Monima Chadha

Recent developments in biology and cognitive science have called into question the fecundity of the notion of an ‘agent’—conceived as a unitary and enduring locus of representation, evaluation, and autonomous action—for explaining the phenomenology of purposeful behavior across diverse substrates and spatio-temporal scales. A coherent account of goal-directed behavior in cognitive systems, without strong commitments to the aforesaid notion of ‘agent’, is therefore desirable, particularly in light of increasingly blurred boundaries between biological and artificial agentic systems. Here we propose that Buddhist philosophy, with its central doctrine of no-self, offers a compelling foundation for substrate-independent accounts of agency by replacing autonomous and enduring agents with stable yet malleable goals. Furthermore, according to Buddhist views, goals systematically bias cognitive representations, resulting in distorted self-models which are the root cause of suffering. We therefore posit that Buddhist-based models of agency in cognitive systems can organically integrate the epistemic, phenomenological, and ethical aspects of purposeful behavior under a unified theoretical framework. We furthermore argue that a cross-disciplinary account of agency, drawing on Buddhist notions, can help address emerging risks posed by artificial and hybrid agentic technologies.

Abhidharma Buddhism maintains that the only ultimately real (paramārtha) entities in the universe are dharmas, which are simples. What then is the ontological status of composites on this theory? One possibility is that Abhidharma Buddhists deny the reality of composites. We argue, however, that Abhidharma Buddhists affirm the reality of some composites, based on the causal efficacy of the composites. This depends on distinguishing between two notions of reality—ultimate reality (paramārtha) and substantial reality (dravyasat). If an entity is causally efficacious, it counts as substantially real. Abhidharma Buddhists affirm the substantial reality of material composites (like the eye); in this case, the causal powers of the composite are of the same type of the causal powers of the constituent dharmas. Abhidharma Buddhists also affirm the substantial reality of mental composites (like sensory episodes), which are composed of diverse kinds of dharmas. We argue that in the latter case Abhidharma Buddhists are committed to some form of emergentism.

According to classical Indian Buddhists the fate of beings in the world is governed by the law of karma, rather than the Gods. Karma offers a moral cosmology as well as a psychological doctrine that explains the fate of human beings and their evolution through the cycle of birth and rebirth. The Abhidharma Buddhists in the classical Indian tradition developed the psychological doctrine by reference to causal relations between dhammas (physical and psychological atoms). This chapter will explain this Buddhist background, and elucidate that the Buddhist version of the pan-Indian karma theory, which, if anything, plays the role of the ‘Unmoved Mover’ and thus is the best candidate for the divine in classical Indian Buddhism. The divine in this sense is omnipresent, but not omnipotent or omniscient.

If reductionism about personal identity is true, “no one ever deserves to be punished for anything they did.” I call this the Responsible Agency Challenge. This paper addresses the question: How should we respond to this challenge? My response is inspired by the famous fifth century Buddhist Abhidharma philosopher, Vasubandhu, and the historical roots of the denial of personal identity in Buddhist philosophy, which points towards a new impersonalist account of agency and responsibility. This impersonalism opens up the space for a far‐reaching and comprehensive revision of our ordinary responsibility practices and reactive attitudes.

Christine Korsgaard famously argues that even if we accept the metaphysical theory that there are no selves or persons, practical standpoint requires us to think of ourselves as unified over time. It is the ability to choose and deliberate, make plans and act that requires me to construct an identity for myself. This practical requirement is antithetical to the Buddhist no-self view. Buddhists argue that it is primarily the ignorance about our identity that is responsible for suffering, and that this ignorance consists not just in having a false belief in a metaphysical self, but also our ordinary self-conception as being unified across time: our ‘I’-sense, so to speak. The Buddhist project of eliminating, or at least reducing, suffering is concerned with arguments to show that there is no metaphysical self and that the ‘I’-sense is an illusion we must get rid of. If Korsgaard is right, it seems that the Buddhist project is in deep trouble. I shall argue that Korsgaard’s requirement is too strong. The Buddhist project is sound, and Buddhists at all stages of their practice can continue to choose and deliberate, make plans and act.

The Indian realists argue for the unique claim that universals are perceptible. The possibility of allowing perceptual access to universals puts pressure on the Nyāya theory of perception. The Nyāya philosophers introduced the notion of nirvikalpaka pratyakṣa (non-conceptual perception) to accommodate the perceptibility of universals. Since there is no direct introspective evidence for non-conceptual perception, it is difficult, if not impossible, to specify the content of nirvikalpaka pratyakṣa or non-conceptual perception. This paper addresses this concern by turning to Ned Block's work in contemporary philosophy of perception. Using Block's arguments, I propose that we have an independent empirical route to specify the content of a non-conceptual perception which is not subject to the ‘myth of the given’ objection.

This paper aims to contribute to an integrated understanding of what goes missing in adverse meditation experiences and in cases of depersonalization disorder. Depersonalization disorder is characterized by distressing alterations in, and sometimes the complete disappearance of, the 'I'-sense. This paper examines the nature of the 'I'-sense and what it means to lose it from a Buddhist perspective. We argue for a nihilist position that the loss of the sense of self arises from misidentifications of the psychophysical complex with non-self elements, such as memories, thoughts, or body movements. Drawing from meditation experiences and depersonalization symptoms, we propose that the sense of self is not a static entity given in experience but fluctuates between various senses of self (and no-self) depending on circumstances. This pluralistic understanding of the various senses of self offers a more nuanced understanding of symptoms in depersonalization disorder and adverse effects of meditation practices.

Gratitude plays a critical role in our social lives. It helps to build and strengthen relationships, and it enhances wellbeing. Gratitude is typically thought of as involving oneself having a positive feeling towards another self. But this kind of self-to-self gratitude seems to be at odds with the central Buddhist view that there is no self. Feeling gratitude to someone for some past generosity seems misplaced since there is no continuing self who both performed the generous action and is now the recipient of gratitude. In this paper, we explore how the Buddhist might respond to this problem. In response, Buddhists characterize a kind of gratitude (anumodanā) that is not fully propositional, but nor is it a notion that critically implicates the problematic concept of self. Anumodanā (literally rejoicing in good deeds of another) is best thought of as an expression of sympathetic joy (mudita) which is classified among the “sublime abidings” or “perfections” in Buddhism. In this paper we explain the notion of anumodanā and its functioning in the context of dāna (gift-giving or almsgiving in the Buddhist monastic context) to explain how it recovers some of the benefits of our ordinary reactive attitude of gratitude without implicating the self.

Vows play a central role in Buddhist thought and practice. Monastics are obliged to know and conform to hundreds of vows. Although it is widely recognized that vows are important for guiding practitioners on the path to enlightenment, we argue that they have another overlooked but equally crucial role to play. A second function of the vows, we argue, is to facilitate group harmony and cohesion to ensure the perpetuation of the dhamma and the saṅgha. However, the prominence of vows in the Buddhist tradition seems at odds with another central part of the doctrine. For vows, like other promises, seem to involve representing a persisting self as the individual who undertakes the vow. And to explicitly appeal to a persisting self conflicts with one of the most important philosophical commitments of Buddhism – the no self view. We argue though that once we articulate the details of how vows generate behavior that conforms to them, we can see that no appeal to the self is required to internalize and act on vows.

Self is central to our ordinary understanding of the mind and ourselves. The fifth-century Abhidharma Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu presents a radical no-self metaphysics in his Abhidharmakośa-Bhāṣya. Selfless Minds offers a new reading of this no-self view as defending not only eliminativism about self but also about persons, and illusionism about the sense of self and all kinds of self-representation. This radical no-self thesis presents several challenges for Abhidharma Buddhist philosophy of mind. Even if we then grant that there is no self, we are left with deeper questions about the sense of self or self-representations implicated in our ordinary everyday experience and thought about the world and ourselves. This sense of self is involved in all kinds of experiential phenomena: episodic memories, unity of consciousness, sense of ownership, sense of agency, etc. And if we grant that there are no persons, questions remain about the status of our person-related concerns and interpersonal practices. Selfless Minds answers these questions on behalf of the Abhidharma Buddhist. The first part (Chapters 3–7) of the book defends the hypothesis that we can salvage much of our experience and thought without implicating self-representations. The second part (Chapters 8–9) of the book examines the normative implications of the revisionary no-person metaphysics. Some of these seem unpalatable, if not downright absurd. These revisionary implications for our normative commitments give us reason to re-evaluate both the Abhidharma metaphysics and our ordinary person-related practices and concerns in light of each other by using some sort of wide reflective equilibrium.

This chapter considers two issues that have gained currency in contemporary philosophy because of the recent surge of liberal naturalist attitude that endeavours to place self, mind, consciousness and religious belief back into nature. The first issue, at the intersection of philosophy of religion and cognitive science, concerns the ubiquity and transmission of cross‐cultural religious belief despite being condemned by sceptics as an evolutionary costly negative social force. The second issue, at the intersection of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, concerns whether Buddhist philosophy and its associated first‐person methodologies can lead to reconceptualization and perhaps a richer understanding of the very notion of consciousness.

Mark Siderits has been one of the sharpest, clearest philosophers working on Buddhism in the last several decades. His work has also been strikingly wide-ranging. In this chapter, we will focus on two themes in his work that we find particularly interesting. First, Siderits makes a strong case that Abhidharma Buddhists promote mereological nihilism – the view that only simple entities are ultimately real, and aggregates (like a chariot or a heap) are at best useful fictions. Mereological nihilism grounds an argument against the existence of selves, which of course, is central to the tradition. But Siderits draws out a further, bracing conclusion from mereological nihilism – that consciousness isn’t ultimately real. We think this conclusion so antithetical to other commitments of Buddhism that it provides reason to doubt whether Buddhists should sustain the commitment to mereological nihilism. There is another important argument for the no-self view, however, Vasubandhu’s causal-efficacy argument; on this argument, real things must enter in cause-and-effect relations, and when we turn to cause-and-effect, there is no place where the self plays a necessary role. This argument informs our exploration of the second theme from Siderits – his defense of the “personalist” view that person (unlike self) is a useful fiction. We challenge this claim, first by noting that Vasubandhu himself uses the causal-efficacy argument against both selves and persons, and second by arguing that selves and persons are also on a par when it comes to whether they are useful fictions.

Vows play a central role in Buddhist thought and practice. Monastics are obliged to know and conform to hundreds of vows. Although it is widely recognized that vows are important for guiding practitioners on the path to enlightenment, we argue that they have another overlooked but equally crucial role to play. A second function of the vows, we argue, is to facilitate group harmony and cohesion to ensure the perpetuation of the dhamma and the saṅgha. However, the prominence of vows in the Buddhist tradition seems at odds with another central part of the doctrine. For vows, like other promises, seem to involve representing a persisting self as the individual who undertakes the vow. And to explicitly appeal to a persisting self conflicts with one of the most important philosophical commitments of Buddhism – the no self view. We argue though that once we articulate the details of how vows generate behavior that conforms to them, we can see that no appeal to the self is required to internalize and act on vows.

Self-control is essential to the Buddhist soteriological project, but it is not immediately clear how we can make sense of it in light of the doctrine of no-self. Exercising control over our actions, thoughts, volitions, and emotions seems to presuppose a conception of self and agency that is not available to the Buddhist. Thus, there seems to be a fundamental mismatch in the practical instructions for exercising control in the Buddhist texts and the doctrine of no-self. In this paper, we develop and defend a general account of self-control that coheres with Abhidarma Buddhism. We defend the Buddhist against recent arguments that self-control depends on an executive self; instead, for the Buddhist, the psychology of self-control must be ‘horizontal’ (for example, one desire winning out over another). However, the characterization of the psychological process isn’t sufficient for a Buddhist theory of self-control. For the Buddhist account is substantive. According to Buddhism, a paradigmatic instance of self-control is an episode in which the desire that wins is a desire that conforms to Buddhist values; by contrast, an episode is not an instance of self-control if the desire that wins is opposed to Buddhist values. We also argue that there are significant resources on which the Buddhist can draw for enhancing self-control despite the denial of self.

In this paper we (i) identify the notion of ‘essentially non-conceptual content’ by critically analyzing the recent and contemporary debate about non-conceptual content, (ii) work out the basics of broadly Kantian theory of essentially non-conceptual content in relation to a corresponding theory of conceptual content, and then (iii) demonstrate one effective application of the Kantian theory of essentially non-conceptual content by using this theory to provide a ‘minimalist’ solution to the problem of perceptual self-knowledge which is raised by Strong Externalism.

The overall goal of this paper is to offer an independent, empirical route to characterize the content on nonconceptual content. I pursue a recent move by Pylyshyn, a leading cognitive scientist and philosopher of mental representation, who focuses on empirical considerations in favor of nonconceptual representations. Pylyshyn proposes a minimalist view of nonconceptual representations. I offer empirical reasons that force us to go beyond minimalist account and reinstate empirically defensible richer nonconceptual representations into a theory of content

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Yet Another Attempt to Salvage Pristine Perceptions!Monima ChadhaIn a recent debate in this journal, Arindam Chakrabarti (2004) astutely identifies a new problem space that has opened up in the debate on nirvikalpaka perceptions. He indicates that the problem space is a grid arising out of the possible answers to three distinct but interrelated controversies. In this comment I primarily concern myself with the first two of these controversies. It is to be expected that the discussion will have some bearing on the third issue, but I will not have much to say about that directly. I begin by listing the first two controversies, in Chakrabarti's terms:1. Do all our perceptions involve the use of concepts, or recognitions of general features, or do some perceptions involve purely concept-free content?2. Are our perceptions necessarily or possibly self-aware or are there awarenesses that the subject of the awareness is necessarily unaware of?A little familiarity with the influential view about the Nyāya notion of nirvikalpaka pratyak???E63;a makes it seem that it falls squarely within the second disjunct in each of the questions, namely that it is a purely concept-free perception and that the subject is necessarily unaware of it. This conjunction smells of incoherence, and this is a theme that Chakrabarti has pursued much in his work. Before we discuss his arguments in detail, I wish to note some points about the very formulation of the controversies.Regarding the first, the way the disjuncts are presented reveals that Chakrabarti endorses a tight relation between concepts and recognitional abilities involving general features. I think it is right to say that a subject who possesses the concept F has reliable (though fallible) recognitional abilities to identify F's. However, I do not think that the converse is necessarily true. That is to say, a subject who has reliable (though fallible) recognitional abilities to identify F's possesses the concept F. Animals are a case in point: everyone agrees that pet dogs have the capacity to recognize their masters—they may even have the capacity for recognizing masters of other dogs that they play with—but at the very least it is controversial whether the dog has the concept of master. Once we admit that having recognitional capacities with respect to a certain general feature does not automatically result in the possession of the concept of the corresponding universal, then we can allow that some concept-free perceptions may involve the recognition of general features.Regarding the second, we can say that the subject is necessarily unaware of indeterminate perceptions only if we qualify this by saying that the subject is unaware of the indeterminate perception at the moment it arises. By force of the Nyāya argument, I will show that the subject can be made aware at a later time that an indeterminate [End Page 333] perception must have occurred at an earlier time. So, in effect, this comment questions the influential view with respect to nirvikalpaka pratyak???E63;a, according to which it is a purely concept-free perception that the subject is necessarily unaware of. I argue that indeterminate perceptions involve dispositional recognitional capacities and that the subject can be made aware of such perceptions at a later time by force of an inference; therefore they are not such that the subject is necessarily unaware of them. Some may object that in using this strategy to make indeterminate perceptions intelligible I may succeed in making some notion of indeterminate perceptions intelligible but have deviated so far away from the Nyāya notion that I certainly cannot be said to address the concerns that haunt Chakrabarti. Not so, as we shall see that most of the materials I use for arguing for this position are from Nyāya texts and other sources that are respected by Nyāya-inspired epistemologists.In the seminal paper, Chakrabarti proposes to banish nirvikalpaka pratyak???E63;a from Nyāya epistemology, for he thinks that on the whole admitting non-conceptual perceptions is likely to cause more harm rather than benefit the coherence and plausibility of their overall epistemological position (Chakrabarti 2000). In another recent article Chakrabarti...

In the last decade, the research into the sciences of the mind has witnessed what some aptly call a “consciousness boom”. This boom has resulted in a new willingness to include the earlier frowned-upon discussions of dimensions, traditions, and practices into these sciences. Nowadays it is commonplace to find philosophers and scientists engaging in discussions of Conscious Presence, Subjectivity, Out-of-Body Experiences, Meditation, Phenomenology, and, more recently, Asian—particularly Indian—theories of the mind. This essay contributes to this process by showing that Yogācāra Buddhist ideas on consciousness can significantly advance contemporary research into consciousness. Furthermore, it also..

In this paper I revisit the early Nyāya argument for the existence of a self. In section 1, I reconstruct the argument in Nyāya-sūtra 1.1.10 as an argument from recognition following the interpretation in the Nyāyasūtra-Bhāṣya and the Nyāya-Vārttika. In Section 2, I reassess the plausibility of the Nyāya argument from memory/recognition in the Bhāṣya and the Vārttika in the light of recent empirical research. I conclude that the early Nyāya version of the argument from recognition can only establish a minimal conclusion that self is a unitary and persisting conscious agent, in contrast to the ontological conclusion that the self is distinct a substance qualified by consciousness. In the final section, I address the tension between the two conclusions in Nyāya and suggest how it might be resolved.

Recent discussions of emotions in Buddhism suggest that one of the canonical self-conscious emotions, shame, is an emotion to be endorsed and indeed cultivated. The canonical texts in the Abhidharma Buddhist tradition, endorse hiri as one of the wholesome factors “always found in all good minds” and as one of “the guardians of the world”. Shame is widely taken to be a self-conscious emotion, and so if hiri counts as shame, this seems to be in tension with the central Buddhist claim that we should rid ourselves of the idea that there is a self. Buddhist moral education seems to promote an emotion that fundamentally presupposes something that Buddhist metaphysics fundamentally rejects: a self. This puzzle provides the motivation for our paper, and we will argue for a new understanding of hiri that also has implications for how we should think about one important “self-conscious” moral emotion, guilt. This puzzle about the Buddhist tradition also raises a basic philosophical question: What kinds of moral emotions are theoretically consistent with the denial of a self? We argue that anticipatory guilt might be such an emotion, and that it provides a plausible interpretation of hiri in key Buddhist texts.

In the absence of continuing selves or persons, Buddhist philosophers are under pressure to provide a systematic account of phenomenological and other features of conscious experience. Any such Buddhist account of experience, however, faces further problems because of another cardinal tenet of Buddhist revisionary metaphysics: the doctrine of impermanence, which during the Abhidharma period is transformed into the doctrine of momentariness. Setting aside the problems that plague the Buddhist Abhidharma theory of experience because of lack of persons, I shall focus on problems that arise because of its allegiance to momentariness and explore some responses on behalf of the Abhidharma Buddhist philosophers. I address two challenges to the Buddhist view in this paper. The first, which I will call the “Phenomenological Challenge”, primarily concerns the temporal properties of what is represented in conscious experience. The second, which I will call the “Metaphysical Challenge”, concerns the temporal properties of conscious representation itself.

In the sixth century a.d., in a debate with the Buddhists about the nature of Self, the well-known Naiyāyika Uddyotakara declared that there is no need prove that the Self or what is referred to by the pronoun “I” exists, for on that score there cannot be any significant disagreement.1 It is only this or that specific metaphysical nature of the self that is the subject of controversy. To limit the scope of the debate at issue here, we employ the same strategy. It is beyond doubt that many cognitive processes involve consciousness of the self, for example monitoring one’s activities, as in learning how to dance or planning an important event in the near future. We can safely assume that there cannot be any..