One way of putting it, which I think should be mostly accurate, is that the state that is being a booed is a belief in the homunculus fallacy.
Dennett, Kurzban, and others have pointed out that there are facts about the way in which the mind and consciousness function which feel deeply counter-intuitive, and that even neuroscientists and psychologists who in principle know that the brain is just a distributed system of separate modules, still often seem to operate under an intuition that there is a single “central” self (as seen from some of the theories that they propose).
I’m not sure whether that’s the source of the intuition, but it also seems related that humans seem to have a core system for reasoning about agency which takes as an axiom the assumption that agents exhibit independent, goal-directed motion (as opposed to objects, which only act when acted upon). Which makes sense if you’re just reasoning about e.g. social dynamics, but gets you into trouble if you try to understand the functioning of the brain and feel intuitively convinced that there has to be a “central agent” (homunculus) there somewhere, and it can’t just be interacting objects all the way down. It’s been a while since I read it, but IIRC Kurzban’s book had a bunch of examples about how neuroscientists who should know this stuff were still making hypotheses that had the homunculus intuition lurking somewhere.
So when Buddhists say that “there is no self”, they are saying that the intuitive belief in the homunculus is wrong; and when talk about realizing that this is a delusion, they talk about actually coming to internalize this on a deep level.
There are those concepts “just” and “central” again. Is a car “just” a system of separate modules? Is there a “single, central, car”? To me these questions are as otiose as the elementary conundrum about whether a tree falling unheard makes a sound.
The car consists of the right components arranged in the right way. When they are, a mode of operation is created that cannot be found in any part. There is the car, as real as anything. “The car” is not a separate animating principle that makes the components perform. Knowing how the car works does not dissolve the car, but does enable one to use it more effectively, and to repair it when it goes wrong.
So also with the mind.
A complication present with the mind but not the car is that (with present technology) the car is not the person operating it, whereas the mind and its operator are one and the same. We must discover and mend our flaws with the very instrument that is flawed. That is what makes it difficult, but there are ways. Some of which I have experienced, although not along the lines of recent posts about enlightenment experiences.
I haven’t read Kurzban’s book*, but I agree that there’s a lot of dualist talk from supposed materialists, when they talk about how “you” don’t do things, “your brain” does them, and the like. Also the anti-pattern “X is the mechanism of Y, therefore Y does not exist”, X and Y being physical and mental phenomena respectively.
\* (The free extract on Amazon suggests to me that the book will argue for the nonexistence of the mind.)
One way of putting it, which I think should be mostly accurate, is that the state that is being a booed is a belief in the homunculus fallacy.
Dennett, Kurzban, and others have pointed out that there are facts about the way in which the mind and consciousness function which feel deeply counter-intuitive, and that even neuroscientists and psychologists who in principle know that the brain is just a distributed system of separate modules, still often seem to operate under an intuition that there is a single “central” self (as seen from some of the theories that they propose).
I’m not sure whether that’s the source of the intuition, but it also seems related that humans seem to have a core system for reasoning about agency which takes as an axiom the assumption that agents exhibit independent, goal-directed motion (as opposed to objects, which only act when acted upon). Which makes sense if you’re just reasoning about e.g. social dynamics, but gets you into trouble if you try to understand the functioning of the brain and feel intuitively convinced that there has to be a “central agent” (homunculus) there somewhere, and it can’t just be interacting objects all the way down. It’s been a while since I read it, but IIRC Kurzban’s book had a bunch of examples about how neuroscientists who should know this stuff were still making hypotheses that had the homunculus intuition lurking somewhere.
So when Buddhists say that “there is no self”, they are saying that the intuitive belief in the homunculus is wrong; and when talk about realizing that this is a delusion, they talk about actually coming to internalize this on a deep level.
There are those concepts “just” and “central” again. Is a car “just” a system of separate modules? Is there a “single, central, car”? To me these questions are as otiose as the elementary conundrum about whether a tree falling unheard makes a sound.
The car consists of the right components arranged in the right way. When they are, a mode of operation is created that cannot be found in any part. There is the car, as real as anything. “The car” is not a separate animating principle that makes the components perform. Knowing how the car works does not dissolve the car, but does enable one to use it more effectively, and to repair it when it goes wrong.
So also with the mind.
A complication present with the mind but not the car is that (with present technology) the car is not the person operating it, whereas the mind and its operator are one and the same. We must discover and mend our flaws with the very instrument that is flawed. That is what makes it difficult, but there are ways. Some of which I have experienced, although not along the lines of recent posts about enlightenment experiences.
I haven’t read Kurzban’s book*, but I agree that there’s a lot of dualist talk from supposed materialists, when they talk about how “you” don’t do things, “your brain” does them, and the like. Also the anti-pattern “X is the mechanism of Y, therefore Y does not exist”, X and Y being physical and mental phenomena respectively.
\* (The free extract on Amazon suggests to me that the book will argue for the nonexistence of the mind.)