Mapping Legacy Epistemic Terms onto a Modern Ontology of Mind

This post started life as a comment on a blogpost on SelfAwarePatterns.

On the distinctions between thoughts, emotions, and feelings, I recall Cordelia Fine having an equation in one of her early popular books:

emotion = arousal + emotional thoughts

Trying to map archaic epistemic terms onto modern ontologies is difficult. Partly because we often don't acknowledge the different modes and levels we are working with.

Pre-modern India had no separate category for "emotion" or "feeling". Sanskrit has names for emotions and often several synonyms or fine distinctions in intensity, but emotions were lumped together with thoughts as "mental" (cetasika) whereas sensations were "physical" (kāyasika). So our European way of dividing up experience is not "natural".

So it just occurs to me that we could think more systematically about this.

The ontological distinctions are whether the stimulus comes from the peripheral nervous system or it originates in the central nervous system; and whether it is accompanied by physiological arousal or not (i.e., whether it also involves the autonomic nervous system).

This gives us

central - arousal
central + arousal
peripheral - arousal
peripheral + arousal

If you want to map the archaic Eurocentric epistemological terms onto this, then I suggest: thought, emotion, sensation, feeling. i.e.

central - arousal ≈ thought
central + arousal ≈ emotion
peripheral - arousal ≈ sensation
peripheral + arousal ≈ feeling

I haven't factored in the parasympathetic side of the autonomic system, i.e., ± relaxation. I suspect we don't see these as separate categories, but as positive experiences fitting into categories, i.e., peaceful thoughts, calm emotions, neutral sensations, contented feelings.

The next step would be an axis for anticipation/reward. But this would include anticipation of positive (↑) and anticipation of negative (↓), since these move us in different directions. Also, there are different reactions if the reward meets or confounds expectations.

The combination would give us a coarse-grained model that would allow us to map most of the archaic legacy epistemic terms onto a modern empirical ontology. So the new equation is:

experience ≈ central/peripheral ± arousal/relaxation ± anticipation/reward

So in this model, happiness, for example, is a centrally initiated experience, accompanied by physiological arousal, and the anticipation of a good outcome that has been rewarded with a good outcome. 

Pain, is peripherally initiated by pain nerves accompanied by physiological arousal and the anticipation of a bad outcome; but it may also become the object for centrally initiated experience accompanied by arousal. With slight pain or discomfort we may anticipate getting better and thus remain relatively calm about it. With intense pain we may anticipate death and this may spin off more centrally initiated experiences.

The idea that a physical experience can spin off many mental experiences is called prapañca in Buddhist Sanskrit. One of the supposed benefits of awakening is that uncontrolled prapañca stops. 

Momentary Madness

The doctrine of momentariness comes about as Buddhists tried to connect actions, especially the cetanā or intention behind actions, and their consequences, i.e., experiences (vedanā) and/or rebirth (punarbhava). It is a result, I argue, of constraints placed on Buddhists by the acceptance of impermanence (anitya) and dependent arising (pratītya-samutpāda).

Momentariness makes a certain kind of sense if you use meditative states as your model of mental activity. In highly concentrated states one can observe thoughts arising and passing away one at a time. They exist briefly and are replaced by another. Buddhists saw meditative mental states, cut off from sensory stimulation, as more real and this one-at-a-timeness became the norm when they thought about the workings of the mind. It was an unhelpful cul de sac philosophically, but they did not foresee this.

Things got even more tricky when budding philosophers in the Sarvāstivāda and Sautrāntika schools concluded that momentariness must also apply to real world phenomena and to macroscopic objects. The first concerted arguments for this conclusion did not occur until a little later in the early Yogācāra literature, but it was still the conclusion of many Buddhists in the classical period.

The trouble is that if a macroscopic object only exists momentarily, then it cannot move in space. The time it would take to get to an adjacent location is less that the time that the object exists. Therefore, movement is not possible. However, we do observe macroscopic objects moving around, so what is going on? Sarvāstivāda and Sautrāntika philosophers argued that the object must be disassembled into its constituent parts and re-assembled in another location. All too fast to see.

Cf. Rospatt, Alexander von. The Buddhist Doctrine of Momentariness: A Survey of the Origins and Early Phase of This Doctrine up to Vasubandhu. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1995, p.67 n.144.

This is what a lot of Buddhist philosophy is like. Bound by axioms that are never questioned, Buddhists plough on regardless of the stupid things that come out. They often worked logically enough from their axioms. The trouble with deductive logic is that one either ends up repeating one's axiom as a conclusion or one falsifies the axiom. If we take the classic Aristotelian syllogism:

Axiom: all swans are white
Observation: Bruce is a swan
Deduction: Bruce is white, because all swans are white.  

Observation: Bruce is an Australian swan and he is black.
Deduction: the axiom "all swans are white" is false. 

But the axiom being false has to be a possible conclusion. Religieux often take the view that certain axioms are true and cannot be disproved. In this case deduction can only be deflected:

Axiom: all swans are white
Observation: Bruce is black
Deduction: Bruce is not a swan, because all swans are white.  

This enables us to satisfy logic and to preserve our axiom. By virtue of being black, we can conclude that, even though Bruce looks exactly like a swan, he is, in fact, not a swan, because we know with certainty that all swans are white. A black swan is a contradiction in terms. The contradictory observation itself is falsified. Those who believe the axiom feel no burden of proof here. They are not interested in what kind of bird Bruce is. They just know that he's not their kind of bird and he is therefore of little or no interest.

Having accepted the axioms, there is a logical, even rational, process of deduction. The problem is not in the process, but in the starting conditions. Most of the attempts at Buddhist philosophy that I have come across do not question axioms. One of the principle axioms is that Buddhist axioms are not to be questioned. So no one who studies Nāgārjuna's use of the tetralemma (not x, not not x, not neither and not both) ever questions Nāgārjuna's axioms.

For example, an unquestioned axiom is that dependent arising applies across the board to phenomena - mental and physical. The mental/physical dichotomy has long been axiomatic in Buddhism as well. In fact, as an epistemic distinction it holds up OK, since we do gain knowledge of the two domains in different ways. But, as an ontology, this duality doesn't hold up. No mind-body duality can explain the behaviour of the world with the degree of accuracy and precision that a monistic approach does.  What's more, mind-body duality leads to silly conclusions.

If we are going to truly make Buddhism fit for the modern world then we have to turn our attentions to the ideas that we are forced to accept as true and ask whether or not they are. Many of them are demonstrably false, and we need to come to terms with this.