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

by Robert Wright

answer is that if we believe something about ourselves, that will help us convince other people to believe it. And certainly it’s to our benefit—or, more precisely, it would have been to the benefit of the genes of our hunter-gatherer ancestors—to convince the world that we’re coherent, consistent actors who have things under control.

hemisphere, when asked where he was going, said he was going to get a soda? His answer wasn’t really true, but it does inspire a kind of confidence in him. He seems like a guy who is in charge of himself, who doesn’t go around doing things for no good reason. Compare him with a guy who offers a more truthful account:

where I’m going. Sometimes I just do stuff for reasons that make no sense to me.” If those two guys were your neighbors in a hunter-gatherer village, which one would you want to go hunting with? Which one would you want to become friends with? During human evolution, the answers to such questions mattered: if you...

view, it’s good for you to tell a coherent story about yourself, to depict yourself as a rational, self-aware actor. So whenever your actual motivations aren’t accessib...

not just coherent stories about ourselves but flattering stories about ourselves.

And by and large we do. In 1980 the psychologist Anthony Greenwald invented the term beneffectance to describe the way people naturally present themselves to the world—as beneficial and effective. Lots of experiments since then have shown that people

in these regards. Yet study after study has shown that most people do think they’re above average along various dimensions, ranging from athletic ability to social skills. And this sort of self-appraisal can firmly resist evidence. One study of fifty people found that on average they rated their driving skill toward the “expert” end of the spectrum—which would be less notable were it not for the fact that all fifty had recently been in car accidents, and two-thirds of them

responsible for the accidents by police. If there is anything we’re more impressed by than our competence, it’s our moral fiber. One finding

average compared to a vaguely envisioned population of human beings at large. When put on a very small team, we tend to convince ourselves that we’re more valuable than the average team member. In one study, academics who had worked on jointly

in the previous sentence is credit. When team efforts fail, our perceived contribution to the outcome

work requirements or inadequate instruction.” In the case of all eight biases, the average person said the average American is more susceptible than they themselves were. As Kurzban has summarized this

painful events get seared into our memories—perhaps so we can avoid repeating the mistakes that led to them—we are on balance more likely to remember events that reflect favorably on us than those

experiences, as if the positive events are specially primed for sharing with the public in rich detail. No such asymmetry of narrative detail is found in our memory of positive and negative things that happen to other people.

make Darwinian sense for certain experiences to instill it. There are other differences as well among people that can influence the kinds of stories they tell and believe about themselves. In one study, people who ranked high on an extroversion scale and

scale both kept diaries about their everyday emotional experiences. Later the extroverts recalled more positive experiences than they had in fact had, and the neurotics recalled more negative experiences than they had in fact had. This is proof that self-inflation, though the norm in our species, isn’t an iron law. But note that both kinds of people were

personalities had steered them toward different kinds of illusions, but in both cases illu...

worldwide, and that’s particularly true when it comes to ethical virtues such as fairness; on average, people think they’re morally above average. This is an especially important piece of self-flattery, because it helps fuel the self-righteousness that starts and

sustains conflicts, ranging from quarrels to wars.

One is about the nature of the conscious self, which we see as more in control of things than it actually is. The other illusion is about exactly what kind of p...

inner us that deserves that credit or blame. The second illusion helps convince the world that what we deserve is credit, not blame; we’re more ethical than the average person, and we’re more productive than the average teammate. We have beneffectance.

within the field of psychology, especially evolutionary psychology, is that the mind is “modular.” In this view, your mind is composed of lots of specialized modules—modules for sizing up situations and reacting to them—and it’s the interplay among these modules that shapes your behavior. And much of this interplay happens without conscious awareness on your part.

new challenges, new chunks would have been added. As we’ll see, this model also helps make sense of some of life’s great internal conflicts, such as whether to cheat on your spouse, whether to take addictive drugs, and whether to eat another powdered-sugar doughnut. Perhaps most important for our purposes, thinking of the mind as modular helps make sense of things you hear from Buddhist meditation teachers, such as that “thoughts think themselves” and that appreciating this fact can be liberating.

helps me infer what people are thinking from what they say and from their body language and facial expressions.” Psychologists do think there’s such a module: the “theory of mind” module. (Autism has been linked to deficiencies in this module.) But when scientists try to sketch out this module

and overlap between different mental modules than you see in a Swiss Army knife or even a smartphone.

Still, it’s worth dwelling on how utterly unlike the idealized working of a corporation the operation of the mind is. Among the traits modules often lack are obedience and harmony. Yes, the modules may sometimes collaborate, but they sometimes

takes place within the modules, it is looking like there is no hierarchy among the modules. All these modules are not reporting to a department head—it is a free-for-all, self-organizing system.”

organized, as if the free-for-all has been resolved. What’s more, the sense of organization is sometimes misleading, because the free-for-alls can happen at a subconscious level and can get resolved at that level.

dominant,” writes Gazzaniga. “It’s a dog-eat-dog world going on in your brain, with different systems competing to make it to the surface to win the prize of conscious recognition.”

that kind of struggle, the conflict itself is often part of consciousness. We’ll get into that kind of intermodular struggle in a later chapter, when I address the problem commonly known as “self-control.”

that get resolved at an unconscious or barely conscious level. The things I pay attention to, the stories I tell

getting made, and “I,” the conscious “I,” the thing I think of as my self, am by and large not making the choices.

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?

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 some behind-the-scenes nudging and so exert some influence

it into something that can do a lot of nudging—maybe even turns it into something more like a president than a speaker of the House. And you may, to that end, find it useful to understand how the brain determines which module is in charge at any given moment. That’s the question we’ll focus on in the

learned that I had an intertemporal utility function. 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

forgo something you like in order to have more of that something later.

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. In the example above,

intertemporal utility function was calibrated—however steep my time discounting—it would stay that way tomorrow and next week and next month and next year. My discount rate was said to be a firm and enduring feature of my psychology.

only one part of the Buddha’s basic not-self argument: the idea that the “five aggregates” are not under your control; they do not, as he later put it, bear the relationship to you that a king’s domain bears to a king.

about flux, impermanence. After he asks the monks “Are mental formations permanent or impermanent?” he gets the predictable reply: “Impermanent, O Lord.” Well, the Buddha goes on to ask, does it make sense to say of impermanent things “they are mine, this I am, this is my self”?

explanation, we’d need to delve into ideas about the self that were circulating in his day. But certainly, leaving his intellectual context aside, there’s a kind of commonsense appeal to his argument: We do tend to think of the self—the inner, real me—as something enduring, something that persists even as we grow from children to adults to senior citizens.

children into adults. We change on a moment-by-moment basis. And sometimes we change along dimensions

their intertemporal utility function, the rate at which

thought calls into question the existence of the self can be described partly as the workings of those modules. Seeing things in these terms helps illuminate a core paradox of Buddhist meditation practice: accepting that your self isn’t in control, and may in some sense not even exist, can put your self—or something like it—in control. This time-discounting experiment belongs

how their inclinations change. Often the takeaway is the same as it was in this experiment: something you might have thought was a pretty firm feature

felt more favorably about the museum, and more inclined to visit it, when given the first pitch, presumably because a state of fear inclines you to see crowds as safe havens. People who had been watching

know that we behave differently when in different moods, so it stands to reason that putting us in a romantic mood would change our behavior. But

you watch determines which subself, or module, controls your reaction to the ad. The romantic movie puts your “mate-acquisition” module in charge. The scary movie puts your “self-protection” module in charge.

this kind of language. The alternative way of describing the situation—saying that “I” act differently when in different “moods”—is just a way of evading the question he seems to have been asking: If you have different preferences from one moment to the next, then in what sense is it the same “you” from moment to moment? Isn’t this image of you exchanging one mood for another just a way of covering up the fact that today’s you and tomorrow’s you aren’t really the same you?

noting that over the past two decades a fair number of psychologists have come to agree with Kenrick and Griskevicius—and Kurzban and Gazzaniga from the previous chapter—that the dynamics of th...