Natural explanations for god and the self
“On the Buddhist model suffering is self. Our sense of self, put simply, results from the moment-by-moment focused attempt to overcome a present uncomfortable state and/or to retain a present comfortable state. In this way the urge to satisfy a thirst or “lack” ends up generating the impression of self in time by driving each momentary self to grasp after something in the next moment.”
From Michael Kurak’s 2003 “The Relevance of the Buddhist Theory of Dependent Co-Origination to Cognitive Science” in Brain and Mind.
What’s interesting to me in Buddhism (and philosophy of mind and metaphysics as well) is how inextricable is our mind and the world “out there.” The two topics dance in and out of each other easily (causality in the mind, in the world, meaning in the mind, in the world…)
Kurak’s argument is that our subject/object distinction (me versus the world) is bound up in the fact that we are conscious of desires. Spinoza and Kant, in subtly different ways, recognized this, as did Buddhist philosophers. This is not to say that the mind creates the world, in the sense of generating ex nihilo, the “stuff” of reality. Rather, the concepts that we intuitively use to structure and explain the world are bound up with needs and desires.
I’m reading Todd Tremlin’s Minds and Gods, in which he argues that we’re naturally included to view the world as being filled with agents–it’s an evolutionary adaptation (reacting to a stick as if it were a snake is a better option that ignoring a potential threat). This tendency, along with other adaptive capabilities of the mind, is why the idea of gods is so compelling.
The question in both cases, though, seems to be whether the cognitive origins of these ideas invalidates their “objective” reality. One way to understand a god would be that it might fashion a world which is able to create itself, evolutionarily, and come to an awareness of god, through means where are natural. In terms of the self-object distinction, while it maybe true, as Kurak puts it, that “self and object, the constituents of conscious experience, emerge interdependently and recurrently in brief states”, does that mean that there is absolutely no sense in which we have a stable self which persists over time?
Both scenarios, I think, shrink the area in which we can look for god or for the self. At the very least, they change our expectations of these two phenomena. Finally, in terms of the ethical implications of belief in god or attachment to the world, we’re still left with an open question. Assuming that we have some natural inclination to believe in supernatural agents, are we bound to bring those beliefs under hyper-critical reflection? What about other areas of folk physics or psychology that we don’t try to slice up according to quantum theory or peer-reviewed double blind studies?
And granted that our sense of an enduring self is tangled up in a desire for comfort or repulsion for discomfort, does that mean that we should reject the illusion of the self? Couldn’t these desires be adaptive? We have other cognitive illusions that serve us well (for example, that our memory is “recalling” things stored in our head, rather than recreating them).
Thus, while natural explanations for god and the self’s stability are compelling, there is more work to be done in parsing out just what they imply for our human behavior, and for our understanding of the world around us (and within).