Contemporary Philosophy of Mind and Buddhist ... - Wiley Online Library

Philosophy Compass 7/10 (2012): 741–751, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2012.00506.x

Contemporary Philosophy of Mind and Buddhist Thought John Spackman* Middlebury College

Abstract

Recent years have seen a growing interest in Buddhist thought as a potential source of alternative conceptions of the nature of the mind and the relation between the mental and the physical. This article considers and assesses three different models of what contemporary philosophy of mind can learn from Buddhist thought. One model, advocated by Alan Wallace, holds that we can learn from Buddhist meditation that both individual consciousness and the physical world itself emerge from a deeper, ‘‘primordial’’ consciousness. A second model, supported by Owen Flanagan, maintains that we should accept from Buddhist thought only what is compatible with physicalism, and thus draws from Buddhism only insights into moral psychology and spirituality. Evan Thompson has developed a third, phenomenological approach, which derives from Buddhism a non-dualistic account of the relation between the mental and the physical, dissolving the ‘‘explanatory gap’’ between them. I suggest that all of these models face significant challenges, and propose a different model derived from the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, which shows the potential to resolve some of the challenges facing contemporary theories of consciousness.

1. Introduction There has in recent years been a growing interest in traditional and contemporary Buddhist thought as a potential source for novel perspectives on the nature of consciousness and the mind. This interest has several sources. For philosophers of mind with a materialist inclination, Buddhism, as a religion that has no place for a monotheistic creator God and that in some of its forms eschews deities altogether, may offer a source of insight into ethical and spiritual issues related to the mind that is compatible with materialism. As Owen Flanagan recently put it, ‘‘Buddhism being intellectually deep, morally and spiritually serious but nontheistic and nondoctrinal…may well sit poised to be an attractor for the spiritually inclined naturalist’’ (Flanagan 2011: 64). But there has also been in recent philosophy of mind a resurgent interest in alternatives to materialism, and herein lies another source of contemporary attraction to Buddhist thought. The most prominent traditional alternative to materialism in Western philosophy of mind is the type of substance dualism advocated by Descartes, which views the mind or self as a substance – a concrete particular which persists through time and bears properties – that is immaterial, thinking, and non-extended, in contrast to material substances, which are non-thinking and extended. But many contemporary philosophers attracted to non-materialist views of the mind reject substance dualism due to the many problems traditionally associated with it. Buddhist theories of mind may thus be appealing because they resist straightforward materialism but also reject the view that the mind is an immaterial substance, since they repudiate the notion that there are substances quite generally, whether mental or material. Buddhism may thus also represent a source for non-materialist views of the mind different from those which have predominated in the West. ª 2012 The Author Philosophy Compass ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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This article will consider and assess several prominent ways in which contemporary philosophers have appealed to Buddhist thought to provide models of the nature of the mind and its relation to the physical world. The goal of the models we will consider, it should be emphasized, is not, or at any rate not only, to reconstruct the exact nature of any of the traditional Buddhist accounts of the mind. The aim of the models, and of this article, is rather to consider what can be learned from traditional Buddhist thought about how we might best think about the mind and its relation to the physical. It is also worth emphasizing that these models draw their views on the mind from many different strands of the variegated Buddhist tradition. The first model we will consider offers what I will call a ‘‘consciousness-based’’ view of the relation between mind and matter, akin to if not identical to some forms of Western idealism. The second is Flanagan’s straightforwardly materialist model, one that holds we should accept from Buddhist thought only what is compatible with materialism, but finds in it valuable insights into moral psychology and spirituality. Finally, we will consider a Buddhist-inspired phenomenological construal of the relation between the mental and the physical. I will suggest, however, that each of these proposals faces significant challenges, and will propose instead a different model derived from Buddhist thought which has the potential to resolve some of these challenges. Before we begin, a few words about some of the central views on the mind-body problem that will concern us. In contrast with substance dualism, property dualism maintains that although all substances (if there are any) are physical, nonetheless mental properties are irreducible to material properties. Materialist views typically proclaim that the mental is simply identical to the physical, but it is common to distinguish between two main kinds of identity theory. Type-identity theories hold that mental state or event types (kinds) are identical to physical state or event types. For instance the mental state of being in pain might – no doubt oversimplifying – be identical to being in a c-fiber stimulation state. More widely held at present, however, are token identity theories, which make no commitments as to the identity of mental types with physical types, but hold only that each mental state or event token (instance) of a given type is identical to a mental state or event token of some type. Pain might thus be ‘‘multiply realized’’ in physical state tokens of quite different types in different organisms. 2. A Consciousness-Based View The first model to be considered is one developed in recent years by Alan Wallace, which is based on certain traditions within Tibetan Buddhism, and bears close affinities with the views expressed by The Dalai Lama (2005). Wallace characterizes his view as rejecting all of the traditional Western doctrines of materialism, substance dualism, and idealism (Wallace 2007: 20). But like some forms of idealism, his account posits that the fundamental nature of the world is not distinct from a certain type of consciousness. His view appears to depart from idealism mainly in that for him in the ultimate nature of the world, consciousness and its object are one; but at any rate, this nature is not independent of consciousness. Wallace develops his account of the mind in the context of an overall critique of what he calls ‘‘scientific materialism’’. Scientific materialism comprises a set of beliefs including physicalism, the view that ‘‘the universe consists solely of configurations of matter and energy within space and time’’ (Wallace 2007: 33); reductionism, the claim that all phenomena (including mental processes) are explicable in terms of physical phenomena; and objectivism, the requirement that scientifically acceptable facts be empirically testable ª 2012 The Author Philosophy Compass ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


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and verifiable from a third-person perspective. Each of these principles he regards as unsubstantiated, and as incapable of giving an adequate account of the mind. Wallace supports this position mainly by reference to two kinds of argument. The first draws on the well-known philosophical claim that there is an ‘‘explanatory gap’’ between the mental and the physical, that is, that mental events and processes can never be satisfactorily explained in terms of neural events and processes (Levine 1983). Wallace argues that physical processes can be understood from the third person perspective of scientific inquiry; but the nature of mental processes can only be known from the first person point of view; so there is thus an explanatory gap between the two. One of the best ways of making this idea vivid is by means of an example from Jackson (1982). Suppose it was discovered that there is an individual, Fred, who can perceive not only all the colors that normal humans can see, but also a different color they cannot see. We could, Jackson argues, learn all we like about the neural processes in Fred underlying this ability, the reflectance properties of the relevant objects, and so on, but none of this would ever tell us what it is like for Fred to see that color.1 According to Wallace, the existence of the explanatory gap directly demonstrates the falsity of the reductionist claim. Further, if mental processes can only be understood from a subjective perspective, the third-person requirement of objectivity will leave out much of our mental states. And most importantly, the explanatory gap shows, contra physicalism, that mental processes and physical processes cannot be identical, by which I take him to mean token identical. As he puts it, ‘‘if certain neuronal processes are equated with their concurrent mental processes, what enables them to take on this dual nature’’ (Wallace 2007: 15)? Once it is acknowledged that third-person descriptions cannot tell us the full nature of consciousness, the door is opened to using first-person experience – specifically, meditative experience – to provide fuller insights. This is the second main type of argument Wallace presents for his position, and it is on this foundation that he bases his specific account of the relation between the mental and the physical. What advanced meditative techniques for cultivating sustained, high-resolution attention reveal about the nature of consciousness, Wallace suggests, is embodied in the views of the Great Perfection (Dzogchen) school of Tibetan Buddhism. According to this doctrine, there is a tripartite division of levels of consciousness. The first level is the ordinary consciousness or ‘‘psyche’’ of everyday experience – the mental images, thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and so on, specific to each individual. The ground from which this consciousness emerges in each individual, however, is the ‘‘substrate consciousness’’ (alayavijn˜ana). Though the specific mental contents of the psyche are causally conditioned by the brain, the body, and the environment, they are not identical to anything physical; their fundamental nature is that of the consciousness from which they emerge. The object of this substrate consciousness, what it is aware of, is the substrate (alaya), which Wallace describes as the immaterial, ‘‘objective, empty space of the mind’’ (Wallace 2007: 18). This substrate consciousness is not to be confused with the Western idea of a soul, since it is not a substance, but ‘‘a stream of arising and passing moments of awareness.’’ The substrate consciousness represents, however, only the ‘‘relative’’ ground of consciousness, the ground of each individual stream of consciousness. The absolute ground of consciousness – the third level – is primordial consciousness (jn˜ana), which is wholly undifferentiated, without qualities or conceptualizations. The object of this form of consciousness is the absolute space of phenomena (dharmadhatu). But at this level, subject and object are entirely transcended, so this absolute space and the primordial ª 2012 The Author Philosophy Compass ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd



consciousness form a unity. From the dharmadhatu ⁄ primordial consciousness emerge not only the phenomena of individual conscious experience, but also all of the phenomena that make up the external world of space, time, and matter. Since in Wallace’s conception, all phenomena in the universe arise from this source, all phenomena have the nature of primordial consciousness. But Wallace also emphasizes that at the relative level, the processes of the individual psyche are not token identical with neurological processes. For this reason, this view is susceptible to some, though not all, of the difficulties that face Cartesian substance dualism, most prominently objections concerning how causal relations between mental processes and physical processes are possible. The most basic problem here is often referred to as the problem of causal interaction. If mental processes are immaterial, it is hard to see what sort of mechanism could allow them to interact causally with the material processes of the body. Wallace might – perhaps – be able to avoid this challenge by pointing out that on his view matter itself ultimately has the same nature as consciousness, so that his view would have no more (or less) difficulty in accounting for how mind and matter could interact than would the materialist view that both share the nature of matter. A more fundamental causal problem facing views like Wallace’s, however, is what has sometimes been called the ‘‘exclusion’’ problem (see especially Kim 2005). This problem is generated by the claim that mental events are token distinct from physical events, which Wallace accepts, together with two other widely accepted principles, the principle of the causal closure of the physical and the principle of non-overdetermination. The principle of causal closure is that every physical event has a set of physical causes sufficient to bring it about. For instance, if I touch a hot stove and jerk my hand away, we generally suppose that there is a sequence of neurological causes which are sufficient to cause me to remove my hand. If this is the case, however, and if the mental event of my feeling pain on this occasion is token distinct from any or all of these physical causes, then it looks like the pain itself can do no causal work in making me move my hand – it is ‘‘excluded’’ from causal relevance. This also assumes, of course, the principle of non-overdetermination, that physical events do not generally have more than one sufficient cause. But this principle seems widely borne out by experience (Kim 1993). Wallace’s response to this problem is to deny the principle of causal closure. This principle, he suggests, is not itself supported by any experimental evidence, and therefore, like scientific materialism itself, is merely a ‘‘metaphysical’’ assumption (Wallace 2007: 32–37). The difficulty with this response is that, if what is meant by calling the principle a metaphysical assumption is that it is rationally unjustified, this hardly follows from the evident fact that it is not itself supported by scientific experiments. The principle has been widely viewed as supported rather by more general theoretical considerations, most importantly the inductive one that it has generally worked so well in the past. Explanations in terms of physical causation have succeeded in making sense of a great variety of phenomena, including many that were at one time widely thought not to be physically explicable. This success arguably gives us good reason to accept the principle as a working hypothesis. The exclusion problem thus represents, I think, a serious challenge to non-materialist accounts of the mind like Wallace’s. 3. Buddhism Naturalized In sharp contrast with the consciousness-based view, several contemporary philosophers have proposed appropriations of Buddhist thought which are broadly physicalist (e.g. Siderits 2001; Flanagan 2002, 2011; Garfield forthcoming). Though a variety of difª 2012 The Author Philosophy Compass ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd



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ferent views of this kind have been proposed, I will focus on the account offered by Owen Flanagan, who argues for a view that takes from Buddhist accounts of the mind only what is compatible with physicalism – that is, what he calls ‘‘Buddhism naturalized’’. Flanagan’s rejection of non-physicalist Buddhist views of the mind derives from several sources. Most importantly for our purposes, he appeals to the causal exclusion argument discussed above (Flanagan 2011: 65). But he also rejects both of the main arguments that Wallace relies on, the arguments from the explanatory gap and from meditative experience. He raises doubts, on epistemological grounds, about the appeal to meditative experience as a source of knowledge about the mind (Flanagan 2011; Chapter 3). As to the explanatory gap, Flanagan’s work embodies a perspective that has emerged in the last 15 years or so, of which Wallace seems unaware. Flanagan calls his view ‘‘subjective realism’’ (Flanagan 2002, 2011), but the general approach is most widely known under the banner of the ‘‘phenomenal concepts strategy.’’2 The phenomenal concepts strategy seeks to deflect the explanatory gap argument against physicalism, along with related arguments, by explaining how the explanatory gap can arise in a way compatible with physicalism. What explains why there is an explanatory gap between consciousness and the physical, on this view, is that we possess two irreducibly different ways of knowing conscious states, by means of what David Papineau (2002) calls material concepts and phenomenal concepts. Material concepts are concepts of conscious states as items knowable from a third-person perspective, for instance as certain physiological or functional states of the nervous system. Phenomenal concepts by contrast are what we use when we attend to what it’s like to be in a conscious state from the firstperson point of view, by introspection. These two types of concepts are however simply two different modes of access to physical states, states of the nervous system. The phenomenal concept of painfulness and the material concept of c-fiber stimulation are two modes of access to the relevant state of the nervous system. But because the two kinds of concepts are inferentially isolated from each other, so that we cannot infer what it is like to feel pain from the knowledge that pain is c-fiber stimulation, or vice versa, there is an explanatory gap between pain and c-fiber stimulation. Since both kinds of concepts refer to physical states, and what it is to possess these concepts is itself physicalistically explicable, there is nothing about the explanatory gap that is incompatible with physicalism. Given this physicalist orientation, what Flanagan seeks to draw from Buddhist theories of mind is not alternatives to materialism, but what he views as a sophisticated moral psychology and an insightful account of the conditions for human flourishing. Since my main concern here is with the relevance of Buddhist ideas to the mind-body problem, I will not dwell on the ethical claims Flanagan develops. I would suggest, however, that there is room to question whether the notion of Buddhism naturalized underestimates the insight that we can gain from Buddhist views for how to resolve the difficulties facing contemporary accounts of the mind. There are challenges that confront physicalist accounts of the mind, even those which adopt something like the phenomenal concepts strategy, which a different Buddhist-inspired account might help to resolve. The challenges I have in mind have been raised by a number of philosophers in response to the phenomenal concepts defense of physicalism.3 I will here emphasize two problems in particular. The first of these, developed for instance by Levine (2007) and Chalmers (2007), questions whether the phenomenal concepts theorist can really account for the explanatory gap in a way compatible with physicalism. The problem, in essence, is that if phenomenal concepts are ‘‘thick’’ enough to do the job they were supposed to do – that is, account for the kind of knowledge made possible by phenomenal consciousness – they will not themselves be physically explicable. Thus a new explanatory ª 2012 The Author Philosophy Compass ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd



gap arises between physical states and phenomenal concepts themselves. Chalmers (2007) raises this problem by asking, in effect, whether it is conceivable that there could be zombies – beings physically identical to humans but without any phenomenally conscious experience at all – who lacked our phenomenal concepts.4 This poses a dilemma for the phenomenal concepts strategist. If the theorist answers yes, then phenomenal concepts will not themselves be physically explicable, for the fact that we have phenomenal concepts and zombies do not would not be explicable by any physical difference between us. If the theorist answers no, then phenomenal concepts cannot account for what is distinctive about our epistemic situation in regard to consciousness, for the zombies would have our phenomenal concepts, but lack phenomenal experience. The second problem for advocates of the phenomenal concepts strategy concerns the response they typically give to another type of anti-physicalist argument, what are often called conceivability arguments. According to one such argument (e.g. Chalmers 1996), it is conceivable that there could be a being who was physically identical to me but whose color experience was systematically inverted from mine, so that what looks red to me would look green to him, and similarly for all other colors. If such a being is conceivable, so the argument goes, it is metaphysically possible. But if it is metaphysically possible, then conscious experience does not metaphysically supervene on the physical, since we have here a case of two physically identical beings with different conscious experiences. A similar argument is sometimes offered for the possibility of zombies. Assuming that physicalism requires the metaphysical supervenience of consciousness on the physical, then, physicalism is false. The usual reply to such arguments among phenomenal concepts strategists is to accept that the inverted spectrum scenario is conceivable, but to deny that it is metaphysically possible (e.g. Papineau 2002). The idea is that we can appeal to the inferential isolation of phenomenal concepts and material concepts to explain why such scenarios are conceivable by us – why we can imagine them – thus relieving us of any necessity to suppose that such things are really possible. This reply does not, of course, offer a positive argument for physicalism, but only serves to deflect the conceivability arguments against it. It assumes physicalism itself to be supported by independent arguments, most importantly the argument from mental causation and arguments based on theoretical and ontological simplicity, and there is no reason to think the conceivability arguments have been deflected unless one accepts these physicalist arguments. In assessing the conceivability arguments, then, we are thus ultimately left weighing the arguments for physicalism against the apparent cogency of the conceivability arguments themselves. To my mind this is, at any rate, not a dispute decisively won by physicalism. I do not take these difficulties for the phenomenal concepts defense of physicalism to be conclusive; there have, of course, been a variety of physicalist replies, though I cannot consider these here.5 But I do take them to raise difficult challenges for physicalism, and to motivate the search for alternatives that might be able to avoid some of these challenges. 4. A Phenomenological Approach A different way of drawing on Buddhist thought is offered by several recent philosophers who adopt a phenomenological approach to understanding the mind (e.g. Varela et al. 1991; Lutz and Thompson 2003; Thompson 2007). Perhaps the most fully developed view of this kind is offered by Evan Thompson. In their book The Embodied Mind, Thompson, Francisco Varela, and Eleanor Rosch appeal to Buddhist thought precisely in ª 2012 The Author Philosophy Compass ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd



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order to circumvent what they see as the Cartesian dichotomy between materialism and dualism. The strand of Buddhist thought from which they draw inspiration, in particular, is that of the Indian Madhyamaka school, founded in the second century C.E. by Nagarjuna, which emphasizes the interdependence and non-duality of all phenomena. These teachings they regard as having important parallels with the phenomenological tradition of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. From this perspective, the mistake of materialism is in thinking that objects in the world are wholly independent of mental construction; the parallel error of idealism is to suppose consciousness or the mind can exist independently of the world. Rather, mind and world arise in dependence on each other, in the causal process Buddhists call dependent co-arising. The enactive approach to cognition the authors develop involves several different claims, but most important for our purposes is the idea that ‘‘cognition is not the representation of a pregiven world by a pregiven mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs’’ (Varela et al. 1991: 9). The enactive approach has been more fully developed in recent years by Thompson, who views it as a way of sidestepping Chalmers (1996) ‘‘hard problem’’ of how consciousness can arise from the physical world (Thompson 2007, Chapter 8). The notion of an unbridgeable explanatory gap is, on this picture, a byproduct of the Cartesian conceptualization of consciousness and the life of the body as necessarily excluding each other, of consciousness as inner experience accessible only to first-person reflection, and life as external, mechanistic function. Thompson argues, by contrast, that a living being always embodies a kind of interiority, an interiority of its own ‘‘immanent purposiveness’’, and it is out of this interiority that consciousness emerges. Consciousness is an emergent process that arises from the self-organizing interactions of brain, body, and environment. There is, he allows, a certain kind of ‘‘explanatory gap’’ in accounting for how a ‘‘lived body’’ with feeling and intentional activity emerges from a ‘‘living body’’, but this is no longer the absolute, unbridgeable explanatory gap that has preoccupied many philosophers (p. 236). The enactive approach has been controversial on a number of different fronts. Thompson takes the idea that consciousness is an emergent process to commit him to a certain kind of ‘‘downward causation’’, and many philosophers, notably Jaegwon Kim, have been skeptical about the idea of downward causation.6 More importantly for our purposes, however, it might be questioned whether Thompson’s perspective can avoid an unbridgeable explanatory gap as easily as he claims. If all life involves a kind of interiority, an at least rudimentary sense of bodily self that makes the environment a place of significance for the organism (p. 158), we might ask whether there isn’t an explanatory gap between this basic notion of interiority and the physical world. Either there is something that it is like for the organism to have this kind of interiority, or there is not. If there is, it might be questioned whether it is possible to explain what it is like for a given organism to have its kind of interiority wholly in terms of the physical and functional characteristics of the organism and its interactions with the environment. If there is not, then it is not clear why there wouldn’t be an unbridgeable explanatory gap between the interiority of conscious experience and the lower-level interiority. Contrary to Thompson’s assumption, it seems that the challenge of the explanatory gap does not arise only if we accept a Cartesian conception of phenomenal consciousness as an intrinsic property of mental states with only contingent logical and conceptual connections to the body and the world. Even so paradigmatic a proponent of the explanatory gap as Chalmers, for instance, holds that consciousness is representational rather than intrinsic, and that cognition and mental states extend into the world in an important way.7 The explanatory gap may thus not be so easy to dismiss as Thompson maintains. ª 2012 The Author Philosophy Compass ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd



5. Neutral Non-Dualism Though the three views of what we can learn from Buddhism about the relation between mind and world all have their difficulties, there is another model of this relation that can be drawn from Buddhist thought that may have the potential to resolve many of these challenges. I’ll call this conception of the relation between the mental and the physical neutral non-dualism. The name is meant to call to mind the ‘‘neutral monism’’ proposed by Bertrand Russell and others, which holds that reality is all of one kind, but that its intrinsic nature is properly describable neither as mental nor as physical.8 But neutral non-dualism also differs from neutral monism in important respects. I cannot give anything like a full account of this view here, but will merely sketch its general features. The locus of Buddhist thought on which this view draws is, once again, the Madhyamaka school and especially the work of Nagarjuna, but the type of interpretation of Nagarjuna on which it depends is somewhat different from that developed by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch. There are several variants of this style of interpretation, but for present purposes I will characterize the view quite generally.9 In his central work, Mulamadhyamakakarika, Nagarjuna draws an important distinction between two levels of truth, paramarthasatya or ultimate truth, and samvrtisatya or conventional truth. The ultimate _ empty of svabhava, which I will here transtruth for Nagarjuna is that all phenomena_ are late as intrinsic nature, that is, a nature possessed independently of other entities, causes, parts, and so on.10 Nagarjuna’s critique is directed not only at the view that objects are svabhava, but at the view that properties and events are as well. On the interpretation in question, the ultimate truth about these things their lack of intrinsic nature cannot be adequately conceptualized or positively described, though it can be known directly through experience. No positive statements at all can be asserted about reality at the ultimate level.11 To make assertions at this level would be to characterize things in terms of their nature as svabhava, and so no positive assertions can be made at this level, not even that things exist, though not that they do not exist either. This perspective is thus akin to monistic views in both of the senses in which that term is commonly used, as meaning that reality contains only one type of thing, and as meaning that reality is undifferentiated. But in both senses, Nagarjuna’s view is better described as non-dualistic: properly, we cannot assert that reality is one, only that it is not two, and while we cannot assert that it is differentiated, neither can we assert that it is undifferentiated. By contrast, at the level of conventional truth, we can affirm that things exist, precisely as dependent on their parts, their causes, and in Nagarjuna’s view, on conceptualuzation as well. The conventional truth includes all of the regularities of our everyday experience, that grass is green, snow is white, and so on. On the present interpretation, however, statements at the conventional level are viewed as containing a pragmatic element, in the broad sense that although their acceptability is constrained by experiential regularities, because they cannot be grounded in any ultimately existing independent reality, their acceptability will also be in part a function of our context-dependent interests and goals.12 What the neutral non-dualist model suggests we can draw from Nagarjuna is, in short, that at the ultimate level the relationship between the mental and the physical may not be properly characterizable in terms of either materialism, dualism, or idealism (or a consciousness-based view). Notice that the central arguments presented for the first two views we considered above, those of Wallace and Flanagan, were in fact arguments against the opposing views. Flanagan argues that substance dualism, property dualism, and idealism cannot be right, most importantly, because they cannot account for mental causation; hence he concludes physicalism must be true. Wallace argues that physicalism cannot be ª 2012 The Author Philosophy Compass ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd



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right, most importantly, because it cannot account for the explanatory gap and related phenomena; on this basis together with the evidence of meditative experience, he adopts the consciousness-based view. Neutral non-dualism suggests that we should accept the negative portions of both of these arguments, but reject their positive conclusions. That is, we can know both that dualism and consciousness-based views are false because of their difficulty in accommodating mental causation, and that physicalism is false because of its difficulty in accommodating the explanatory gap. The proposal is that we leave it at that, and accept that reality cannot be characterized in terms of any of these views. Indeed in its strongest form, neutral non-dualism would hold that the relation between mind and matter is simply unintelligible, something that cannot be conceptualized at all. Neutral non-dualism can thus accommodate both the facts of mental causation and the explanatory gap, for unlike physicalism, dualism, and consciousness-based views, it makes no ontological commitments that are incompatible with these facts. Neutral non-dualism does however supply an account of why it is that the ultimate relation between mind and matter cannot be construed in terms of materialism, dualism, or any consciousness-based view. On this account, all such views presuppose that there are certain things that are svabhava, have intrinsic natures, and since in fact no phenomena are svabhava, all of these views fail to capture reality. It might be questioned whether materialism is necessarily committed to the view that higher level physical properties, for instance neurological properties, have ‘‘an intrinsic nature’’ in any sense. But even if it is not, it is plausible that materialism must either accept that some fundamental particles or properties have intrinsic natures, or else give up the idea that reality is differentiated and move toward some form of monism or non-dualism. In a similar way, broadly idealistic views might be seen as positing that mental substances, properties, or events have an intrinsic nature. Wallace, although he is at pains to reject the view that there are substances which are svabhava, nonetheless speaks of the dharmadhatu which is identical to primordial consciousness as timeless and internally undifferentiated, and it is thus hard to see why it should not qualify as an entity with an intrinsic nature (Wallace 2007: 20). We have been talking about the relationship between the mental and the physical at the level of ultimate truth, but it is important to emphasize that neutral non-dualism would allow that at the conventional level, it is possible to say a great deal about this relationship, and indeed this is just what cognitive science and neuroscience seek to do. As noted above, however, statements at this level must be taken as containing a pragmatic element in the specified sense. Neutral non-dualism as I have described it is in some ways reminiscent of the ‘‘New Mysterianism’’ proposed by Colin McGinn, and yet it is importantly different (McGinn 2000). Both views hold that we cannot grasp the ultimate nature of the relation between mind and matter. But for McGinn, the reason for this inability is the limitation of our cognitive powers. There is in fact an answer to the question of whether mental events and physical events are identical or distinct, it’s just that this fact lies beyond our cognitive abilities. According to neutral non-dualism the relation between the mental and the physical is not just unknowable by us, but unintelligible. The reason we can’t answer the above question is, rather, that it is badly formed: it presupposes that some phenomena have intrinsic natures. Though neutral non-dualism can as we have seen accommodate both mental causation and the explanatory gap, it might be thought to have significant downsides. Most obviously, it leaves the ultimate nature of the relation between mind and matter unexplained and perhaps inexplicable, and it may thus be susceptible to the kind of charge often leveled against McGinn’s New Mysterianism, that it gives up on the struggle for understanding too early. It might also be questioned whether it is really plausible that ª 2012 The Author Philosophy Compass ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd



there are no substances, properties, or events with intrinsic natures. These are important questions which cannot be addressed here. It is worth emphasizing however that there is considerable contemporary debate about what the intrinsic properties of the world might be, and whether there are any (e.g. Blackburn 1990; Esfield 2003; Heil 2003; Cameron 2008). David Chalmers (1996) suggests, following Russell (1927), that even physics does not tell us the intrinsic properties of things, since even basic properties like mass and charge are implicitly relational. Others have questioned whether the notion of an intrinsic property is even coherent (Blackburn 1990). The idea that there might in fact be no intrinsic properties, is at any rate a live option. Given the ability of the neutral non-dualist account to avoid many of the challenges facing other views, it thus seems an alternative worth considering. Short Biography John Spackman is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at Middlebury College. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University, as well as an M.A. in Religion, focusing on Buddhist Philosophy, from Columbia University. His central areas of research include the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of perception (especially debates about conceptual vs. nonconceptual content), theories of concepts, and Buddhist philosophy. He has published articles in such journals as Philosophical Studies and Philosophy East and West. Notes * Correspondence: Department of Philosophy, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT 05753, USA. Email: [email protected]. 1

Jackson (1982) actually uses this example to support not the existence of an explanatory gap, but his closely related ‘‘knowledge argument’’ against physicalism. See for instance Loar (1997), Papineau (2002), Tye (2000), Sundstro¨m (2011). This is the type of view that Chalmers (2002) calls ‘‘type-B materialism’’. 3 I will for present purposes set aside difficulties which arise for physicalist views which deny the explanatory gap, that is, views which adopt what Chalmers (2002) calls ‘‘type-A materialism’’. 4 Note that Chalmers maintains this argument does not depend on the metaphysical possibility of zombies, but only on their conceivability. 5 For responses to Chalmers’ and Levine’s objections to the phenomenal concepts strategy, see for instance Papineau (2007) and Balog (2012). 6 Kim (1993, 1999). For Thompson’s response to Kim, see Thompson (2007), pp. 431–41. 7 For Chalmers’ version of representationalism, see Chalmers (2004). Chalmers refers to his conception of how cognition and mental states are not independent of the world as ‘‘active externalism’’ (Clark and Chalmers 1998). 8 See Russell (1927), Lockwood (1989), Heil (2003), Heil (2004). 9 The type of interpretation I have in mind is a quite broad one to which a number of contemporary interpreters would subscribe. It encompasses both what I call in Spackman forthcoming the ‘‘anti-essentialist’’ interpretation proposed by Garfield (1995), and the somewhat different ‘‘conceptualist’’ interpretation I argue for there. 10 For a clear discussion of some different possible translations of svabhava, see Westerhoff (2009), Chapter 2. 11 One dissenter from this view among those who adopt broadly the kind of interpretation under discussion is Jay Garfield. See Garfield and Priest (2002). 12 (Citation deleted for blind review.) This is not, it should be emphasized, to attribute to Nagarjuna anything like the classical pragmatic views of meaning or truth adopted by James or Dewey. 2

Works Cited Balog, Katalin. ‘In Defense of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy.’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (2012): 1–23.

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