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

by Robert Wright

“If feeling were self, then feeling would not lead to affliction,”

valence

This wasn’t a diagnosis; “intertemporal utility function” isn’t a malady. It’s something everybody has. It’s an equation that describes, roughly speaking, your willingness to delay gratification—your willingness to forgo something you like in order to have more of that something later.

This is also called “time discounting.” People tend to “discount” the future in the sense of feeling that getting $100 a year from now isn’t as good as getting $100 today.

He insists, in each case, that something subject to change shouldn’t be thought of as part of the self.

It’s feelings that “decide” which module will be in charge for the time being, and it’s modules that then decide what you’ll actually do during that time.

They concluded that what emotions do—what emotions are for—is to activate and coordinate the modular functions that are, in Darwinian terms, appropriate for the moment. (This isn’t, of course, to say that these functions are appropriate in moral terms,

or even that they serve the welfare of the person they steer, but just that they helped our ancestors spread genes.)

They divide the mind neatly into seven “subselves” with the following missions: self-protection, mate attraction, mate retention, affiliation (making and keeping friends), kin care, social status, and disease avoidance.

(1) This isn’t a state of mind that the conscious “self” “chooses” to enter; rather, the state is triggered by a feeling, and the conscious “self,” though it in principle has access to the feeling, may not notice it or notice that a new state has been entered. (So much for the idea of the conscious you as CEO.) (2)

You can see why the Buddha emphasized how fluid, how impermanent, the various parts of the mind

the self is supposed to be some unchanging essence, it’s pretty hard to imagine where exactly that self would be amid the ongoing transitions from state of mind to state of mind. Indeed, if there is something that qualifies as a constant amid the flux, something that really does endure, essentially unchanged, through time, that something is ...

Presumably, evolution didn’t build a “beer-drinking module”

into us. But beer, like many other recreational drugs, is an invention that circumvents evolution’s logic: it taps directly into the reward center that normally would be activated more arduously, by doing things that helped our ancestors spread their genes.

Reason has its effect not by directly pushing back against a feeling but by fortifying the feeling that does do the pushing back.

“Reason alone,” Hume argued, “can never oppose passion in the direction of the will.” Nothing “can oppose or retard the impulse of passion but a contrary impulse.”

Natural selection has made us want foods with certain kinds of tastes, and has also made us want to live a long, healthy life. The struggle for self-control—in this particular case, at least—is a clash between these two values and between feelings associated with these two values.

It’s the desire to live a long, healthy life that focuses our reasoning on the link between sugar consumption and longevity, and it’s through this desire that the results of the reasoning can overpower the desire for the chocolate itself.

It’s in this sense that reason remains a “slave” ...

Hum...

and thus a slave to natural selection’s overarchi...

And, indeed, when I asked him what’s wrong with saying something like “I considered the pros and cons and decided not to eat the chocolate,” he said that, strictly speaking, you should put it more like this: “There were certain systems in your head that were designed to be motivated to eat high-calorie foods, and those systems had

In the end, modules of the second kind, modules focused on the long term, “inhibited the behavior that was being facilitated by the short-term modules.”

In other words, neither kind of module was more “rational” than the other; they just had different goals, and on this particular day, one was stronger than the other.

This isn’t to say that the only reason we’re conscious of our reasoning process is so we can sell rationales for our behavior to a gullible public. Sometimes, while deliberating on a big decision, we consult with friends or family about what we should do; and this consultation will be more productive if we’re already aware of some arguments for and against the decision.

“Consulting” may be a way of making sure, in advance, that we’re not going to do something that will antagonize important people in our lives, or a way of getting commitments of support from these people in case our decision antagonizes other people.

Either way, one virtue of your conscious mind being in touch with the reasons generated by competing modules is that you can share the reasons with others,

Strictly speaking, though, the way I should put it is this: You can share the reasons with others, and then their feedback will recalibrate how good or bad the two options feel.

First we learned that Hume seems to have been right: our “reasoning faculty” isn’t ever really in charge; its agenda—what it reasons about—is set by feelings,

Then we learned that, actually, even the term reasoning faculty suggests more in the way of orderly deliberation than is typical of the human mind. The view emerging here is that we don’t so much have a reasoning faculty as reasoning faculties; modules seem to have the ability to recruit reasons on behalf of their goals.

This in turn suggests that “reasoning” is sometimes a euphemism for what thes...

feelings tend to carry the day.

If self-discipline is really good for the organism, you wouldn’t expect natural selection to make it so easy for a few early lapses to destroy self-discipline. Yet there’s no denying that a few injections of heroin can be the end of a productive life. Why?

essentialism”—the tendency to attribute inner essences to things—is a “human universal.”

We are designed to judge things and to encode those judgments in feelings.

But we’re designed by natural selection to get satisfaction out of finding the answers to questions, and over time, when I’ve asked how long something is, tape measures have given me the answer. Maybe that’s why I’ve come to like them.

Anyway, to be clear: the claim isn’t that everything I feel positively or negatively about will actually have an accordingly positive or negative impact on my chances of

spreading my genes; the claim is just that the machinery in my mind that assigns feelings to things was originally designed to maximize genetic proliferation. That it no longer reliably does so is among the absurdities of being a human.

This is a major theme of Bloom’s: that the stories we tell about things, and thus the beliefs we have about their history and their nature, shape our experience of them, and thus our sense of their essence.

Bloom thinks that, if you look closely enough, every pleasure has a consequential story behind

“There’s no such thing as a simple pleasure. There’s no such thing as a pleasure that’s untainted by your beliefs about what you’re being pleasured by.”

The fact that pleasure is shaped by our sense of essence, and thus by the stories we tell and the beliefs we hold, suggests to Bloom that our pleasures are, in a sense, more profound than we may realize.

But you could look at it the other way around.

actually, there is a superficiality to our pleasure,

Symbiosis

but other evidence makes it clear that in our species, too, microbes influence the mind, in part by influencing neurotransmitters.

Weber, I asked him about a line of his I recalled reading, something to the effect of: The bad news is that you don’t exist; the good news is that you’re everything.

“If you’re nothing, if you disappear, you can then be everything. But you can’t be everything unless you are nothing. It just logically follows that’s the case.”

espouse

In other words: nothing possesses inherent existence; nothing contains all the ingredients of ongoing existence within itself; nothing is self-sufficient.