 Welcome to the 30th episode of Patterson in Pursuit. I'm your host, Steve Patterson, and I've got an awesome interview for you today. We're talking about Buddhism. Some of the most difficult questions in philosophy have to do with the nature of the self and consciousness and personal identity. These issues are central in Buddhist philosophy. I had a wonderful conversation about these topics with a professor at Harvard while I was in Boston. My guest is Dr. Janet Gyatso, who is the Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies at Harvard. She's the author of many books, including Apparitions of the Self, which is the topic that we're talking about today. Before we dive into it, I'm happy to announce that Square One, the Foundations of Knowledge, my first book on philosophy, is now available for pre-sale. The book will be officially released on Cyber Monday. That's the 28th of November, but you can reserve a copy today. Go to stevedashpatterson.com slash books and you'll see the link for it. It's by far the most important thing that I've ever written, and I'm going to be referencing it for the rest of my entire life, so if you're interested in logic and epistemology and foundational questions and you want a clear answer to the question, can we know anything with certainty, then that's the book for you. I'm also happy to announce that Patterson in Pursuit is going to be back on the road starting December 6th. My wife and I officially got tickets to New Zealand, and then we're going to go to Australia. There's a mathematician down in Australia that I can't wait to talk with, so about a month from today we will be leaving upstate New York and continuing our international journey. 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So I hope you guys enjoy my interview with Dr. Janet Ghiazzo, and this is another interview very high on my list when I get to recording some more interview breakdowns. Enjoy. So first of all, I want to thank you for sitting down and speaking with me today. Sure, no, it's my pleasure. I am perplexed by one phenomenon I keep thinking about and I don't have a good answer for it, and it's my own consciousness. So I like the idea of the physicalist worldview. I think it's very simple, it's very easy to understand, there's nothing remarkable going on, and I can explain a great deal within the physicalist framework, but when I think about myself, when I introspect, and I'm aware of my feelings, I have a very difficult time putting that into the physicalist worldview. I say, well, it seems like I am some kind of a being, or some kind of person, or my consciousness doesn't seem like it itself is some physically-existent thing, it doesn't seem like it's a particle, or some assortment of matter, and so I was wondering what the Buddhist conception of the self is, and could it be fit into the physicalist metaphysics, or does it imply something bigger than the physicalist metaphysics? Well, okay, so there is a lot of parts of that question. And first of all, just the notion of the self, the self is a very important term in Buddhism, and it's one of the sort of key doctrinal insistence that the self is generally a construct that we create, and it doesn't have, it doesn't refer to anything that exists independently in the world, but rather it's dependent upon how we construct it, and many things go into its construction. And so one of the biggest points in all of Buddha's thought is that we need to be aware of this fact, because the ensuing attachment that we have to any idea or definition that we have of ourselves as a self gets in the way and leads to a lot of problems. In fact, it's one of our worst problems, and this problem then gets connected to what is usually often translated as essentialism about any given thing, so it's not only the self, but any given identity of anything, be that in the physical or mental world. So the question of the physical and mental is a different question than that of the nature of the self, and certainly definitions of the self can be myself as my body or whatever, and that would be a physical definition. Myself is a kind of personality or a set of propensities, it's a kind of set of emotions, and so on and so forth. So the question, the relationship between mind and body that I'll just say is one of my big interests as well. And I share with you a kind of desire to really privilege physical existence in and I do think that in some ways everything does boil down to physical existence. But the so there's two things in kind of classical Buddhist doctrine, there is a clear distinction between body and mind, these are terms, Namarupa for example. And so lots of formulations are put in those terms. And so they are clearly seeing that these are two domains that are not completely collapsible. However, when you do the kind of work that I do in Buddhist studies, I find many sorts of instances where we really see one being an epiphenomenon of the other. And that's, you know, I think asking that question in the particular terms we're asking it now, you know, is we're maybe asking those questions a different way than they did. But, you know, but if we use Buddhist philosophy as a resource to think about these issues and they thought about them a lot, actually, and in many different domains, I think there's a lot more to be said about it. You know, I think it's obviously one of the biggest philosophical questions of all time, you know. So I guess for me, when I think of the self, it has this very intimate connection with the mind, with consciousness, but it's almost one layer deeper that there is, it's not just the phenomena of consciousness, it's my consciousness. I feel like I'm this being who is experiencing these things, it's not just the experience is happening, it's that it's my experience, that me part. So that me part, you're saying that's a construction, can we dive a little more into that? So what does it mean for something to be a construction? Is it an illusion? Is it something that doesn't actually exist? Is it something, is it a concept that we think actually has some kind of independent existence, but really it doesn't? No, it is a concept and it does exist as an illusion. I mean, this is like one of these difficult things that I'm floating in front of my class all the time. I'm teaching my intro to Buddhism class and we're talking about all these questions. But the my part of the my consciousness has a lot of different means and in what that my consists and what its status is with respect to consciousness could be quite different. It's not obvious exactly what that means. And Buddhists would say that yeah, it doesn't, there is no independent existence of this entity that would allow the genitive pronoun my to stand on its own other than an idea that we create or a way of explaining things to ourselves. So it's at least conceivable that there could be some type of conscious goings on without that possessive. Absolutely, that's kind of one of the things that they play with. So is that a state of mind that somebody can experience? Is the being the conscious without the being the being or being the person? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now again, what that means is very various and complicated, but yes, and at the minimum even if you could say that the minus, the status of the my or the ego or the cogito or whatever doesn't dissolve 100% but to the degree that it's sidelined and reduced is the degree to which we're able to empathize with others and the degree to which we're aware of reality around ourselves and the degree to which we're less attached to identity issues and can function more ethically, more creatively in the world. So when you said we can't entirely get rid of it 100% Well, I'm not saying that, I'm saying even if, so whether we can or not is itself a question, whether I believe that or whether that's what Buddhists say or any particular Buddhist school says that, I Buddhist schools do come out with statements that you could entirely get rid of it, but then when you look closely at what exactly do they mean by that against complicated, but on the surface they will say yes, you can get rid of it, but I was saying that even if we don't have to like talk about that. Okay, so let me ask you, because this is when I experience phenomena as I interact with the world, I have developed this explanation for what's going on that I don't know how it can be compatible with what you've just presented, which is it seems like there is a point of perspective that I have or my perspective, we can put that in quotation marks, but I also believe that you, or at least what I'm referencing when I use that term, also have a perspective and it's the same, and it's very similar in the sense that there is this perspective and that perspective and they're not ultimately the same perspective, doesn't that imply some kind of a self or at least some kind of a true metaphysical difference between the perspectives? No, not at all. For one thing, your perspective is always changing and my perspective is always changing first of all, and that's a really important part of this, the sort of logical proof that is given about the self is that it's always changing, it doesn't remain the same, and so at the minimum you have to say that any kind of such conception is a shorthand for what in fact is always in flux. And so once it's always in flux, going back to Aristotle, something that's always in flux undermines its ability to have an essence. And the main Buddhist critique is about this notion of essence, and the idea that you have a perspective and that I have a perspective, even if both of them are in flux, the very fact that we're able to communicate shows that there's important ways that our perspectives overlap. And there also are extremely important ethical capacities to take on the perspective of others. You may not be able, again, you may not be 100%, but we are able to do that, we try to do that. It's a very important part of what we do, actually as human beings in the community of people. So would you say then the claim could be something like this that what exists is not a bunch of selves with fundamentally different perspectives, that there's one type of thing that's out there, one type of consciousness, and it's artificially broken up between them? No, no, we're not going there either. So that would be to hypothesize a one consciousness. Okay. So any, the aim, the target that the Buddhists are aiming at is the hypothesization or the essentialization. So be it one big thing or a bunch of little individual ones. The problem with all of it is not to see that every single one of those things is constructed out of many different parts and those are constantly shifting and the way that we name them depends on what particular perspective we're taking at any one particular moment, which itself is always changing. And so there are, there's energy, there's phenomena, things are happening, but none of them have an essential identity or essential essence. So when you say things are happening, but if they don't have an identity, then they're not really things, right? No, that's the whole point is that things don't need an identity in order to be there. So what are you referencing when you use the term things? I'm always referencing it from whatever particular angle that I'm taking. So, you know, you do need to give things identity and common human communication and you do that all the time, but those again are products of our conceptions, our set of concepts, our set of constructions and they don't necessarily belong to the thing as such. So there is no thing per se? No, everything's in flux. Everything's constantly changing. But there is everything, but there's not one particular thing. There's not an everything either. So you're just, then you're just moving to making this one big thing in the sky or something. So no, there isn't, the universe is infinite. And so if you were to think of the world as, or just take the room that we're in, everything in the room is constantly in flux. It's constantly changing. It's constantly moving. And if we were to see this on a screen, it would be constantly morphing. Nothing would be standing still. And to say, okay, there's this thing Steve over here and there's this Janet, we would have to like cut out a picture and freeze frame, but that would be itself artificial. Okay, so that's the point. So when we say that, it sounds, so when I think this just in common language, it seems like you're saying really nothing exists, in a sense. We're like, there's no thing. Well, yeah, so it's the thing-ness, but it depends what you mean by nothing exists. It's not the blank nothing-ness. It's like, that's one of the problems with language is any word I use to talk about what does exist is gonna run into trouble if you put it under a microscope. So the word thing I was using as a sort of provisional term to try to get a handle, but actually any such term that when we look at closely, we're gonna see that that too is a construction. That still doesn't mean that there's nothing. Okay, so there is something, there's not something, there's something. Yeah, put it that way. Okay, so this is the kind of language game you have to get into, and that's what the Buddhist texts are always doing. And they use language that way to try to break down our habits of thinking to open up new modes of thinking. So for that something, is it, does it have any constituent parts to it? Yeah, but each of those parts themselves are made up of constituent parts down to an infinite regress. So there's no base anything. No. Okay. You take a deep breath. Yeah, I have to think about it. So if it's true that at some level, there is something or there is constituent parts, it seems like it would require that ultimately that you don't have an infinite regress, that you can't have something made up of a lot of nothing. Because it depends on what you mean by nothing. So nothing doesn't mean blank slate or total darkness, blackness. It just means that nothing is hypothesized. Okay, this is an excellent segue then because a lot of people, especially in the West, when we read Eastern ideas, I think a lot of people take them, I think they interpret them the wrong way. They take them very, very literally and I think it causes all kinds of problems. Like for example, sometimes it says nothing exists. I think a lot of people take that to mean, oh, literally nothing. No, it's nothing that exists. Exactly, which I don't think that's what the Eastern. No, I'm not saying that. So what appear to be paradoxes, is it nothing exists? Well, that's not literally true. What is the Buddhist take on paradox or even logical contradiction? Like are these things that are meant to get a deeper premise to get us to realize our constructions about the world or do they accept, look, there are some paradoxes that are actually there and you just kind of have to deal with it. It's the former. The former. Okay, so for logic specifically, would you say that in Buddhist thinking there is any acceptance of actual logical contradiction? You can make a logical contradiction. You can make it all the time. It depends what it means and how you're using it. So if I say something like, I exist and I don't exist. You can say that, but it doesn't make any sense. So then, we're not gonna bother with stuff that makes no sense. You can say that. And every utterance depends on its rhetorical context and what you're trying to do with it and how you're using it. And so any one single utterance taken out of context can be interpreted in a lot of different ways. And that's another major part. It's very similar to what I've already been saying that our notion of ourself, it depends on what perspective we take on it and the same thing for language. So that you certainly can construct a paradox, but what's the status of that paradox? Is it an artificial game or whatever? I mean, the thing about paradox in certain kinds of Buddhist texts, it is the former of the two options you gave that a seeming paradox requires us to maybe move to another level to understand certain assumptions that we're bringing to that paradox. Yes, I think that that makes a great deal of sense. And I can refer also to the law of the excluded middle, which is like saying, either I exist or I don't exist. I've actually worked on this topic a little bit and the law of the excluded middle depends on a faulty presumption that there's a clear dividing line between exist and doesn't exist or yes and no. And it's a bifurcated line, which yeah, that's a paradox if you accept that assumption. But if you don't accept that assumption, the whole thing falls away. So would you say something like that specifically on the law of the excluded middle that it presupposes identity or it presupposes that there are boundaries? Exactly, the meaningfulness and absoluteness of boundaries. Yes, that's right, absolutely. So in my conversations that I've had with a lot of people, especially maybe if they haven't heard this perspective, the idea that in Eastern philosophy, they embrace actual logical contradiction. This is just an error. It's not supposed to come in that way. No, not at all, no, right. They're not idiots. We'd have to examine a particular case, what is this contradiction and how's it being used and so on and so forth. But no, not at all do they embrace those contradictions. If anything, they'll say, oh, on one level, it's yes and on another level, it's no. The contradictions are difficult to understand. I was just teaching a very important Buddhist text today in my class two hours ago which really stops the brain and on the surface appears to be blatantly self-contradictory, but it isn't. Actually, they're trying to make another point and they think that the exercise in figuring that out is gonna be very beneficial. This is another excellent segue. So my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong here, my understanding of the Zen cones and it has a similar goal as something like meditation which is it is trying to get people to calm their mental constructing, it's trying to quiet that down so that you can just exist and have a more true understanding of what exists by relaxing those boundaries, if you will. Is that accurate? Yeah, it's not only relaxing them but it's also seeing through them and understanding them. The koan thing's a little different, it's less about calming. The koan is a tradition of confrontation between master and disciple in which they're posing a seemingly contradictory paradox or they say something that's very outlandish and the contradiction or the situation bears reflection and by virtue of reflection one gets to a state where one is able to either transcend the seeming contradiction or something happens to our habitual thought processes. So it's not only a thing of calming but calming is certainly part of it. When you say they get to a state of transcending can you unpack that a little bit? What does it mean to transcend I don't mean transcend in the usual way of like a transcendent philosophy but it's more like sometimes a contradiction will be posed in order to get the person to realize that the point of it is to expose the inability of a certain kind of propositional statement to ever be exactly correct. So the transcending is a transcending between like a particular proposition and to look at the larger phenomenon and that makes the proposition possible which is the very functioning of language and so it's to draw your attention to the function of language rather than assuming that language has an obvious unproblematic reference. Okay so I have two more questions for you. One on this line has to do with the term the unity of opposites. I've seen this term come up a lot. Can you explain what in Buddhist thinking is the unity of opposites that maybe you can't have black without white or you need in order for something to appear as a thing it has to be in contrast to a background or in contrast to something else. But would it be fair to say that the central idea or one of the central ideas in Buddhism is to reject or to see past that boundary that we're saying there's some objective distinction between this and that that ultimately that is a dualistic bifurcation that doesn't actually exist or that it's artificial? Yeah but I'm worried about the notion of unity. I would say the relativity or the interdependence rather than the unity and it depends on which way they're unified. And by no means you have this common phrase that students all think is what Buddhism means is all is one. And I've never seen a statement like that in Buddhist texts and because once again if there's first of all they're not trying to erase difference there is difference even though it's always relative it's not absolute but it is relative and they're not posing some one big fat one out there. I think that's a more Hinduistic idea. Well yeah and I'd be careful also using the word Hindu but you can say in the Upanishadic literature which is one early branch of what's now called Hinduism would be the way to put that. The university here we have to be precise with our things. Okay so the last question that I want to ask you is going back to consciousness and also it has to do with this seeming distinction between things. That theory that there is a seems to be a unique difference between the contents of my awareness the contents of my consciousness the feelings that I'm having and yours. Is that a objective distinction? If I had a theorize of any meaningful objective distinction that isn't relative that seems to be absolute and talking about something in the world that would be right up there probably number one. It seems to be that even my perspective even from the sense of like I'm looking at you from this side of the table you're looking at me from that side of the table though the actual awareness isn't that something that would be a non-relative distinction. Well that's one of the hardest things for anybody to explain is the so-called existence of other minds. And that was a debate that was taken up at a certain point in Buddhist philosophy and I don't think was satisfactorily dealt with. But one thing I would distinguish first of all is the nature of awareness as such and the particular contents of it. So I think that the ways in which the habits of thought and the ways that awareness is constructed between you and I are probably shared in many ways. We're very much constituted by our shared language our shared historical knowledge our shared cultural knowledge. There is a way nonetheless I agree with you and I think about this too there is a way in which if I'm thinking of a number right now in my head I can do it and you won't know what it is. And I'm not sure that that's because there's some kind of fundamental difference between my mind and your mind. But there's a way that the kind of continuum of psychophysical aggregates that you kind of collect around a kind of point over there and the one that I have over here is doesn't have access to everything. So you don't know everything there's also there's a lot of other things you don't know as well you don't know what's inside my bag. So it's not only a question of one mind and another mind. So the way that we try to understand that particular problem I agree is a really interesting question. I'm not sure that Buddhist thinkers have fully worked that out. I mean, Buddhists do depend on an idea that there's many ways in which one can know the thoughts of others actually. And I think that it that hasn't been explored either it's one of those fields that that's out in La La Land because nobody believes that we really can read other people's minds. I actually think it's a very interesting question because I think it's not like a magical mysterious thing it's just by people's bodily positions by other kinds of perceptions you can tell a lot more about a person than is immediately evident. And I think that Buddhists were interested in developing those skills. I don't think, however, that it's at this very abstract level of I'm just thinking of a number right now and you don't know what it is. I think that would be very hard. What? No, it was three. And then I thought of two, 43 years. But I have to make it harder for you. But that's an extreme that they lay out there's a number of debates about how omniscient is the Buddha or not and does the Buddha actually know every single fact in the universe or is it that he understands the principles behind every single fact. And the guys who are trying to argue that he actually does know every single fact were probably outclassed by the guys and nobody knows everything like that. So there's lots of things that we don't know. Okay, so let me ask you, maybe this is a better way of phrasing it. Is the claim that distinctions between things are relative? Is that an absolute claim? Is that saying there is no circumstance in which you have a true absolute distinction between things that isn't a construction? Yeah, because whatever the thing is itself can be deconstructed. So would this be a circumstance then with the existence of other minds where it would seem like that distinction is not conceptual or constructed. It seems like we're talking about things separate, in a sense separate. The distinction is separate from our minds, our conception of it. Would that be an example of a... I'm not so sure because you're trying to pose them as opposites and I'm not sure they're opposites. And I think it would be really important, first of all, to think about the question of your mind versus what's in my purse. So I think we're mixing two different problems. One of them has to do with the nature of consciousness and one of them has to do with the nature of things and absolute difference. Okay, so maybe we can get around this... I don't know if this is a way to get around it, but what if I say, okay, forget differences in consciousness, what if I say the contents of my own perception, I'm talking about my visual field, there is kind of a tan blob here and there's kind of a blue blob there in my visual field. Now, they have some constructed relationships. So for example, if this, that blob is over here, that blob is over there, that only makes sense kind of as a together, as they're relative to one another. But the actual feeling or the actual qualitative experience of these things seems to be different, seems to be meaningfully different that it wouldn't be a construction. We found a non-relative distinction in my own conscious experience. Say the difference between the experience of blue and tan, for example. That's a much faster way of looking. Yeah, so they're different, but they're on a continuum with each other. The continuum being? Color. Color. Okay. Thank you very much for telling me this has been a great conversation. You're welcome. Yeah, that's been fun. All right, that was my interview with Dr. Janet Guillazzo. I hope you guys enjoyed it. You'll notice with this interview, we have a fairly abrupt ending. That's just because we had a hard deadline, but I'm hoping to have Dr. Guillazzo back on the show because there's so much philosophy to break apart here and she really knows her stuff. In my own examination of metaphysics, trying to investigate what types of things exist in the world, I found that the central issue, really in all of metaphysics, has to do with boundaries. Where are the objective boundaries in the universe, if any? However you choose to answer that question has gigantic implications on the rest of our world view. So I've got a lot more to say about the topic. Thanks for listening, and I hope you guys enjoy the rest of your day.