In considering parallels and resonances between latter day cognitive science and Eastern Philosophy, it is important to bear in mind that within the latter traditions, there is very often no distinction made between ‘is’ and ‘ought’. The use of language is often simply assumed to be to guide behavior, while it simultaneously illuminates and reveals that which is. Wei Wu Wei is analytical in spirit, and reveals his European roots in interpreting texts ontologically. The concern of this small blog and associated work is also in the Occidental analytical tradition, and belies no overt moral, ethical, or soteriological intent.
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§41. Thought as Action
Action is a demonstration of thought.
Action, being the exterioration of thought, Dualistic thought demonstrates as volitional action
This quote could almost be taken from recent work in cognitive science. More and more, it has become clear that observing neural and muscular activity is to observe thought. A clear example, is provided by the work of Fadiga et al (2005). This is representative of a rapidly growing literature. It demonstrates that when one listens to speech, the muscles that would be involved in the production of that speech (and hence in the thinking of those thoughts) can be found to show a slight increase in activity. But there is more here than the notion of action as an observable manifestation of thought.
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It is not the eye that sees, it is not the ear that hears; There is seeing, there is hearing. Who sees? Who hears? No one. That is the truth. For the seeing and the seen, the hearing and the heard are impersonality, impersonal consciousness. (Ask the Awakened, p. 30)
WWW distinguishes between a process of perceiving (one might also consider that the ongoing transient contents of attention) and perception considered as a process. The latter fails. Perceiving does not make reference to the subject-object divide. Perception, as conventionally conceived, delivers a Percept to a Subject, and thus introduces an unnecessary dualism.
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Dualist psychology necessarily maintains an uncomfortable position with respect to the centrality of subjective experience in our account of what is. Where behaviorism categorically outlawed any explanatory recourse to spooky, unverifiable and immeasurable mental states, latter-day cognitive psychology has constructed an elaborate hypothetical system, the Cognitive System, that plays many of the roles of Mind, without ever meaningfully addressing or even recognizing the absolutely fundamental place of subjective experience. It is a baroque construction, whose parts, proponents trust, will ultimately be vindicated by being found in some recognizable form in the workings of the nervous system. But the fullest account that can arise out of cognitive psychology is a mechanistic account, describing the workings of a machine.
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I do not possess sentience:
What sentience is – I am.
(Posthumous Pieces, §42)
This little quip captures nicely just what is missing from the orthodox account of minds and brains provided by cognitive psychology. Consciousness, Mind and Cognition are all words that have spun a web of confusion around our understanding of our selves. Of late, there has been some recognition of the continuity of sentience and life, especially in the work of Maturana and Varela. But this quip summarizes the quandary of psychology very neatly. There is no mind that might have an architecture. That would make mind a thing.
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Many of us trained in cognitive science, psychology, or Western philosophy of mind are avowed monists. That seems sensible. But we do not always agree what that means. A convenient but short-sighted account is to focus on Rene Descartes and the notion that Mind and Matter are separate realms interacting in some mysterious way (or not at all). This is certainly an unpopular notion nowadays, but to reject it is by no means to stop being a dualist. There are many dualisms. Some in particular that Wei Wu Wei focusses on are the notion that in immediate experience there should be both One Who Sees and That Which Is Seen, or a perceiver and a percept, if you will. Indeed, conventional psychological accounts of mental function demand that there be two roles here: the Subject who sees and the object that is seen. This is dualist. It is a dualism built into language, as we can hardly reduce the phrase “John saw the wall” any further.
This is a frequent topic of Wei Wu Wei:
A perceiving is in itself pure, i.e. impersonal and real. The interpretation that follows introduces subject and object, and the result is a concept that is unreal.
That is why there is no perceiver, nothing perceived, and only the perceiving really is. It is a manifestation of pure consciousness.
(Ask The Awakened, §15)
This is a theme at the heart of Neutral Monism, a strand of cognitive philosophizing that boes back at least to William James, and possibly to Baruch Spinoza. Here, for example, is William James:
The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the ‘pure’ experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that.
(James 1904, 23)
or here, Edwin Holt:
If, as Aristotle said, ‘thought and its object are one,’ so are sensations and perceptions one with their ‘objects.’ In fact, there are not sensations or perceptions and their objects. There are objects, and when these are included in the manifold called consciousness they are called sensations and perceptions.
(Holt 1914, 219)
Neutral Monism has a long and colorful history, and not everything that falls under that heading is compatible with everything else. The interested can find more in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
References
Holt, E. B., 1914, The Concept of Consciousness, London: George Allen & Company.
James, W. 1904, “A World of Pure Experience”, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1(20, 21). Reprinted in James, W., 1912, 39-91.
—–, 1912, Essays in Radical Empiricism. Reprinted: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1996.
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