing its contents much more objectively than usual.
“Thoughts think themselves.”
So if the conscious mind isn’t in control, what is in control?
(The modular mind: competing players with no CEO, no hierarchy)
The closer we look at the mind, the more it seems to consist of a lot of different players, players that sometimes collaborate but sometimes fight for control, with victory going to the one that is in some sense the strongest.
In other words, it’s a jungle in there, and you’re not the king of the jungle. The good news is that, paradoxically, realizing you’re not king can be the first step toward getting some real power.
Of course, it’s hard to admit you’re not king, and that’s not just because king seems like a great thing to be. It’s because we feel like we’re king; we feel that our conscious self is in charge of our behavior, deciding what to do and when. But
“split-brain” experiments.
Again, the part of the brain that controls language had generated a coherent, if false, explanation of behavior—and apparently had convinced itself of the truth of the explanation.
This part of the brain was more active when the monetary reward was higher—and that was true regardless of whether the information about the reward had been presented subliminally or had been left on the screen long enough to enter consciousness.
this experiment suggests a different scenario: the actual brain machinery that translates incentive into motivation is the same regardless of whether you’re consciously aware of the incentive and consciously experiencing the translation; so maybe the conscious awareness doesn’t really add anything to the process. In other words, maybe it’s not so much “conscious motivation” as “consciousness of motivation.” With or without conscious awareness, the same physical motivational machinery seems to be doing the heavy lifting.†
but it’s a salient one, and it’s one the Buddha would probably warm to: you think you’re directing
the
movie, but you’re actually just watching it.
The researchers concluded that the brain was initiating the action before the person became aware of “deciding” to initiate it.
And the reason this role was exaggerated is that the conscious mind feels so powerful; in other words, the conscious mind is naturally deluded about its own nature.
vindicated. But you may also feel puzzled. Why would natural selection design a brain that leaves people deluded about themselves? One
benefit of the genes of our hunter-gatherer ancestors—to convince the world that we’re coherent, consistent actors who have things under control.
In short, from natural selection’s point of view, it’s good for you to tell a coherent story about yourself,
depict yourself as a rational, self-aware actor. So whenever your actual motivations aren’t accessible to the part of your brain that communicates with the world, it would make sense for that part of your brain to generate stories about your motivation.
So you would expect us to tell (and believe) not just coherent stories about ourselves but flattering stories about ourselves.
One finding among many that drive this point home is that the
average person believes he or she does more good things and fewer bad things than the average person. Nearly half a millennium after Montaigne died, science has validated the logic behind his perhaps too modest remark: “I consider myself an average man except for the fact that I consider myself an average man.”
And we remember positive experiences in greater detail than negative experiences, as if the positive events are specially primed for sharing with the public in rich detail. No such asymmetry of narrative detail is found in our memory of positive and negative things that happen to other people.
What’s more, when we recount an experience to someone, the act of recounting it changes the memory of it. So if we reshape the story a bit each time—omitting inconvenient facts, exaggerating convenient ones—we can, over time, transform our actual belief about what happened. Which presumably makes it easier to convince others that our story is true.
on average, people think they’re morally above average. This is an especially important piece of self-flattery, because it helps fuel the self-righteousness that starts and sustains conflicts, ranging from quarrels to wars.
One is about the nature of the conscious self, which we see as more in control of things than it actually is. The other illusion is about exactly what kind of people we are—namely, capable and upstanding.
The first illusion helps us convince the world that we are coherent, consistent actors: we don’t do things for no reason, and the reasons we do them make sense; if our behaviors merit credit or blame, there is an inner us that deserves that credit or blame. The second illusion helps convince the world that what we deserve is credit, not blame; we’re more ethical than the average person, and we’re more productive than the average teammate. We have beneffectance.
how does behavior get directed? How do decisions get made?
is that the mind is “modular.”
the interplay among these modules that shapes your behavior. And much of this interplay happens without conscious awareness on your part.
The word module begs to be misinterpreted, so before we get into the workings of the modular mind, let me try to preempt misunderstanding by listing three ways you shouldn’t conceive of modules:
The modules aren’t like a bunch of physical compartments.
You can’t point to one part of your brain and say, “This is the module that helps me infer what people are thinking from what they say and from their body language and facial expressions.” Psychologists
2. The different modules aren’t like the blades on a Swiss Army knife or the apps on a smartphone.
The modules aren’t like departments in a company’s organization chart.
brain experiment pioneer, has written, “While hierarchical processing takes place within the modules, it is looking like there
no hierarchy among the modules. All these modules are not reporting to a department head—it is a free-for-all, self-organizing system.”
“It’s a dog-eat-dog world going on in your brain, with different systems competing to make it to the surface to win the prize of conscious recognition.”
When Gazzaniga talks about the “dog-eat-dog world” inside your head, he isn’t just talking about the obvious Dr. Jekyll–Mr. Hyde kind of internal struggle between the you who wants to eat a doughnut (or maybe even steal a doughnut!) and the you who counsels restraint. In fact, with that kind of struggle, the conflict itself is often part of consciousness. We’ll
The things I pay attention to, the stories I tell about the things I pay attention to, the stories I tell about myself—all these result from choices getting made, and “I,” the conscious “I,” the thing I think of as my self, am by and large not making the choices.
The capacity for feeling, and for subjective experience in general, is what gives life meaning and what gives valence to moral questions.
Indeed, you may find it useful to think of meditation as a process that takes a conscious mind that gets to do a little nudging and turns it into something that can do a lot of nudging—maybe even turns it into something more like a president than a speaker of the House. And you may, to that end, find it useful to understand how the brain determines which module is in charge at any given moment. That’s the question we’ll focus on in the next chapter.
We do tend to think of the self—the inner, real me—as something enduring, something that persists even as we grow from children to adults to senior citizens.
Why would someone’s basic financial philosophy change after looking at pictures
of women?
accepting that your self isn’t in control, and may in some sense not even exist, can put your self—or something like it—in control.
(Feelings trigger modules: how nonattachment leads to not-self)
This idea—that modules are triggered by feelings—sheds new light on the connection between two fundamental parts of Buddhism: the idea of nonattachment to feelings and the idea of not-self.
It’s feelings that “decide” which module will be in charge for the time being, and it’s modules that then decide what you’ll actually do during that time. In this light, it becomes a bit clearer why losing attachment to feelings could help you reach a point where there seems to be no self.
The emotion of sexual jealousy constitutes an organized mode of operation specifically designed to deploy the programs governing each psychological mechanism so that each is poised to deal with the exposed infidelity. Physiological processes are prepared for such things as violence… . The goal of deterring, injuring, or murdering the rival emerges; the goal of punishing, deterring, or deserting the mate appears; the desire to make oneself
more competitively attractive to alternative mates emerges; memory is activated to re-analyze the past; confident assessments of the past are transformed into doubts; the general estimate of the reliability and trustworthiness of the opposite sex (or indeed everyone) may decline; associated shame programs may be triggered to search for situations in which the individual can publicly demonstrate acts of violence or punishment that work to counteract an (imagined or real) social perception of weakness; and so on.
If you don’t yield to attachment—if you don’t, as the Buddha might say, let your consciousness become “engaged” with the feeling—then the jealousy module presumably won’t be activated. Observing feelings without attachment is the way you keep modules from seizing control of your consciousness. Easier said than done, I know.
But without surrendering to jealousy, you’ll be better able to determine whether the infidelity is a fact, better able to decide on a wise course of action, and, in any event, less likely to kill somebody.
Of course, the men in these experiments didn’t see real mating opportunities; they just saw pictures of women. But in the ancestral environment there weren’t photographs, so any realistic image of a woman would have signified the actual presence of a woman. That’s why the minds of the men in this experiment could be “fooled” by mere pictures, even though the men “knew,” at a conscious level, that these women weren’t available. So this experiment is, among other things, another reminder that modules can get triggered not only without the conscious self doing the triggering but also without it having a
clue as to the Darwinian logic behind the triggering.
they can become crowd-averse, suddenly partial to intimate environments; their intertemporal utility function can get recalibrated; and their career goals, at least for the time being, can become more materialistic.†
At the same time, we should stay mindful of the mind’s messiness and not get overly enamored of the modular metaphor.
By and large, my philosophy is Live and let live: if you’re enjoying the Matrix, go crazy.
Except, maybe, when your illusions harm other people in your life or contribute to larger problems in the world.
meditation works the other way around. It’s not that meditative observations about your mind validate theories, but more that theories can help validate meditative observations about your mind.
There are three recurring themes here. First, these thoughts involve the past and future, not the present; the one thing you’re not doing while having these thoughts is paying attention to what’s actually going on in the real world at this moment. Second, all of these thoughts involve you.
Third, most of these thoughts involve other people.
modules that deal with attracting mates, keeping them, enhancing your status (which can mean derogating rivals), taking care of kin, tending to your friendships (which includes making sure they are reciprocal and that you’re not getting exploited), and so on.
5: looking forward to that beer you so richly deserve. Presumably, evolution didn’t build a “beer-drinking module” into us. But beer, like many other recreational drugs, is an invention that circumvents evolution’s logic: it taps directly into the reward center that normally would be activated more arduously, by doing things that helped our ancestors spread their genes.
you will probably lean increasingly toward the second hypothesis: it will seem more and more like your mind isn’t wandering within its own terrain so much as being hijacked by intruders. And eventually these won’t seem so much like hijackings as attempted hijackings.
One way to get the idea, Goldstein said, is to “imagine that every thought that’s arising in your mind is coming from the person next to you.”
“The thought itself is appearing and disappearing like a sound, but being identified with it is something we’re adding.”
This, in turn, seemed consistent with the idea that modules generate thoughts outside of consciousness and somehow inject them into consciousness. So
it’s closer to being the case that the thoughts try to capture you, the thing you think of as ‘you.’
though they’re influenced by life experiences, they’re on balance closer to being instincts than bad habits, which explains why uprooting them is so hard.
it could seem like “thoughts think themselves”—because the modules do their work outside of consciousness, so, as far as the conscious mind can tell, the thoughts are coming out of nowhere.
the conscious self doesn’t create thoughts; it receives them.
regardless of whether a self exists, by jettisoning parts of what you think of as your self, you clarify your view of the world and become a better and happier person.
Anyway, here’s what I’ve noticed about thoughts that intrude when I’m trying to focus on my breath: they often seem to have feelings attached to them. What’s more, their ability to hold my attention—in other words, to keep me enthralled, to keep me from noticing that they’re holding my attention—seems to depend on the strength of those feelings.
As John Ruskin put it in the nineteenth century, “Curiosity is a gift, a capacity of pleasure in knowing.”
But the main point is just that all kinds of curiosity—ranging from a driving, headlong quest to a pleasant stroll along the byways of speculation—do seem to involve feelings. It’s no surprise, then, that brain scans are showing that a curious state of mind involves activity in the dopamine system, the system involved in motivation and reward, in desire and pleasure.
When your mind is wandering, when your default mode network is running the show, how does the network decide which module gets to propel its thought into consciousness at any given time?
But what determines which dog wins? What makes one dog more powerful than another?
So far as I can tell, the best candidate for that honor is feelings. Of all the thoughts engaged in subterranean competition at a given moment, maybe the thought that has the strongest level of feeling associated with it is the one that gains entry into consciousness.†
In all of these cases, the feelings associated with the thoughts will be commensurate in strength to the importance of the thoughts as natural selection defines importance.
If the self doesn’t exist, then what are the real dynamics of what is commonly called “self-control”? And what does Buddhism tell us about how to get some of this “self” control?
smarter, but the point of smarts, from natural selection’s perspective, isn’t to replace feelings but rather to make them better informed:
For that matter, the reason we started the analysis in the first place is because being cold in the winter gives us a bad feeling. Feelings tell us what to think about, and then after all the thinking is done, they tell us what to do. Over
prefrontal cortex, which sits right behind
Reason has its effect not by directly pushing back against a feeling but by fortifying the feeling that does do the pushing back. Yes, that Hershey bar looks good, and the thought of eating it feels good, but reflecting on that article you read about the toll high blood sugar takes on your body makes the thought of eating the Hershey bar guilt-inducing. And it’s the guilt, not the reflection, that does direct combat with the urge to eat the candy bar. “Reason alone,” Hume argued, “can never oppose passion in the direction of the will.” Nothing “can oppose or retard the impulse of passion but a contrary impulse.”
feelings and put us under rational control. No, the powers of reason embedded in the prefrontal
cortex are themselves under the control of feelings. The value system embedded in the feelings—natural selection’s conception of what’s good and what’s bad, what we should pursue and what we should avoid—continues to be, more or less, the prevailing value system.
It’s in this sense that reason remains a “slave” to the passions, as Hume put it—and thus a slave to natural selection’s overarching value system.
In other words, neither kind of module was more “rational” than the
other; they just had different goals, and on this particular day, one was stronger than the other.
Why does our conscious mind have to spend time witnessing the presentation of reasons—that is, participating in the
“deliberation”? If it’s
agent. “My guess,” said Kurzban, is that the reason your conscious mind observes the debate, including the winning rationale, is so that “if someone ever challenges you or asks you why you did x, y, or z,” you’ll be able to cite a plausible rationale.
“Consulting” may be a way of making sure, in advance, that we’re not going to do something that will antagonize important people in our lives, or a way of getting commitments of support from these people in case our decision antagonizes other people.
consulting: seeking guidance. Either way, one virtue of your conscious mind being in touch with the reasons generated by competing modules is that you can share the reasons with others, and get their feedback,
arguing against indulgence prevails a few times—if it gets successfully “exercised”—its chances of success will be better next time, whereas if it loses a few times in a row, it will be headed toward a very long losing streak.
self-discipline is really good for the organism, you wouldn’t expect natural selection to make it so easy for a few early lapses to destroy self-discipline. Yet
There are two virtues of describing the self-control problem this way—as a module getting stronger and stronger rather than as some all-purpose muscle called “self-discipline” getting weaker and weaker.
But it’s easy to imagine why natural selection would design modules that get stronger with repeated success and why natural selection would use, as its working definition of success, gratification in one sense or another.
The second virtue of conceiving the problem of self-discipline in modular terms is that it can suggest new ways of addressing the problem. There’s a difference between thinking of the goal as strengthening the self-discipline muscle and thinking of the goal as weakening a module that has grown dominant.
He said, “If you don’t feed a stray cat, it quits coming to your door.”
The urge—the thing that’s analogous to pressing the bar—is allowed to fully form, yet it doesn’t get reinforced, because your mindful inspection of it has deprived it of its force and so broken the connection between the impulse and the reward. Over time, after the urge has blossomed again and again without bringing gratification, the urge ceases and desists.
Anyway, the main point is that you can think of the problem of distraction as analogous to the problem of quitting smoking. And if you think of it that way—think of your goal as being to weaken the module that favors leading you away from your work—this might affect how you address the problem.
But this positive reinforcement, like the positive reinforcement for having revenge fantasies, will never happen if, when you see the feeling of hatred coming, you view it mindfully rather than surrender to it.
You can observe these feelings for what they are: things that some module is trying to give force to. The more you observe them this way—observe them mindfully—the less force they will have, and the less a part of “you” they will be.
According to Buddhist philosophy, both the problems we call therapeutic and the problems we call spiritual are a product of not seeing things clearly.
And as for the depressingness: thinking of the perceived world as in some sense empty doesn’t have to strip your life of meaning. In
I think there’s an important, if subtle, sense in which we attribute too much form and content to reality, and I think appreciating this can have—and should have—radical implications for our lives.
(Perception as construction: the mind builds models, not mirrors)
There is a pretty uncontroversial sense in which, when we apprehend the world out there, we’re not really apprehending the world out there but rather are “constructing” it. After all, we don’t have much direct contact with the world; the things we see and smell and hear are some distance from our bodies, so all the brain can do is make inferences about them based on indirect evidence: molecules that waft across the street from a bakery, sound waves emanating from a jet plane, particles of light that bounce off trees.
Still, the point is that, strictly speaking, this is a matter of construction. Perception is an active, not a passive, process, a process of constantly building models of the world.
You may think of buzz-saw noise as abrupt and jarring, but I found a grace in the way the sound winds down, with its descending tone, and in the way it resumes with a more rapid tonal ascent.
To perceive emptiness is to perceive raw sensory data without doing what we’re naturally inclined to do: build a theory about what is at the heart of the data and then encapsulate that theory in a sense of essence.
Yes, the buzz saw exists. It consists of things like a power cord, a blade, and a trigger. These, you might say, are among the buzz saw’s “qualities.” But when I talk about the “essence” of the buzz saw, I’m talking about something we perceive in a buzz saw that is more than the sum of such qualities, something that carries distinctive connotations and emotional resonance.
conversation I felt I got her gist. I asked, “So the idea is that everything meaningful about the world is something we impose on it?” She answered, “Exactly.”
Mindfulness meditation is, among other things, a tool for examining our stories carefully, from the ground up, so that we can, if we choose, separate truth from fabrication.
mean? Does the meaning of the word ocean—not the dictionary meaning but the actual meaning of the word to you—depend on a mélange of feelings that you’ve come to associate with oceans? If you were suddenly cut off from those associations, would the ocean seem, well, empty? I suspect so.
they would seem “without essence, but with qualities that can be seen.”
The psychologist Paul Bloom has written that “essentialism”—the tendency to attribute inner essences to things—is a “human universal.”
them. This equation is true to the Darwinian view (laid out in chapter 3) that, functionally speaking, feelings are judgments.
So Zajonc seems to have been right; human beings are automatic evaluators. We tend to assign adjectives to nouns, whether consciously or unconsciously, explicitly or implicitly.
feelings. And feelings infuse things with essence. At least, that’s my hypothesis—that the dampened sense of essence some meditators feel has a lot to do with dampened feelings.
I say that the dampening of feelings leads to the clarity of vision. Indeed, I’d almost go so far as to say the dampening of feelings is the clarity of vision, so finely is affect intertwined with perception—in particular, with the perception of essence.†
“There’s not that differentiation between them and their background,” Weber says.
sitting in the dining hall, savoring food, I’ve at times gotten so immersed in the flavors and textures that I wasn’t really conscious of what I was eating—what fruit, what vegetable, whatever. I don’t recall any story, in even the most basic sense, accompanying the sensation. What I do recall is the sensation feeling very good.
So essence matters! One minute you see a certain essence in something and you want to kill it, and the next minute the essence has vanished and you don’t want to kill it.
(Essentialism and the Darwinian defense of Buddhist emptiness)
And when the beings in question are sentient—human beings, for example—the stakes can be high.
attribute their behavior to disposition, not situation; I locate the badness in them, not in environmental factors.
own right which people merely ‘observe.’ The ‘game’ ‘exists’ for a person and is experienced by him only in so far as certain happenings have significances in terms of his purpose. Out of all the occurrences going on in the environment, a person selects those that have some significance for him from his own egocentric position in the total matrix.”
That’s why I wouldn’t say domain-specific mechanisms color our perceptions—I’d say they create our perceptions.
wrote, “An ‘occurrence’ on the football field or in any other social situation does not become an experiential ‘event’ unless and until
some significance is given to it.”
The thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi is said to have written, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
We were both thrown into a world we didn’t choose, under the guidance of behavioral algorithms we didn’t choose, and were trying to make the best of the situation. I felt a kind of kinship with the lizard that I’d never felt with a lizard.
again. “But I would say that in my opinion, my experience, as one continues to practice the Buddhist path, it enriches the emotional life, so that one becomes emotionally more sensitive, more happy and joyful. And I would say that one can respond to things in the world in a freer, more happy, more delightful way.”
After all, one virtue of mindfulness meditation is that experiencing your feelings with care and clarity, rather than following them reflexively and uncritically, lets you choose which ones to follow—like, say, joy, delight, and love. And this selective engagement with feelings, this weakened obedience to them, can in principle include the feelings that shape the essence we see in things and people.
taste—pleasant to some, annoying to others. The problem with this objection is that pain isn’t inherently painful. I’ve already recounted the time that, via meditation, I converted an excruciating knot of anxiety into a mere object of interest;
Scientists have found that by replacing the gut bacteria in shy, anxious mice with bacteria from gregarious mice, they can make the shy mice gregarious.
Lots of information impinges on my brain, and my brain decides which information it will consider part of my self and which information it won’t consider part of my self, and which information—say, the cry of an offspring—falls somewhere in between.
condition known as mirror-touch synesthesia pretty literally share the feelings of people in their vicinity. If they see someone being touched, they feel the touch, and brain scans show much the same neuronal activity they would have if they were being touched.
Attempts to truly share the experience with you will ultimately fail; as with all mystical experiences, you had to be there.
This consists of looking “within”—at your thoughts, your feelings—and asking, “Wait a second, in what sense are these things really inherently a part of me?” This is the basic question that was asked by the Buddha in his famous discourse on not-self.
website I run called Bloggingheads.tv, and I wove excerpts of the videos into
“If you’re nothing, if you disappear, you can then be everything. But you can’t be everything unless you are nothing. It just logically follows that’s the case.” Well, I’m not sure it logically follows, but apparently it seems like inexorable logic if you’re in the state Weber is in.
In other words: nothing possesses inherent existence; nothing contains all the ingredients of ongoing existence within itself; nothing is self-sufficient. Hence the idea of emptiness: all things are empty of inherent, independent existence.
interconnection, not unity or oneness.” Don’t interdependence and interconnection point to unity and oneness?
To put a finer point on it, the problem is the unquenchability of tanha, the fact that attaining our desires always leaves us unsatisfied, thirsting for more of the same or thirsting for something new.
Well, Albahari says, if you desire to be free of something, then you have in mind the goal of creating more distance between yourself and that something (assuming you don’t take the more straightforward approach of throwing a meditation cushion at the person generating the something). And wanting to create distance between yourself and something means having an idea of the place where your self ends.
“For unless I identified fully as a self, then how could I care particularly about whether ‘my’ desires are fulfilled?”
of aversion. In other words, the first two poisons are the two sides of tanha: a craving for the pleasant, an aversion to the unpleasant.
Raga plus dvesha equals moha.†
part of me than the tingling in my foot, I think I got a sense of what it would be like to be much farther down the meditative path than I am. And it felt very, very good.
texts, including many that characterize nirvana, described it as “a state of perfect happiness, complete peace, complete inner freedom, and full awakening and understanding.”
that mean? The answer to that question involves one of the most important terms in Buddhism: paticca-samuppada. It is a term that has numerous applications and numerous translations.I For present purposes—when we’re using it to illuminate the logic of nirvana—a good translation is “conditioned arising.”
For if instead of yielding to craving, to the driving thirst for pleasure, if a person contemplates with mindfulness and awareness the nature of feelings and understands these feelings as they are, then that person can prevent craving from crystallizing and solidifying.”
(Re-enchantment: retreat experience, shedding self-absorption, world made vibrant)
Certainly the world as I saw it had a new tenor. I had shed so much of my usual self-absorption that I could take a new kind of delight in the people and things around me. I was more open, suddenly inclined to strike up conversations with strangers. The world seemed newly vibrant and resonant.
to tamping down the influence of feelings on perception, to fostering a view of sober clarity, would only abet that tendency. But Batchelor says meditative practice can lead to the “re-enchantment” of the world, and I know what he means. After that first retreat, I felt like I was living in a zone of enchantment, a place of wonder and preternatural beauty.
lights. So what “not making judgments” ultimately means is not letting your feelings make judgments for you. And what “getting in touch with your feelings” ultimately means is not being so oblivious to them that you get pushed around by them. And all of this means informing your responses to the world with the clearest possible view of the world.
Life as ordinarily lived is a kind of illusion, and you can’t be truly free until you pierce the illusion and look into the heart of things. Until you “see it for yourself,” as Morpheus puts it to Neo, you will remain in “bondage.”
between your “inside” and the world on the “outside” that you may start to see harming others as tantamount to harming yourself.
If you ask Buddhist philosophers to defend the idea of emptiness, they will talk about how everything is too interconnected for anything to have independent, self-sufficient existence. If you ask me to defend the idea of emptiness, I would take a different tack: I’d focus on the experience of emptiness, not the philosophical doctrine, and argue that this experience is in a sense more valid, more truthful, than our ordinary experience of the world. The argument for the truth of
Emptiness, you may recall, is, roughly speaking, the idea that things don’t have essence. And the perception of essence seems to revolve, however subtly, around feelings; the essence of anything is shaped by the feeling it evokes. It is when things don’t evoke much in the way of feelings—when our normal affective reaction to things is subdued—that we see these things as “empty” or “formless.”
If you truly and completely adopt the vantage point Einstein adopted—if you transcend the perspective of the self, any self, and view things from nowhere in particular—essence disappears, along with the feelings that created it in the first place.
Our entire notion of good and bad, our whole landscape of feelings—fear, lust, love, and the many other feelings, salient and subtle, that inform our everyday thoughts and perceptions—are products of the particular evolutionary history of our species.
If having sex with armadillos had been the only way our ancestors could get their genes into the next generation, you and I would think armadillos are attractive—not just cute in an offbeat way, but deeply enticing.
From the perspective that Einstein considered the truest perspective—the point of view from no particular point—feelings don’t even exist, and so essence doesn’t either.
Still, suppose—just as a thought experiment—that your goal wasn’t living as long as possible but rather attaining the clearest vision possible.
It is about creating lots and lots of different perspectives, each of which is shaped fundamentally by the principle that it is truer than competing perspectives, and none of which is naturally imbued with awareness of that fact, much less awareness of its absurdity. Buddhist enlightenment is about transcending all these perspectives.
So, yes, we can think of natural selection as somewhat like those robot overlords in The Matrix, perpetrating a pervasive and oppressive illusion on behalf of an agenda that we have every right to reject. If
I assume bliss can be a potent revelation reinforcer. In any event, whatever neurochemicals impart conviction to our apprehensions, making us feel sure we’ve seen the truth, must have been in liberal supply that night.
the more time on the cushion, the fewer eruptions of self-chastisement.
Sometimes it’s the other way around:
freedom lets you see the truth.
Maybe the best way to put it is that enlightenment and liberation are mutually reinforcing: the more you do the things that bring liberation from suffering, the more clearly you see; and the more clearly you see, the easier it is to do the things that bring liberation from suffering. Which allows even more clarity of vision. And so on.
And, in the experience of people I’ve talked to, the difference between thirty minutes a day and ninety is huge.
“You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.”
It’s kind of amazing, when you think about it, that the world would be set up this way: that the path you embark on to relieve yourself of suffering would, if pursued assiduously, lead you to become not just a happier person but a person with a clearer view of both metaphysical and moral reality. Yet that is the Buddhist claim, and there is substantial evidence in favor of it.
The sense of beauty feels more like something the mind just naturally relaxes into when the preoccupation with self subsides.
Still, it may also be a world in which metaphysical truth, moral truth, and happiness can align, and a world that, as you start to realize that alignment, appears more and more beautiful. If so, this hidden order—an order that seems to lie at a level deeper than natural selection itself—is something to marvel at. And it’s something I’m increasingly thankful for.
(Twelve Buddhist truths validated by evolutionary science)
Okay; without further ado, here are some Buddhist “truths”:
1. Human beings often fail to see the world clearly, and this can lead them to suffer and to make others suffer. This costly misapprehension of the world can assume various forms, described in various ways in different Buddhist texts. For example:
2. Humans tend to anticipate more in the way of enduring satisfaction from the attainment of goals than will in fact transpire. This illusion, and the resulting mind-set of perpetual aspiration, makes sense as a product of natural selection (see…
Dukkha is a relentlessly recurring part of life as life is ordinarily lived. This fact is less evident if you translate dukkha as it’s conventionally translated—as “suffering” pure and simple—than if you translate it as involving a big component of “unsatisfactoriness.” Organisms, including humans, are designed by natural selection to react to their environments in ways that will make things “better” (in natural selection’s sense of the term). This means they are almost always, at some level, scanning the horizon for things to be unhappy about, uncomfortable with, unsatisfied with. And since being unsatisfied, by…
sense of suffering is a pervasive part of life. (See…
The source of dukkha identified in the Four Noble Truths—tanha, translated as “thirst” or “craving” or “desire”—makes sense against the backdrop of evolution. Tanha, you might say, is what natural selection instilled in animals so they wouldn’t be satisfied with anything for long (see chapter 1). Seeing tanha as the source of suffering makes even more sense when it is construed broadly, as not only the desire to obtain and cling to pleasant things but also the desire to escape from unpleasant things (see chapter 13). Clearly, if…
5. The two basic feelings that sponsor dukkha—the two sides of tanha, a clinging attraction to things and an…
us as they tend to do. Meditative disciplines such as mindfulness meditation can weaken the grip they exert. People disagree on whether complete and lasting liberation—nirvana in the classic sense of the term—is attainable, but there is no doubt that lives have been transformed by meditative practice. It’s important to emphasize that becoming less enslaved by craving and aversion doesn’t mean becoming numb to feelings; it can mean developing a different relationship to them and becoming more selective about which feelings to most fully engage with. Indeed, this revised…
6. Our intuitive conception of the “self” is misleading at best. We tend to uncritically embrace all kinds of thoughts and feelings as “ours,” as part of us, when in fact that identification is optional. Recognizing that the identification is optional and learning, through meditation, how to make the identification less reflexive can reduce suffering. An understanding of why natural selection engineered various feelings into the human mind (see chapter 3) can help validate the idea that we shouldn’t uncritically accept the guidance of our feelings and can help us choose which feelings to accept guidance from. To exercise this kind of discretion is to follow a strictly pragmatic rendering of Buddhism’s famous “not-self” idea—a rendering that is a plausible interpretation of the foundational text on not-self, the second discourse the Buddha delivered after his enlightenment. (See chapter 5.) 7. The more expansive and more common interpretation of the Buddha’s second discourse—as saying that the “self” simply doesn’t exist—is rendered in various ways in various Buddhist texts. A common rendering—that there is no CEO self, no self that is the “doer of deeds,” the “thinker of thoughts”—is substantially corroborated by modern psychology, which has shown the conscious self to be much less in charge of our behavior than it seems to be. A number of psychologists, including in particular evolutionary psychologists, subscribe to a “modular” model of the mind that is quite consistent with this view that there is no CEO self. This model can help explain a common…
prevailing ideas about how natural selection shaped the mind. (See chapters 6, 7, and 8.) 8. What I call the “exterior” version of the not-self experience—a sense that the bounds surrounding the self have dissolved and were in some sense illusory to begin with—is not empirically and theoretically corroborated in the same sense that, I argue, the “interior” version of the not-self experience is corroborated. Indeed, I’d say the exterior version is not in principle amenable to corroboration in the same sense that the interior version can be corroborated, because it amounts to a claim that is less about psychology than about metaphysics (in the sense of the term metaphysics used in mainstream philosophy, not in any more exotic…
sensing a kind of dissolution of the bounds of the self can be thought of as no less accurate an apprehension than our ordinary sense of the bounds of the self. (See chapters 13 and 15.) 9. Leaving aside the metaphysical validity of our ordinary sense of self, and of alternatives to that ordinary sense of self, there is the question of moral validity. In particular, when a sense of the dissolution of the bounds of self (perhaps paired with the “interior” version of the not-self experience in the form of reduced identification with selfish impulses) leads to a less pronounced prioritization of “my” interests over the interests of others, does that move a person closer to moral truth? I argue that considerations from evolutionary biology support an affirmative answer to that question. (See chapter 15.) 10. The intuition that objects and beings we perceive have “essences” is, as the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness holds, an illusion. Specifically, it is an illusion engineered by natural selection to identify the significance of things with respect to the Darwinian interests of the organisms doing the perceiving. (See chapters 10 and 11. This Darwinian defense of the idea of emptiness is quite different from traditional Buddhist defenses of the idea, but it’s compatible with them.) Seeing essences in things doesn’t always lead us to suffer or to inflict suffering on others, but it can. In particular, an “essentialist” view of other people and groups of people can…
who report apprehending emptiness or formlessness in a fairly thoroughgoing way—seem to be very happy and, in my (limited) experience, benevolent people. (See chapter 13.) 11. The preceding point about essence and essentialism is one illustration of the broader proposition that not seeing the world clearly can lead not just to our own suffering but to bad conduct in the sense of making others suffer needlessly. Or, to put a more positive spin on it: Seeing the world more clearly can make you not just happier but more moral. This isn’t a guaranteed outcome. There have been very good meditators who were (apparently) very happy and (manifestly) very bad people. Still, there is a close enough association between the…
tend to make us not just happier but better people. That this moral progress isn’t guaranteed is one reason meditative instruction has typically been paired with the sort of ethical instruction that is so prominent in Buddhism. (See chapter 16.) 12. Many Buddhist teachings, including several of those listed here, could be lumped under the rubric of “awareness of conditioning,” where “conditioning” means, roughly speaking, causes. Mindfulness meditation involves increased attentiveness to the things that cause our behavior—attentiveness to how perceptions influence our internal states and how certain internal states lead to other internal states and to behaviors. This attentiveness includes an awareness of the…
Importantly, the meditative practices that bring awareness of these chains of influence also empower us to intervene and change the patterns of influence. To a large extent, that’s what Buddhist liberation is: a fairly literal escape from chains of influence that had previously bound us and, often,…