Milinda’s Questions

(Here’s another oldie from The Gadfly’s Buzz, originally posted 04/13/2005. This post was selected for the April 2005 Philosophy Carnival, a monthly roundup of interesting writing on philosophical topics from around the Web.)

Victor Reppert has a post about the Cartesian cogito which seemed relevant to the discussion of anatta and meditative experience that I’ve been having with Bill Vallicella. (Bill discusses Reppert’s post here.) Some thoughts occurred to me that seem worth throwing in.

Reppert quotes an article by Lex Newman (with whom I once spent an enjoyable New Year’s Eve at a bar in Atlanta), in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, as follows:

Many a critic has complained that in referring to the “I” Descartes begs the question, since he presupposes what he intends to establish in “I exist.” Bertrand Russell objects that “the word ‘I’ is really illegitimate”; that Descartes should have, instead, stated “his ultimate premiss in the form ‘there are thoughts’.” As Russell adds, “the word ‘I’ is grammatically convenient, but does not describe a datum.” (1945, 567) Accordingly, “there is pain” and “I am in pain” have different contents, and Descartes is entitled only to the former.

The Russell reference is to The History of Western Philosophy, but Russell says similar things in other places. This is from Lecture I in The Analysis of Mind:

All that I am concerned with for the moment is that the grammatical forms “I think,” “you think,” and “Mr. Jones thinks,” are misleading if regarded as indicating an analysis of a single thought. It would be better to say, “it thinks in me, like “it rains here”; or better still, “there is a thought in me.”

The similarity of Russell’s claims here to themes associated with Buddhism should be apparent; consider, for example, that the title of a popular recent book on Buddhism and psychotherapy is Thoughts Without a Thinker. (Russell’s words here should also be sufficient to refute the facile claims sometimes made that the Buddhist perspective is radically alien to Western culture or thinking.)

Reppert elaborates on the encyclopedia entry as follows:

But my problem with this objection is that just because we can say “there are thoughts” and not actually say that someone is thinking those thoughts doesn’t make the suggestion coherent. . . Does the term “pain” really mean anything if there is no one experiencing the pain? We can redescribe the pain in such a way that it no longer refers to an individual having the pain, (the firing of C-fibers in the brain) but if we do it seems we lose what is meant by pain. (This would be a good way to solve the problem of pain, if it were legitimate. “You think these people are suffering terrible pain, and that God shouldn’t allow it. But really all that is going on is that people’s C-fibers are firing.”)

In short, I think that Descartes argument that there must be a thinking subject is a successful argument.

My purpose in this post is to argue that the notion of pain without anyone experiencing the pain is perfectly coherent, and to go some way towards rendering that notion intuitively plausible to those who are skeptical.

Let’s begin by considering an ordinary physical object; say, the green stapler on the desk in front of me. Not being a Berkeleyan, I believe that the stapler continues to exist when my eyes are closed, or when I turn around and face the opposite direction. Does this mean that the characteristics of the stapler are all independent of my own mind? Having studied some philosophy, I’m familiar with the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. According to a common interpretation of the distinction, the stapler’s “secondary qualities”, like its greenness, are actually relational properties that arise from the interaction of the physical stapler and my mind, and what’s “really there” is extension and mass, or the stapler’s microphysical structure, or what have you. So, I might, in certain philosophical moods, say that “what’s really there” when the stapler is behind my back has no phenomenal color (as long as no one else is looking at it either.) But it requires a certain amount of philosophical or scientific sophistication to think that way, a certain amount of knowledge about wavelengths of light and retinal cells and whatnot, and I submit that all of us in our everyday unphilosophical lives implicitly conceive of the stapler as being green even when we’re not looking at it. At least, there’s no absurdity or incoherence in our thinking of it that way; I suspect that most human beings who have not been exposed to the theories of scientific optics, (or who have not given careful thought to the way the appearance of colored surfaces change in different colors of light,) do think of physical objects as really having colors.

If we analyze that commonsense conception of the physical object that persists while not being perceived, I suggest that as a rough approximation we’d come up with something like this: a physical object is the association of a set of properties (color, shape, hardness, etc.) with a particular region of space. I don’t mean to argue that Millian phenomenalism is the correct philosophical analysis of material objects. If we’re philosophers, we’ll start worrying about whether there is some substance or bare particular or whatever that unites them all, but the “properties at a location” view seems approximately correct as an account of prereflective experience.

At this point I’m going to shift gears and discuss meditative experience. Moreover, I’m going to increase the risk of losing any academically trained readers I may have by discussing those experiences in first-person and colloquial terms. More specifically, I’m going to talk about what happens when you’ve been sitting on the floor cross-legged with your eyes closed for so long that your ankles or your knees or your butt or your back or your neck is killing you, and you decide to just keep on sitting and observing what happens. My central claim is: In meditative experience, one comes to see that the experience of pain is exactly like the perception of a physical object: there is a particular property (pain in the one case, color in the other) located in a particular region of space. If it is coherent to think that physical objects, including their phenomenal properties, exist when they are not being perceived, then it is just as coherent to imagine a pain existing without being experienced by anyone.

Why do we resist this conclusion? Some people may balk at the notion of pain being merely “located at a region in space”; that region is in my body, and surely that must make some difference. But how much difference? I submit that phenomenologically, “in my body” just means “in that region of space in which I am directly aware of pain and similar sensations.” (in somewhat the same way as “in this room”, when I am in a room with opaque walls and no windows, denotes “in that region of space in which I am directly aware of visible objects.”) Granted, “my body” ordinarily denotes as well “that physical object that I can see most of one side of when I look down, all the front side of which I can see the reflection of when I look in the mirror, and parts of which I can cause to move so as to alter certain physical states of affairs in the world.” But that the two conceptions refer to the same region of space is a (metaphysically) contingent fact, as becomes increasingly evident the longer you sit motionless with your eyes closed. (It may be a scientifically necessary fact, but that’s beside the point.)

Another reason that the pain I experience seems peculiarly “mine” may have to do with the motivational role of pain. When we say “Smith is in pain”, is it not a conceptual truth that “Ceteris paribus, Smith wants to do something to alleviate or eliminate the pain”? I’m quite willing to grant that this may be a conceptual truth regarding the use of the ordinary-language concept of pain, but that only shows that that ordinary-language concept is radically deficient. What one comes to see is meditative experience is that most, if not all, of what we interpret in naive experience as the aversion to pain is actually “mental chatter”, internal verbalization of phrases like “Damn, that hurts! I wish that would go away. Could I get away with moving my leg a little bit? I was an idiot to come here and put myself through this.” When one listens to that chatter for long enough, it eventually gets boring and something else in the mind thinks “Oh, shut up already. We’ve had enough of your grouching.” (This thought may or may not itself take the form of internal verbalization; at times one simply finds that the complaining voice has quieted down for a while, leaving it uncertain whether the rest of the mind got tired of listening or the complainer just got worn out.) And none of this is any way implies that “It stops hurting as much”, that the pain has decreased in intensity, because it’s evident that the sensation located in that region of space hasn’t changed at all.

Clearly there’s a lot more work that I would need to do to fully defend this thesis. To cite a few issues: I have frequently used first-person indexicals like I, me, and mine in this account of the meditative experience of pain, and one might object that this is an implicit self-refutation. It would be an interesting exercise to see if all those statements could be converted “without residue” into the Russellian/Buddhist subject-free language. Second, I said in the previous paragraph that “most, if not all” of the aversion to pain is actually mental chatter. Phenomena such as jerking one’s hand back from a hot stove may seem to be counterexamples. This issue deserves a substantial discussion; I might point out, though, that there’s a distinction between the biological or evolutionary function of pain, and the experience of pain, and also that instinctive or reflexive reactions cannot be the ground of the unity of the subject to which Reppert means to appeal when he claims that a pain cannot exist without being experienced. Third, there’s a lot more that could be said about the notion of “space” I’m relying on, about the relationships between geometrical space, the space of physical theory, and phenomenological or conceptual space (the “maps of the world” that we all use to get ourselves around in the world.)

Finally: have I shown that “thoughts without a thinker” is also a coherent notion? Have I refuted the cogito? Clearly not. All I hope to have shown is that alleging the absurdity of “pain without a sufferer” is a particularly bad way of arguing for the absurdity of “thoughts without a thinker.” What do I think about those larger issues? (or rather, What thoughts occur in me about those larger issues?) I’ve already played fast and loose with enough deep questions in this post, and I want to keep it a blogpost, not a dissertation. So I will not compound my errors at this time.

meditation