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

by Robert Wright

Just what I experience, so interesting. I’m aware of this draw to ‘why won’t things just level off?’ It happens all the time.

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This is a reminder that natural selection didn’t design your mind to see the world clearly; it designed your mind to have perceptions and beliefs that would help take care of your genes.

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Modern life is full of emotional reactions that make little sense except in light of the environment in which our species evolved. You may be haunted for hours by some embarrassing thing you did on a public bus or an airplane, even though you’ll never again see the people who witnessed it and their opinions of you therefore have no consequence. Why would natural selection design organisms to feel discomfort that seems so pointless? Maybe because in the environment of our ancestors it wouldn’t have been pointless; in a hunter-gatherer society, you’re pretty much always performing in front of people you’ll see again and whose opinions therefore matter.

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By the way, this mismatch between our evolved nature and the environment in which we find ourselves isn’t just a modern phenomenon. For thousands of years, there have been human social environments that weren’t the ones we were designed for. The Buddha was born to a royal family, which means he lived in a society with clusters of population much bigger than a hunter-gatherer village. And though PowerPoint hadn’t been invented, there is evidence that people were being called on to speak before large audiences and that something like PowerPoint-apocalypse anxiety had taken shape.

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1. Our feelings weren’t designed to depict reality accurately even in our “natural” environment. Feelings were designed to get the genes of our hunter-gatherer ancestors into the next generation. If that meant deluding our ancestors—making them so fearful that they “see” a snake that isn’t actually there, say—so be it. This class of illusions, “natural” illusions, helps explain a lot of distortions in our apprehension of the world, especially the social world: warped ideas about ourselves, about our friends, our kin, our enemies, our casual acquaintances, and even strangers. (Which about covers it, right?) 2. The fact that we’re not living in a “natural” environment makes our feelings even less reliable guides to reality. Feelings that are designed to create illusions, such as seeing a snake that isn’t there, may at least have the virtue of increasing the organism’s prospects for surviving and reproducing. But the modern environment can take various kinds of feelings that served our ancestors in this Darwinian sense and render them counterproductive in the same sense—they may actually lower a person’s life expectancy. Violent rage and the yearnings of a sweet tooth are good examples. These feelings were once “true” at least in the pragmatic sense of guiding the organism toward behaviors that were in some sense good for it. But now they’re likely to mislead. 3. Underlying it all is the happiness delusion. As the Buddha emphasized, our ongoing attempts to feel better tend to...

By interrupting the workings of my default mode network, by “snapping out of it” and realizing that my mind was wandering and then returning to my breath, I was diluting the network’s dominance. As I got better at focusing on my breath for longer periods, this network would become less and less active. At least, that’s a pretty fair guess. Brain-scan studies have shown this happening in novice meditators. Such studies have also shown that highly adept meditators, people who have meditated for tens of thousands of hours and are in a whole ’nother league from me, exhibit dramatically subdued default mode networks while meditating.

This is really interesting. He’s finally explained why awareness stabilising work with the breath precedes work with the heart - one, then the other lead to a third element of the eightfold path.

In fact, there is no term in the entire text that is translated as “now” or “the present.”† This doesn’t mean that “staying in the present” wasn’t part of the experience of Buddhist meditators two millennia ago. If you focus on your breathing or on bodily sensations, as prescribed in ancient mindfulness texts, the present is where you will be. Still, if you want to go full-on Buddhist—if you want to take the red pill—you need to understand that staying in the present, though an inherent part of mindfulness meditation, isn’t the point of the exercise. It is the means to an end, not the end itself.

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Describing these aggregates precisely would take a chapter in itself, but for present purposes we can label them roughly as (1) the physical body (called “form” in this discourse), including such sense organs as eyes and ears; (2) basic feelings; (3) perceptions (of, say, identifiable sights or sounds); (4) “mental formations” (a big category that includes complex emotions, thoughts, inclinations, habits, decisions); and (5) “consciousness,” or awareness—notably, awareness of the contents of the other four aggregates.

So two of the properties commonly associated with a self—control and persistence through time—are found to be absent, not evident in any of the five components that seem to constitute human beings. This is the core of the argument the Buddha makes in this first and most famous discourse on not-self, and it’s commonly taken as the core Buddhist argument that the self doesn’t exist.

And this feels important because it’s the same argument Noah uses in Secular Buddhism. It’s transforming your identification with the four remaining aggregates through meditation, thus liberating consciousness.

We associate the self with control and with firm persistence through time, but on close inspection we turn out to be much less under control, and much more fluid, with a much less fixed identity, than we think.

But is “conscious motivation” really the right term? That could be taken to mean that the motivation originates with conscious volition. And this experiment suggests a different scenario: the actual brain machinery that translates incentive into motivation is the same regardless of whether you’re consciously aware of the incentive and consciously experiencing the translation; so maybe the conscious awareness doesn’t really add anything to the process. In other words, maybe it’s not so much “conscious motivation” as “consciousness of motivation.” With or without conscious awareness, the same physical motivational machinery seems to be doing the heavy lifting.†

So, all told, we’re under at least two kinds of illusions. 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 people we are—namely, capable and upstanding. You might call these two misconceptions the illusion about our selves and the illusion about ourselves. They work in synergy. The first illusion helps us convince the world that we are coherent, consistent actors: we don’t do things for no reason, and the reasons we do them make sense; if our behaviors merit credit or blame, there is an 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.

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All told, the division of labor among, and delineation among, the modules in our mind is much less clear-cut than the word modules suggests, and the extent of interaction among them is greater than the word suggests.

Of course, the men in these experiments didn’t see real mating opportunities; they just saw pictures of women. But in the ancestral environment there weren’t photographs, so any realistic image of a woman would have signified the actual presence of a woman. That’s why the minds of the men in this experiment could be “fooled” by mere pictures, even though the men “knew,” at a conscious level, that these women weren’t available. So this experiment is, among other things, another reminder that modules can get triggered not only without the conscious self doing the triggering but also without it having a clue as to the Darwinian logic behind the triggering.

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Indeed, it turns out there’s a fair amount of overlap between the default mode network and what brain scans have identified as the “theory of mind network”—the part of the brain involved in thinking about what other people are thinking.

When your mind is wandering, it may feel like, well, like your mind is wandering—like it’s strolling along the landscape of modules and sampling them, indulging one module for a while, then eventually moving on to another one. But another way to describe it is to say that, actually, the different modules are competing for your attention, and when the mind “wanders” from one module to another, what’s actually happening is that the second module has acquired enough strength to wrestle control of your consciousness away from the first module.

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Feelings are, among other things, your brain’s way of labeling the importance of thoughts, and importance (in natural selection’s somewhat crude sense of the term) determines which thoughts enter consciousness.

Feelings tell us what to think about, and then after all the thinking is done, they tell us what to do. Over the history of our evolutionary lineage, thinking has played a larger and larger role in action, but the thinking has always had both its beginning and its end in feelings.

So if you’re walking out of a store jamming a 3.5-ounce chocolate bar into your mouth and a passerby looks at you quizzically, you can say, “This is so I can get more work done this afternoon.” Presumably the passerby will then think more highly of you than if you’d said, “I’m out of control, okay?”

The point is just that it makes sense that natural selection would design a modular mind this way—that “winning” modules would amass more power when their judgment is vindicated. And note that the form vindication takes, in at least some cases, is sensual gratification. If the libidinous module counsels sexual assertion and this leads to an orgasm, then its counsel will carry more weight next time.

And I’ve suggested, more broadly, that the entire infrastructure of feelings should be viewed with a certain suspicion, given that it was built by natural selection, whose ultimate aim isn’t to foster clear perceptions and thoughts but rather to foster the kinds of perceptions and thoughts that have gotten genes spread in the past.

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Brexit/Brexiteers

one virtue of mindfulness meditation is that experiencing your feelings with care and clarity, rather than following them reflexively and uncritically, lets you choose which ones to follow—like, say, joy, delight, and love. And this selective engagement with feelings, this weakened obedience to them, can in principle include the feelings that shape the essence we see in things and people.

“But the tingling originates inside your skin; it’s part of you!” Well, yes, it’s inside my skin. But the whole question I’m raising is whether my skin is really as significant a boundary as we instinctively assume—whether it really makes sense to think of everything on the inside as me and everything on the outside as other. So you can’t just reiterate that instinctive assumption and put my question to rest.

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