Cool article from Seed Magazine that looks at what some neuroscientists and philosophers have known for a long time - Buddhism intuited through 1st person perspectives (subjective) what took science another 2,500 to observe through 3rd person perspectives (objective). Funny how that works, eh? Introspection and observation arriving at very similar understandings of consciousness.
And yet the majority of neuroscientists and a bunch of philosophers still think the 1st person perspective is useless and unreliable. On the other hand, a new generation of researches (including the atheist Sam Harris) are meditating and applying both 1st person and 3rd person perspectives to their understandings of the brain and the mind.
The author of this post, David Weisman, also blogs at Psychology Today.
Read the whole article.Buddhism and the Brain
Opinion / by / March 9, 2011Many of Buddhism’s core tenets significantly overlap with findings from modern neurology and neuroscience. So how did Buddhism come close to getting the brain right?
Credit: Flickr user eschipul
Over the last few decades many Buddhists and quite a few neuroscientists have examined Buddhism and neuroscience, with both groups reporting overlap. I’m sorry to say I have been privately dismissive. One hears this sort of thing all the time, from any religion, and I was sure in this case it would break down upon closer scrutiny. When a scientific discovery seems to support any religious teaching, you can expect members of that religion to become strict empiricists, telling themselves and the world that their belief is grounded in reality. They are always less happy to accept scientific data they feel contradicts their preconceived beliefs. No surprise here; no human likes to be wrong.
But science isn’t supposed to care about preconceived notions. Science, at least good science, tells us about the world as it is, not as some wish it to be. Sometimes what science finds is consistent with a particular religion’s wishes. But usually not.
Despite my doubts, neurology and neuroscience do not appear to profoundly contradict Buddhist thought. Neuroscience tells us the thing we take as our unified mind is an illusion, that our mind is not unified and can barely be said to “exist” at all. Our feeling of unity and control is a post-hoc confabulation and is easily fractured into separate parts. As revealed by scientific inquiry, what we call a mind (or a self, or a soul) is actually something that changes so much and is so uncertain that our pre-scientific language struggles to find meaning.
Buddhists say pretty much the same thing. They believe in an impermanent and illusory self made of shifting parts. They’ve even come up with language to address the problem between perception and belief. Their word for self is anatta, which is usually translated as ‘non self.’ One might try to refer to the self, but the word cleverly reminds one’s self that there is no such thing.
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