Does the self exist? If so, what is its nature? How long do selves last? Galen Strawson draws on literature and psychology as well as philosophy to discuss various ways we experience having or being a self. He argues that it is legitimate to say that there is such a thing as the self, distinct from the human being.

This article discusses the Tibetan notion of rlung, usually translated as: ‘wind’, but perhaps better understood as a close equivalent of pneuma in the Greek tradition, or qi in the Chinese tradition. The article focuses on the way rlung provides a useful prism through which concepts of health, illness and disease may be observed in a cross-cultural perspective. An analysis of syndromes linked with rlung in a Tibetan cultural context illuminates some of the ways in which culture determines particular syndromes. (...) The article raises a number of questions which are relevant for a more general multicultural approach to concepts of health, illness and disease.The article argues that notions of rlung/pneuma/wind/ qi constitute a particularly interesting area for an exploration of culture-bound syndromes, as they reside in the meeting point between material and non-material, physical and mental, as well as the psychological, spiritual and religious. They are hence fundamental for a more cross-cultural approach to the mind-body problem.The article also deals with the significance of history of medicine, particularly histories of medicine, which attempt to widen the scope of the traditional Eurocentric narrative of the history of medicine, in dealing with questions such as concepts of health and illness. Allowing alternative narratives—whether narratives of patients, other cultures or historical ones—can enhance our understanding of what health, illness and disease are. Discussing perceptions of the body as culturally defined is not only important from a philosophical or historical point of view, but also has important practical ramifications, which are particularly crucial in our global age. (shrink)

Aristotle, Dignāga, Descartes, Arnauld, Locke, Brentano, Sartre and many others are right about the nature of conscious awareness: all such awareness comports—somehow carries within itself—awareness of itself . This is a necessary condition of awareness being awareness at all: no ‘higher-order’ account of what makes conscious states conscious can be correct. But is very paradoxical: it seems to require that awareness be somehow already present, in such a way as to be available to itself as object of awareness, in order (...) to be constituted as awareness in the first place. Can anything relate to itself in this way? Can there be a relation that is necessarily one-term, reflexive, non-logical , concretely realizable, dynamically real, such that its holding is a necessary condition of the existence of the thing it holds of? It helps to consider the thought this very thought is puzzling. Many accept the reality of the kind of awareness of awareness posited in and , and think it must be not only ‘pre-reflective’ and ‘non-positional’, but also irrelational or non-intentional. But perhaps such awareness of awareness can be fully relational and fully intentional, and can be legitimately said to be its own object or content, even while being pre-reflective and non-positional. (shrink)

The concept of “self-awareness” ( svasaṃvedana ) enters Buddhist epistemological discourse in the Pramāṇasamuccaya and - vṛtti by Dignāga (ca. 480–540), the founder of the Buddhist logico-epistemological tradition. Though some of the key passages have already been dealt with in various publications, no attempt has been made to comprehensively examine all of them as a whole. A close reading is here proposed to make up for this deficit. In connection with a particularly difficult passage (PS(V) 1.8cd-10) that presents the means (...) of valid cognition and its result ( pramāṇa/pramāṇaphala ), a new interpretation is suggested, inspired by the commentary of Jinendrabuddhi. This interpretation highlights an aspect of selfawareness that has hitherto not been claimed for Dignāga: self-awareness offers essentially subjective access to one’s own mental states and factors. (shrink)

On the stage of the religion-and-science dialogue, Buddhism, especially Tibetan Buddhism, is a late arrival. However, thanks primarily to the long-standing personal interest of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan tradition he represents has come to engage deeply with various disciplines of modern science. This essay follows the active engagement that has occurred particularly in the form of the biannual Mind and Life dialogues between the Dalai Lama and scientists. From the perspective of an active participant, I present the careful deliberations (...) that ensure constructive parameters for these dialogues so that no one side can exert a hegemonic voice. I explore the challenges that are likely to confront the Buddhist side from its encounter with science, particularly with respect to its worldview. I identify specific areas where the two sides can and do engage in concrete collaboration, especially with respect to investigating healthy qualities of the mind and the effects of conscious mental training for attention and emotion regulation. Finally, I explore the question of the possible impact of this dialogue on modern science. (shrink)

The Buddhist construct of mindfulness is a central element of mindfulness-based interventions and derives from a systematic phenomenological programme developed over several millennia to investigate subjective experience. Enthusiasm for ?mindfulness? in Western psychological and other science has resulted in proliferation of definitions, operationalizations and self-report inventories that purport to measure mindful awareness as a trait. This paper addresses a number of seemingly intractable issues regarding current attempts to characterize mindfulness and also highlights a number of vulnerabilities in this domain that (...) may lead to denaturing, distortion, dilution or reification of Buddhist constructs related to mindfulness. Enriching positivist Western psychological paradigms with a detailed and complex Buddhist phenomenology of the mind may require greater study and long-term direct practice of insight meditation than is currently common among psychologists and other scientists. Pursuit of such an approach would seem a necessary precondition for attempts to characterize and quantify mindfulness. (shrink)

I’ll organize my replies around four topics: mind wandering and phenomenal selfhood, transformation versus enactive emergence, agency versus ownership, and finally the importance of doing philosophy of mind from a cross-cultural perspective.

ABSTRACTEpisodic memory is the ability to revisit events in one's personal past, to relive them as if one travelled back in mental time. It has widely been assumed that such an ability imposes a metaphysical requirement on selves. Buddhist philosophers, however, deny the requirement and therefore seek to provide accounts of episodic memory that are metaphysically parsimonious. The idea that the memory perspective is a centred field of experience whose phenomenal constituents are simulacra of an earlier field of experience, yet (...) attended to in a way that presents them as happening again, is, I suggest, a better one than that the memory perspective consists in taking as object-aspect the subject-aspect of the earlier experience, or the idea that it consists in labelling a representation of the earlier experience with an I-tag. (shrink)

Fine's replies to critics, in a symposium on his book The Limits of Abstraction.

Many spiritual traditions employ certain mental techniques (meditation) which consist in inhibiting mental activity whilst nonetheless remaining fully conscious, which is supposed to lead to a realisation of one’s own true nature prior to habitual self-substantialisation. In this paper I propose that this practice can be understood as a special means of becoming aware of consciousness itself as such. To explain this claim I conduct some phenomenologically oriented considerations about the nature of consciousness qua presence and the problem of self-presence (...) of this presence. (shrink)

In the absence of continuing selves or persons, Buddhist philosophers are under pressure to provide a systematic account of phenomenological and other features of conscious experience. Any such Buddhist account of experience, however, faces further problems because of another cardinal tenet of Buddhist revisionary metaphysics: the doctrine of impermanence, which during the Abhidharma period is transformed into the doctrine of momentariness. Setting aside the problems that plague the Buddhist Abhidharma theory of experience because of lack of persons, I shall focus (...) on problems that arise because of its allegiance to momentariness and explore some responses on behalf of the Abhidharma Buddhist philosophers. I address two challenges to the Buddhist view in this paper. The first, which I will call the “Phenomenological Challenge”, primarily concerns the temporal properties of what is represented in conscious experience. The second, which I will call the “Metaphysical Challenge”, concerns the temporal properties of conscious representation itself. (shrink)

The Abhidharma Buddhist revisionary metaphysics aims to provide an intellectually and morally preferred picture of the world that lacks a self. The first part of the paper claims that the Abhidharma ‘no-self’ view can be plausibly interpreted as a no-ownership view, according to which there is no locus or subject of experience and thus no owner of mental or bodily awarenesses. On this interpretation of the no-self view, the Abhidharma Buddhist metaphysicians are committed to denying the ownership of experiences, and (...) thereby apparently obliged to explain our purported experience of ownership. My experiences seemingly come with the sense that I am the one who is undergoing this experience. But is there a really an experience of ownership—namely, an experience of being a subject that underlies our sense of ownership? I argue that there is nothing that it is like to be an owner of experiences, in the sense that there is no experiential phenomenology associated with the ownership of experience. The second part of the paper argues that, since there is no experience of ownership, there is no onus on the Abhidharma philosopher to give an explanation of the sense of ownership. (shrink)

The paper argues that empirical work on Buddhist meditation has an impact on Buddhist epistemology, in particular their account of unity of consciousness. I explain the Buddhist account of unity of consciousness and show how it relates to contemporary philosophical accounts of unity of consciousness. The contemporary accounts of unity of consciousness are closely integrated with the discussion of neural correlates of consciousness. The conclusion of the paper suggests a new direction in the search for neural correlates of state consciousness (...) or creature consciousness. (shrink)

This paper defends the realist representationalist version of the Buddhist-Abhidharma account of consciousness. The account explains the intentionality and the phenomenality of conscious experiences by appealing to the doctrine of self-awareness. Concerns raised by Buddhist Mādhyamika philosophers about the compatibility of reflexive awareness and externality of the objects of perception are addressed. Similarly, the Hindu critiques on the incoherence of the Buddhist doctrine of reflexive awareness with the doctrines of no-self and momentariness are also answered.

Abhidharma Buddhist philosophy presents a version of what is now often called “panprotopsychism.” The most pressing group of problems for the Abhidharma panprotopsychism, like all other panpsychist views, is what Seager calls “the combination problem.” There are at least three versions of the problem: the subject-combination problem; the quality-combination problem; and the structure-combination problem. I begin with the Abhidharma Buddhist version of panprotopsychism and its account of conscious experience. The main focus of this paper is to show that Abhidharma panprotopsychist (...) account of conscious experience solves the quality-combination problem. In the last and closing Section, I look at other versions of the combination problem, primarily the subject-combination problem and the structural problem and provide a sketch of the Abhidharma Buddhist response to these. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that some of the work to be done by the concept of self is done by the concept of mind in Buddhist philosophy. For the purposes of this paper, I shall focus on an account of memory and its ownership. The task of this paper is to analyse Vasubandhu’s heroic effort to defend the no-self doctrine against the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣikas in order to bring to the fore the Buddhist model of mind. For this, I will discuss (...) Vasubandhu’s theory of mind in the early Abhidharma as well as post-Abhidharma period to show the continuity in his work. (shrink)

One of the major aims of this article is to provide the theoretical account of mindfulness provided by the systematic Abhidharma epistemology of conscious states. I do not claim to present the one true version of mindfulness, because there is not one version of it in Buddhism; in addition to the Abhidharma model, there is, for example, the nondual Mahāmudrā tradition. A better understanding of a Buddhist philosophical framework will not only help situate meditation practice in its originating tradition, but (...) it will also clarify a Buddhist perspective on consciousness. In this article, I present the Abhidharma account of mindfulness—as explicated in the Abhidharmakośa, the root text for the Abhidharma tradition—and the theoretical model of the mind that underlies its practice. Abhidharma–Yogācara model of the mind, I believe, contains critical philosophical insights relevant to contemporary concerns while at the same time placing mindfulness meditation in its proper philosophical context. (shrink)

This study presents two case reports of altered states spontaneously occurring during meditation in two proficient practitioners. These states, known as fruition, are common within the Mahasi School of Theravada Buddhism, and are considered the culmination of contemplation-induced stages of consciousness. Here, electrophysiological measures of these experiences were measured, with the participant’s personal reports used to guide the neural analyzes. The preliminary results demonstrate an increase in global long-range gamma synchronization during the fruition states, compared to the background meditation. The (...) discrepancies and similarities with other neuroscientific studies of meditation-induced altered states are discussed. Albeit preliminary, the results presented here provide support for the possibility - previously raised by various authors - that long-range global gamma synchronization may offer an underlying mechanism for un-learning of habitual conditioning and mental patterns, possibly underpinning the neural correlate of the Buddhist concept of liberation. Finally, this pilot study highlights the utility of employing neuro-phenomenology, namely using first-person reports to guide neural analyzes, in the study of subtle human consciousness states. (shrink)

Is attention both necessary and sufficient for consciousness? Call this central question of this treatise, “Q.” We commonly have the experience of consciously paying attention to something, but is it possible to be conscious of something you are not attending to, or to attend to something of which you are not conscious? Where might we find examples of these? This treatise is a quest to find an answer to Q in two parts. Part I reviews the foundations upon which the (...) discourse on Q is built. Different inputs to Q produce different answers. After consideration of the many ways “attention” and “consciousness” have been defined, I settle upon phenomenal consciousness and Executive Attention (defined as a suite of strategies for structuring cognition for further processing implemented by the executive of working memory) as the most interesting inputs to Q, and the ones on which Part II focuses. Attention without consciousness seems relatively easy to establish empirically, but consciousness without attention is much harder. The putative candidates all seem to have major problems, but I build a strong abductive case for the hitherto ignored case of foveal phenomenal overflow. We consciously see far more detail in our foveal fields than we can Executively Attend, although there is a serious obstacle to our ever confirming that empirically—identifying conscious content relies on Executive Attentional report. Triangulating the capacity limitations of attention, consciousness, and working memory strengthens this case for consciousness without attention, and suggests that cognition must work something like my “Witches’ Hat Model,” on which content can become conscious outside of Executive Attention or working memory. I conclude with some reflections on the implications of my arguments for the discourse on Q, and for other discourses such as the ontologies of attention and consciousness, theories of consciousness, some other cognitive concepts, and ethical considerations in humans, animals, and machines. A conclusive answer to Q continues to elude us. It may perhaps be an ultimately insoluble conundrum. But it is the very essence of humanity to seek an answer, and in so doing, to improve our understanding of our own nature: “The proper study of mankind is man.”1. (shrink)