Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

by Robert Wright

Leda and I were discussing the relationship between these modules and the various biases that afflict human apprehension of the world. Earlier in the conversation I had talked about how our view of the world can be colored by whichever module is dominating our consciousness at the moment. She questioned whether it made sense to talk about a process of “coloration”—as if there was some uncolored view that had existed before the color was applied. “There’s always some psychological mechanism doing something,” she said. “It’s creating our world, it’s creating our perception of the world. That’s why I wouldn’t say domain-specific mechanisms color our perceptions—I’d say they create our perceptions. There’s no way of perceiving the world that doesn’t involve carving it conceptually into pieces.” This sounds quite like the view from Buddhism: everything, from spinach to football games, is empty of inherent existence; things—forms—come into existence in our consciousness only after we have taken some combination of elements in our perceptual field and imposed a collective meaning on them.