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

by Robert Wright

Kurzban has written, “In the end, if it’s true that your brain consists of many, many little modules with various functions, and if only a small number of them are conscious, then there might not be any particular reason to consider some of them to be ‘you’ or ‘really you’ or your ‘self’ or maybe anything else particularly special.” When Kurzban wrote that—in a book called Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind—he wasn’t conversant with the Buddhist idea of not-self. But millennia after that idea arose, science had steered him toward it. I’d take issue with Kurzban’s suggestion that the conscious mind isn’t “special.” The conscious mind is special, I’d argue, because it’s, well, conscious. As such, it can feel pleasure and pain, joy and sadness. The capacity for feeling, and for subjective experience in general, is what gives life meaning and what gives valence to moral questions. If you imagine a planet full of humanlike robots, incapable of subjective experience, would there be anything obviously wrong about destroying them, or anything obviously good about creating more of them? Still, the conscious mind—the conscious “self”—isn’t special in the way we commonly assume it’s special. It’s not calling as many of the shots as we think it is. It’s less like a president than like the speaker of the US House of Representatives, who presides over votes and announces the outcome but doesn’t control the votes. Of course, the speaker of the House may do...