Perhaps no other classical philosophical tradition, East or West, offers a more complex and counter-intuitive account of mind and mental phenomena than Buddhism. While Buddhists share with other Indian philosophers the view that the domain of the mental encompasses a set of interrelated faculties and processes, they do not associate mental phenomena with the activity of a substantial, independent, and enduring self or agent. Rather, Buddhist theories of mind center on the doctrine of no-self (Pāli anatta, Skt.[1] anātma), which postulates (...) that human beings are reducible to the physical and psychological constituents and processes which comprise them. (shrink)

While Derek Parfit is aware that his reductionism about persons is anticipated in early Buddhism and Abhidharma, he has not explored that tradition for any clues it might yield concerning the consequences of adopting the position. In this essay, the tradition is used to construct a taxonomy of possible views about persons, and then examine the meta-physical commitments that Buddhist reductionists claim are entailed by their view. While these turn out to be significant, it is argued here that this is (...) a price a reductionist should be prepared to pay. (shrink)

The concept of self-generated action is controversial, despite extensive study of its neural basis. Why is this concept so troublesome? We analyse the concept of self-generated action as employed by and. There are two definitions of self-generated action; as operant action and as underdetermined action. The latter draws on subjective experience. Experiments on action awareness suggest that experience may not be a good guide for defining self-generated action. Nevertheless, we agree with Passingham and colleagues that self-generated actions exist distinct from (...) operant actions. But defining ‘self-generated’ by the degree of involvement of an endogenous process risks regress. We sketch an alternative account of self-generated action that tries to avoid these problems to make self-generated actions accessible to experimental science. (shrink)

Voluntary acts are preceded by electrophysiological (RPs). With spontaneous acts involving no preplanning, the main negative RP shift begins at about200 ms. Control experiments, in which a skin stimulus was timed (S), helped evaluate each subject's error in reporting the clock times for awareness of any perceived event.

Recently, some contradictory statements have been made concerning whether or not the Buddha taught free will. Here, a comparative method is used to examine what exactly is meant by free will, and to determine to what extent this meaning is applicable to early Buddhist thought as recorded in the Pāli Nikāyas. The comparative method reveals parallels between contemporary criticisms of Cartesian philosophy and Buddhist criticisms of Brahmanical and Jain doctrines. Although in Cartesian terms Buddhism promotes no recognizable theory of free (...) will, it does promote a primitive theory of compatibilism which shares some keyfeatures with Daniel Dennett's position on this issue. It is argued that the implicit Buddhist stance on freedom of the will allows the existence of choice and responsibility without calling upon an ultimate controlling agency that transcends the causal nexus of mind and body. (shrink)

Only in the stream of thought and life do words have meaning. The belief in karma and rebirth, according to which actions performed in one lifetime bear fruit in a subsequent one, is widespread, some version of it being common among Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, and some other religious traditions. Ethnographic studies sometimes provide examples of how this belief manifests in people’s lives. For instance, fieldwork carried out by Richard and Candy Shweder in the eastern Indian town of Bhubaneswar yielded (...) interview footage exhibiting how members of the Hindu community apply the concepts of karma and rebirth in describing their situations. A poignant case is that of an eighty-three-year-old high-caste .. (shrink)

Recently, some contradictory statements have been made concerning whether or not the Buddha taught free will. Here, a comparative method is used to examine what exactly is meant by free will, and to determine to what extent this meaning is applicable to early Buddhist thought as recorded in the Pāli Nikāyas. The comparative method reveals parallels between contemporary criticisms of Cartesian philosophy and Buddhist criticisms of Brahmanical and Jain doctrines. Although in Cartesian terms Buddhism promotes no recognizable theory of free (...) will, it does promote a primitive theory of compatibilism which shares some keyfeatures with Daniel Dennett's position on this issue. It is argued that the implicit Buddhist stance on freedom of the will allows the existence of choice and responsibility without calling upon an ultimate controlling agency that transcends the causal nexus of mind and body. (shrink)

What might early Buddhist teachings offer neuroscience and how might neuroscience inform contemporary Buddhism? Both early Buddhist teachings and cognitive neuroscience suggest that the conditioning of our cognitive apparatus and brain plays a role in agency that may be either efficacious or non-efficacious. Both consider internal time to play a central role in the efficacy of agency. Buddhism offers an approach that promises to increase the efficacy of agency. This approach is found in five early Buddhist teachings that are re-interpreted (...) here with a view to explaining how they might be understood as a dynamic basis for ‘participatory will’ in the context of existing free will debates and the neuroscientific work of Patrick Haggard (et al.). These perspectives offer Buddhism and neuroscience a basis for informing each other as the shared themes of: (1) cognition is dynamic and complex/aggregate based, (2) being dynamic, cognition lacks a fixed basis of efficacy, and (3) efficacy of cognition may be achieved by an understanding of the concept of dynamic: as harmony and efficiency and by means of Buddha-warranted processes that involve internal time. (shrink)

A critical review of the first wave of publications on Buddhism and free will between the 1960s and 1980s.

A critical review of Mark Siderits's arguments in support of a compatibilist Buddhist theory of free will based on early Abhidharma reductionism and the two-truths distinction between conventional and ultimate truths or reality, which theory he terms 'paleo-compatibilism'. The Buddhist two-truths doctrine is basically analogous to Sellers' distinction between the manifest and scientific images, in which case the argument is that determinism is a claim about ultimate reality, whereas personhood and agency are about conventional reality, both discourse domains are semantically (...) insulated, and thus there cannot be any issue of the incompatibility. (shrink)

Critical review of Buddhist theories of free will published between 2000 and 2014.

I want to argue here that certain Buddhist and Jewish thinkers say scandalous things on purpose. More scandalously still, I suggest that these statements are infused with deeply transformative ethical power, intended specifically as a way of relating to the dreadful fact of suffering. As scandals, these special responses to suffering intentionally rupture normal semantic patterns and sequences of thought, often through statements or actions which appear paradoxical. These scandalous statements are, in fact, always communicative in function, structure, and intent, (...) but they are designed to create a kind of 'cognitive dissonance'. The thinkers I consider here say scandalous things in order to cause a breaking-open in the consciousness of the hearer and practitioner, which produces compassion, transformation, and liberation. Counter-intuitively, this rupture highlights intersubjectivity and language. In thus talking about scandal and about ethical responses to suffering, this essay brings into dialogue ideas from two very different source traditions . I engage Mahayana Buddhist ideas in conversation with the modern Jewish philosopher of ethics, Emmanuel Levinas. (shrink)