Physicalism and Beyond: Flanagan, Buddhism, and Consciousness

Matt MacKenzie
Colorado State University
DRAFT

In The Bodhisattvas Brain: Buddhism Naturalized, Owen Flanagan undertakes a

project of what he calls cosmopolitan philosophy, with an aim to develop and
interrogate a naturalized Buddhism. Cosmopolitan philosophy, for Flanagan, involves an
on-going practice of, reading and living and speaking across different traditions as open,
non-committal, energized by an ironic or skeptical attitude about all the forms of life
being expressed, embodied, and discussed, including ones own . . . (Flanagan 2011, 2).
A project of naturalization requires a conception of naturalism that can serve as a
hermeneutic and philosophical standard against which certain things may be judged
naturalistically acceptable or unacceptable. To his credit, Flanagan admits that
naturalism is a vague concept, but its basic motto, he says, is Just say no to the
supernatural. That is: what there is, and all there is, is natural stuff, and everything that
happens has some set of natural causes that produce italthough we may not be able to
figure out what these causes are or were (Flanagan 2011, 2). On Flanagans account,
Buddhism naturalized is primarily a Buddhism, without the mind-numbing and
wishful hocus-pocus such as rebirth, a karmic system . . . , without nirvana, without
bodhisattvas flying on lotus leaves, . . . without nonphysical states of mind, . . .
(Flanagan 2011, 3). Instead, he sets out to sketch a version of Buddhism (or a new view
inspired by it) that is consistent with neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory and scientific

materialism, including neurophysicalism or the view that mental events are brain
events (Flanagan 2011, 3). Why bother sketching a naturalized Buddhism? According to
Flanagan, naturalized Buddhism (along with Confucianism) offers, an interesting,
possibly useful way of conceiving the human predicament, of thinking about meaning for
finite material beings living in a material world (Flanagan 2011, 6).
For those of us who are committed to practicing cosmopolitan philosophy and
who are sympathetic to Buddhism in theory and practice, there is much to applaud in
Flanagans version of naturalized Buddhism. In particular, his engagement with Buddhist
thought and practice as part of the cross-cultural, interdisciplinary study of human
flourishing, or eudaimonics as he calls it, strikes me as an important and largely
successful example of cosmopolitan philosophy. Moreover, for many of us who are
sympathetic to and influenced by Buddhist thought, traditional beliefs about rebirth and
cosmic bodhisattvas are not really live optionsto say nothing of hell realms, hungry
ghosts, or Mount Meru! So I am in substantial agreement that a philosophically viable
contemporary Buddhist philosophy should just say no to the supernatural. Yet, there is
inner tension within Flanagans naturalizing project. On the one hand, he wants to pursue
a cosmopolitan project that involves an ironic or skeptical attitude about all the forms of
life . . . including ones own (Flanagan 2011, 2). On the other hand, he wants to make
Buddhism both interesting and safe for naturalistically inclined analytic philosophers.
This creates a dialogical asymmetry in which Flanagans own naturalism and scientific
materialism become the standards of what is philosophically acceptable. Indeed, it
appears that, on Flanagans view, rejection of nonphysical states of mind and acceptance

of (at least) the token-identity of mental events and brain events marks the boundary of
an acceptable contemporary account of mind.
However, classical Buddhist philosophers rejected materialism on philosophical,
not merely dogmatic, grounds. In contemporary terms, Buddhist philosophers saw that
phenomenal consciousness, intentionality, and mental causation present serious problems
for materialism. These considerations, among others, lead many Buddhist thinkers to
endorse an event dualism along with a type of phenomenological psychology geared
toward describing and classifying the basic features and connections that constitute the
flow of conscious mental life. So, rather than dismissing Buddhist anti-materialist
accounts of mind as simply hocus-pocus, in this chapter I want to take up the question
of whether and how these views might inform a naturalistic Buddhist philosophy. The
question, then, is whether a naturalistic Buddhism requires some form of
neurophysicalism. Ill argue that it does not, by way of examining two distinct versions of
naturalistic, but non-physicalist accounts of consciousness reconstructed1 from the Indian
Buddhist tradition. The first, drawing on the work of Dharmakrti, is a form of trope
dualism. The second, drawing on the work of ntarakita, is a form of pragmatic
pluralism that gives a central place to consciousness. And while these two accounts are
distinct, and in some important respects incompatible, what they have in common is the
idea that consciousness is both non-physical and fully natural.

Whose Buddhism, Which Naturalism?

Both Buddhism and naturalism cover quite a lot of ground. The Buddhism of
Shinran is not the Buddhism of ntideva and the naturalism of Dewey is not that of

Dennett. For my purposes here, I will focus on classical Indian Buddhist philosophy.
Dharmakrtis thought is most closely associated with pramavda, the Indian
philosophical discourse devoted to (the means of) valid cognition, but covering what in
Western philosophy we would call epistemology, logic, metaphysics, philosophy of
mind, and philosophy of language. ntarakita is a later syncretic thinker who drew
together strands of Yogcra, pramavda, and Madhyamaka thought.
As for naturalism, diversity abounds. On Flanagans view, the naturalist is
committed to the rejection of the supernatural. But what counts as supernatural? Flanagan
writes:
According to [the] objectionable (and not unfamiliar) form of
supernaturalism, (i) there exists a supernatural being or beings or
power(s) outside the natural world; (ii) this being or power has causal
commerce with this world; and (iii) the grounds for belief in both the
supernatural being and its causal commerce cannot be seen, discovered, or
inferred by way of any known and reliable epistemic methods (Flanagan
2006, 433).

Of course, the above definition uses both natural and supernatural and so cant give us
a rigorous definition of the supernatural without first fixing the content of the natural.
Here I suggest we think about the natural in terms of causal and nomological closure.
Nature is a system of causes that is understandable in terms of natural laws.2 A
supernatural being or force would exist outside this network and potentially intervene in
it. Minimally, to be a naturalist is to hold that we have no compelling reason to believe in

anything supernatural and to strive to account for the phenomena we encounter in the
world as (directly or indirectly) part of the causal fabric of this natural world.3 It follows,
for the naturalist, that we are natural beings and that consciousness, whether physical or
not, is a fully natural aspect of the world.
Within this basic commitment to just say no to the supernatural, we can discern
a spectrum of positions. At one end, we find reductive scientific naturalism. Roughly,
this the view that, (i) all real entities and properties are reducible to the basic entities and
properties of the natural sciences (or just physics); (ii) nature is (in principle)
exhaustively captured in the scientific image; (iii) that scientific inquiry is the only
legitimate means of objective knowledge; and (iv) that philosophy is continuous with
science. At the other end is liberal naturalism that, while denying the supernatural, rejects
or weakens (i-iv). That is, it is a form of non-reductive naturalism that rejects epistemic
and methodological scientism. I take Flanagans own naturalism to be on the liberal end
of the spectrum and will presuppose in what follows that a naturalized Buddhism need
only be committed to liberal naturalism.
The issue, then, is whether the liberal naturalist must (or should) be a physicalist.
Flanagans liberal naturalism is also a form of non-reductive physicalism and he is, to say
the least, suspicious of non-physicalist views of mind. He writes:
Regarding mind, it is true that immaterial mental properties are not
completely ruled out by mind science. But the inference to the best
explanation (aka abduction) based on everything we know, taking all the
evidence and all reasonable hypothesis into account, is that there are no
such things. The reason has to do with mental causation. If mental

eventsfor example, intentions to actare, as they seem, causally

efficacious, then the best explanation is that they are neural events. This is
neurophysicalism, the thesis that mental events are brain events or, at
least, bodily events, and that the subjective character of experience is
explained by the way nervous systems are connected to the persons that
house them (Flanagan 2011, 65-66).

So neurophysicalism is committed to the token-identity of mental and neural or bodily

events. It should be noted at the outset, though, that Flanagan slides from talk of
immaterial properties to talk of immaterial events in this passage. However, many
property dualists are event moniststhat is, they hold that a single event can instantiate
both physical and (non-physical) mental properties. In any case, Flanagan also endorses
what he calls subjective realism, the view that, sentient beings have subjective
perspectives on their own being and nature, whichtheir nature, that isis part of the
real, physical fabric of things, not exhausted by the objective perspective (Flanagan
2011, 66). He is thus non-reductionist about the mental, including subjectivity, and yet
physicalist in that mental events and properties just are physical events and properties.
Now any contemporary philosophy of consciousness must come face to face with
the hard problem of consciousness and the problem of mental causation. The hard
problem is the problem of why and how there is phenomenal consciousness. The problem
is so hard because there is a fundamental explanatory gap between our third-person
(neurological, causal, functional) accounts of the body and brain and our first-person
account of phenomenal experience. No matter how much more we learn or in how fined-

grained the detail of our accounts of neural events, it still makes sense to ask why these
events are correlated with conscious experience, and indeed, why there is any experience
at all. As it stands, not only do we not have a way to bridge the explanatory gap, we
arent even sure what such a bridge could be. Realism about phenomenal consciousness
combined with recognition of the hard problem pulls in the direction of non-physicalism.
That is, given the undeniability of consciousness and the absence of any epistemically
transparent account of how it relates to the physical, we have reason to believe that the
explanatory gap reflects an ontological gap.
The problem of mental causation is the problem of explaining (or explaining
away) how mental events can be part of the causal fabric of the world. Intuitively,
desires, pains, beliefs, and perceptions are causally efficacious. And yet, many hold that
every physical event has a sufficient physical cause. Thus when I raise my hand it
appears to be the case that there is a sufficient physiological cause for this event. But if
the hand raising can be explained purely physiologically, then what explanatory role is
there for my beliefs and desires? It is very hard to see how mental events qua mental can
play a non-redundant role in explaining the behavior of sentient beings. Unlike the hard
problem, then, the problem of mental causation pulls in the direction of physicalism. This
is because, as Flanagan argues, it seems that the only way to account for the causal
efficacy of mental events is to identify them with physical events. If mental events just
are neural events, the thinking goes, then theres no mystery about how they can be the
cause of other physical events. One problem here, however, is that, as Jaegwon Kim has
argued, the problem of mental causation pulls in the direction of reductive physicalism.
That is, even if one affirms the token-identity of mental and physical events, it is the

event qua physical (i.e., understood purely in terms of neurophysiology) that is doing to
the work and it remains unclear how the event qua mental is causally relevant. The only
way out, the argument goes, is to give a reductive account of the mental in physical
terms. Thus, as a non-reductionist about the mental, Flanagan too faces the causal
exclusion problem. Moreover, given the explanatory gap, the affirmation that mental
events just are physical events does not in fact explain how they could be. A deep tension
in any non-reductive physicalist view is how to square the irreducibility of the mental
with the causal closure and sufficiency of the physical.

A Neo-Dharmakrtian Dualism
Buddhist thought has never been friendly to materialism. Indeed, in Indian
philosophy in general materialism was widely associated with moral and spiritual
nihilism. From a traditional Buddhist perspective, in so far as materialism (as represented
by the Crvka school in India) called into question the causal efficacy of the mental
treating it as an epiphenomenon of its material constituentsboth morality and spiritual
transformation were threatened. Morality was threatened because, on this view, the moral
quality of an action was primarily determined by its motive or intention (cetan), which
requires that motives can be the primary causes of actions. Spiritual transformation is
threatened because, if the mental is a mere epiphenomenon, one cannot effectively deploy
the psychological skillful means that (purportedly) lead to awakening. In short, the
Buddhist path, as a path of psychological transformation from sasra to nirva, makes
no sense without a robust notion of mental causation.

The most central and influential Buddhist anti-materialist arguments derive from
Dharmakrti and are taken up and refined by later thinkers. But before examining this
argument, it will be helpful to quickly sketch some of the relevant features of his
philosophy. Dharmakrtis view is, in western terms, broadly empiricist, causalist,
reductionist, and nominalist. His ontology consists in two basic categories: svalakanas
(particulars) and smnyalakaas (universals). Svalakanas are momentary causally
efficacious concrete particulars that are best understood, in contemporary ontological
terms, as tropes. On his view, there are both physical and mental tropes.
Smnyalakaas are not particular, but general and come in two basic varieties.
Horizontal universals (tiryaglakaa) are what we normally think of as universals, such
as properties and kinds. So the particular red of an apple is a svalakana, while redness is
a smnyalakaa. Vertical universals (rdhvatlakaa) are persisting entities.4 They
are universals, not particulars because they are, ultimately, constructions of particulars.
So the apple is a smnyalakaa because, in the final analysis, it is synchronically
reducible to a bundle of momentary svalakanas and diachronically reducible to a series
of momentary trope bundles. Further, as a strict nominalist, Dharmakrti holds that only
svalakanas are finally real because only they are causally efficacious. For him, to be real
is to make a difference to how the world goes. Of course, Dharmakrti recognizes that
universals play an important, indeed indispensable, role in our cognitive and practical
engagement with the world. But in so far as they are reducible constructs and have no
autonomous causal powers, they have a merely conventional or pragmatic reality, while
momentary tropes constitute the causal fabric of the world.

Dharmakrtis anti-physicalism starts with the observation that mental events have
aspects or properties distinct from observable physical events or entities. These distinct
properties include those underpinning cognition, affect, and motivation. Most
fundamentally, perhaps, is Dharmakrtis assertion that the mind is luminous by
nature.5 That is, (conscious) mental events have the inherent capacity experientially to
present, disclose, or make manifest. In this sense, the luminosity as the capacity for
experiential presentation is linked to both phenomenal consciousness and intentionality.6
On this view, these mental properties are not identifiable with any observable physical
properties.
So Dharmakrti is a staunch non-reductionist about the mental. He also holds what
we might call the principle of causal homogeneityroughly, only like causes like. This is
a familiar, though not universally held principle of causality. Indeed, physicalists
sometimes appeal to it in support of their view on the grounds that if mental events can
interact with physical events, then they must be physical. On the other hand, since he
holds that mental tropes are distinct from physical tropes and tropes are individuated
causally, then mental and physical tropes are casually heterogeneous. That is, mental and
physical tropes cannot give rise to one another. Here we need to be careful, though.
Dharmakrti distinguishes primary causes (updna) from secondary causes (pratyaya).
The primary cause of an effect must be sufficient to produce it and there must be
something about the very nature of a primary cause that accounts for its power (akti) or
fitness (yogyat) under the right circumstances to produce the effect. A secondary cause
can condition or modulate an effect but is not sufficient to produce it. Thus,
Dharmakrtis view seems to be that mental and physical tropes cannot be the primary

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causes of the other, but that they can be secondary causes. For instance, in the case of a
conscious perception, sensory stimulation alone cannot give rise to a conscious state, but
it can serve as part of the total causal complex in conjunction with prior mental states.
Hence we can say that contact between a stimulus and a functioning sensory system
causes a state of visual consciousness, but only against the background of already
functioning mental states and capacities. The resulting view will be something like
parallelism about primary causes and interactionism about secondary causes.
But why hold such a view? There are, I think, three features of his view that push
him in this direction and they are relevant to the neo-Dharmakrtian view I will sketch
below. First, he is a staunch realist about the mental. One cannot coherently deny the
reality of the mental and reducing the mental to the non-mental would do just that.
Second, he is a reductionist who holds that to be real is to be causally efficacious. Thus
the mental, as real, must be basic and cannot be epiphenomenal. Third, he holds that there
must be some essential connection (svabhvapratibandha) between cause and effect. On
my reading, then, he would agree with Galen Strawson that:
If it really is true that Y is emergent from X then it must be the case that Y
is in some sense wholly dependent on X and X alone, so that all features
of Y trace intelligibly back to X (where intelligible is a metaphysical
rather than an epistemic notion). . . . For any feature Y of anything that is
correctly considered to be emergent from X, there must be something
about X and X alone in virtue of which Y emerges, and which is sufficient
for Y (Strawson 2006, 18).

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Hence, the physical cannot be said to give rise to the mental, on this view, because there
is no available account that makes that form of primary causation (including emergence)
intelligible. And in the absence of such an account, we are not warranted in positing the
connection. We do, of course, observe regular psycho-physical correlations, but these can
be accounted for in terms of secondary causes without having to posit brute or
unintelligible identities, causes, or other dependence relations.
Dharmakrti, then, argues for a strong form of dualism according to which mental
and physical events and processes are ontologically independent, though mutually
conditioning. This is not surprising, since his arguments against physicalism are also
meant to be arguments for the reality of rebirth, which requires, on the Buddhist account,
causal-psychological continuity across lives and bodies. As I mentioned above, though,
the neo-Dharmakrtian form of dualism Im interested in here is much more modest. Why
bother? There are a number of features of a broadly Dharmakrtian view that are
potentially attractive to a naturalistic Buddhist. (Your mileage may vary.) First, it is
robustly realist about mentality. Second, it is anti-substantialist, recognizing the
impermanent and fluid nature of reality. Third, the two-category ontology of particular
tropes and general constructs is both parsimonious and powerful. Fourth, while fully
realist about experience, it offers an interesting form of reductionism about personal
identity.
A neo-Dharmakrtian view, then, would have the following features: (i) trope
dualism, (ii) natural supervenience, and (ii) real mental causation. On this view, tropes
are the basic category. Objects are bundles of tropes, events and processes are series of
tropes, and properties are classes of tropes.7 Mental tropes are distinct from and

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irreducible to physical tropes on epistemic, conceptual, and ontological grounds.

Phenomenal tropes, for instance, are known first-personally and are inaccessible thirdpersonally. We deploy irreducibly distinct conceptual vocabularies for phenomenal and
neurophysiological tropes. Finally, no convincing reduction or identification of
phenomenal tropes (properties) with non-phenomenal (physical) tropes (properties) has
been made. Importantly, the irreducibility of phenomenal tropes holds even if one holds
the token identity of mental and physical events. Even if conscious events have both
phenomenal and non-phenomenal properties, there is still no convincing reduction of the
phenomenal to the non-phenomenal. Of course, the non-reductive physicalist will
respond that she agrees that phenomenal properties are irreducible to non-phenomenal
properties, and yet also affirms that phenomenal properties are physical properties. As
Flanagan reminds us, the wise naturalist is not a reductionist (Flanagan 1992, 92).
So in what sense are irreducible mental properties physical? Flanagan
distinguishes between what he calls metaphysical physicalism and linguistic
physicalism, affirming the former and denying the latter. He writes:
Metaphysical physicalism simply asserts that what there is, and all there
is, is physical stuff and its relations. Linguistic physicalism is the thesis
that everything physical can be expressed or captured in the language of
the basic sciences (Flanagan 1992, 98).

As I understand him, then, Flanagan thinks that the mental is ontologically physical, even
if the nature of the mental cant be expressed or captured with the conceptual resources
through which we generally understand the physical. This is a very minimal physicalism

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indeedit seems to drain physical of all useful content. In contrast, the neoDharmakrtian will want her ontology to be much more tightly constrained by her
observations and explanatory interests. Thus, if mental and physical tropes systematically
show up in our experience as distinct, and if we have no good way of explaining how the
mental can be assimilated into the physical, we should treat them as fundamentally
distinct types of tropes.8
Now the standard way for a non-reductive physicalist to try to capture the sense in
which the mental just is physical is through (a suitably constrained form of)
supervenience. If mental properties or events logically or metaphysically supervene on
physical properties or events, then we can count them as physical as well. Flanagan
denies logical supervenience, since it entails something like linguistic physicalism, but
he seems to be committed to metaphysical supervenience. In arguing for the ontological
independence of the mental, Dharmakrti put forward a number of cases that would count
as counter-examples to supervenience. For instance, he argued that the mental is
independent because a living body and a (new) corpse are materially the same, and yet
mentally different. Also, he claims, identical twins are materially the same but mentally
different. Obviously, however plausible the examples might have seemed in the 7th
century, they are not plausible today. Moreover, we have a very strong body of evidence
of correlations between mental and physical events and properties that supports
supervenience (or some similar dependence relation). Whats a dualist to do?
The naturalistic trope dualist need not deny supervenience, but rather should deny
metaphysical supervenience in favor of natural supervenience. That is, mental and
physical tropes are systematically correlated in the natural world as we observe and try to

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explain it, but mental tropes are not metaphysically necessitated by physical tropes. Thus
there are logically and metaphysically possible worlds wherein the mental and the
physical are differently related (or not related at all). Instead of appealing to
Dharmakrtis implausible examples, the neo-Dharmakrtian dualist can appeal to the
more recent, though admittedly controversial, counter-examples to logical and
metaphysical supervenience. The literature surrounding these counter-examples is vast,
and I wont delve into it here. My point is simply that the neo-Dharmakrtian dualist can
affirm a form of supervenience, without being committed to physicalism. Furthermore,
she can point out that neither our everyday experience nor the mind sciences require
metaphysical supervenience, and so the naturalist should not be so concerned with what
might be necessary in all possible worlds, but rather with understanding systematic
relations in this one.
The picture so far, then, is that mental and physical tropes are ontologically
distinct, mental tropes naturally supervene on physical tropes, and both types of tropes
are natural in so far as they arise within (and themselves constitute) the integrated causal
network we call nature. The neo-Dharmakrtian dualist must now face the problem of
mental causation. Unlike some recent defenders of naturalistic dualism,
epiphenomenalism is not an option here given the Dharmakrtian commitment to a causal
criterion of reality. Here I want to just sketch two strategiesone radical, one
moderateour trope dualist can employ to address the problem of mental causation.
The radical strategy is to bite the bullet and deny the problem of causal closure of
the physical.9 The naturalist is committed to the causal closure of nature, but not
necessarily to the closure of the physical aspects of nature. It is very unlikely that current

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physics is complete and so we have no decisive reason to affirm physical closure. It is

true, as Flanagan points out, that there is inductive (or abductive) support for closure
based on the success of physics. But the trope dualist need not be too concerned with this
given that this success has been in dealing almost entirely with areas of the natural world
that lack mental properties. When it comes to natural systems that display both mental
and physical properties, we have nothing at all like a complete causal account, let alone
one that appeals only to the physical. On the other hand, some future physics may be
complete, but in that case we currently dont know what entities will constitute the closed
causal domain or whether those entities will bear much resemblance to our current notion
of the physical. Suppose, for the moment, that the trope dualist is correct and sentient
beings instantiate causally efficacious neurophysiological and mental tropes. A complete
future physics would presumably take this into account. Does this mean that dualism is
correct or that the physical turns out to include irreducibly mental aspects? This
(modified) application of Hempels Dilemma might be avoided by reaffirming the
distinction between metaphysical and linguistic physicalism. However, if we divorce
the physical from both current and future physics, then it isnt at all clear that we know
what we are claiming when we say that the physical is causally closed. So the radical
option for the naturalistic dualist is to shrug off the problem of causal closureand so the
causal exclusion problem for mental causationby arguing that physical closure is either
unproven (current physics) or indeterminate (by future extension or divorce from
physics).
The moderate strategy is to piggy-back on (whatever turns out to be) the most
plausible account of mental causation offered by the non-reductive physicalist.10 The

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non-reductive physicalist who holds the irreducibility of (some) mental properties and
token event monism must give an account of the causal relevance of mental properties.
And, of course, she must do so without reducing mental properties to non-mental
properties (on pain of sliding back into reductive physicalism). But note that, for the neoDharmakrtian, a mental property just is a class of irreducible, causally relevant tropes.
So in any particular case of mental causation, the causally relevant mental property is a
mental trope. If the non-reductive physicalist can show that the property is causally
relevant, so can the trope dualist. Now, some want to understand causal relevance as
linked to explanation, while causal efficacy is linked to actual causation. In that type of
view, the physical properties (of an event) are doing the causal work, but the mental
properties are explanatorily relevant without themselves being efficacious. That notion of
mental causation is not open to the trope dualist. However, that notion of mental
causation looks a lot like epiphenomenalism rather than an account of mental causation.
Yet, so long as the non-reductive physicalist gives an account of mental properties as that
in virtue of which some physical event occurs, the trope dualist can appropriate the
account for her own view. So either there are irreducible, causally relevant mental
tropes/properties or there arent. If there are, then the trope dualist is on solid ground. If
there arent, neither the trope dualist nor the non-reductive physicalist is on solid ground.
From this point of view, the question of event dualism versus event monism is
secondary. Insisting on event monism doesnt solve the problem of the causal relevance
of the mental, because it might be the physical properties of the event that are doing all
the work. On the other hand, once the causal relevance problem is solved, how one
individuates events is not so important. For a trope dualist, the most basic form of event

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is the occurrence of a trope. So at the fundamental level mental and physical events are
distinct just because mental and physical tropes are distinct. More complex mental events
are just bundles of causally relevant mental tropes. Theres no mental stuff that
subserves these tropesthey simply occur within the staggeringly complex causal
processes we call sentient beings. Moreover, mental tropes (events) supervene on
physical tropes (events). The neo-Dharmakrtian is a constructive nominalist. Thus
whether one carves the causal flow into distinct mental and physical events or, instead,
into events with both mental and physical properties is largely a matter of explanatory
interests or pragmatic concerns.

Luminosity and Emptiness

I now want to turn to a distinct approach to the problem of consciousness inspired
by ntarakitas Yogcra-Madhyamaka synthesis. ntarakita drew on the Yogcra
tradition of Asaga and Vasubandhu, the tradition of Dignga and Dharmakrti, and the
Madhyamaka tradition stemming from Ngrjuna to develop a fascinating and powerful
synthesis of Mahyna philosophy. His debt to Dharmakrti is deep and pervasive, but in
the final analysis ntarakita is a Mdhyamika thinker and this, I think, has important
implications for understanding his take on the issue of consciousness. So, for my
purposes here, I will focus on the integration of Yogcra/pramavda philosophy of
mind with the ontological non-foundationalism of Madhyamaka.
Like Dharamkirti, ntarakita is a proponent of self-luminosity (svaprakat).
The self-luminosity of consciousness consists in its being reflexive or self-presenting.
Consciousness presents itself in the process of presenting its object. In some Buddhist

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schools, the term svasavedana (self-awareness) denotes this self-luminosity or prereflective self-awareness that is an invariant aspect of conscious experience. On this
view, individual conscious states simultaneously disclose both the object of
consciousness and (aspects of) the conscious state itself. Thus, when a subject is aware of
an object, she is also (pre-reflectively) aware of her own experiencing.
Now, in one respect, the role of svasavedana is epistemic. Indeed it comes to be
treated by Buddhist epistemologists as the most basic and secure means of knowledge
(prama). The idea here is that we have a direct (i.e., immediate, non-inferential) and
perhaps even infallible acquaintance with the phenomenal contents of our experience. To
have a conscious pain is to be aware of the qualitative pain directly, just by having it.
Moreover, even if there is no scarlet sphere in my immediate environment, I am still
directly aware that I am having an experience as of a scarlet sphere. On this view, then,
there is no phenomenal presentationno presentation of either the subjective or objective
face of an experiencewithout the basic awareness of those faces. Thus Dharmakrti
argues, The seeing of objects is not established for one whose apprehension thereof is
itself imperceptible (PV 1.54). That is, if one is not at all aware of the experience in and
through which the object is presented, then the object is not phenomenally present at all.
Furthermore, note that the svbhsa (subject-appearance) and viaybhsa (objectappearance) are given to or given within a conscious, first-person point of view. For the
Buddhist reflexivists, svasavedana constitutes the conscious point of view within which
the two faces of cognition are given. Reflexivity, therefore, constitutes a minimal form of
subjectivity in the phenomenological sense of a dative of manifestation, that to which
the phenomenally present is presented. Yet, crucially, this point of view is not a distinct

19

or enduring subject of experience existing over and above the interconnected episodes of
experience constituting individual streams of consciousness (cittasantna). Rather, as we
have seen, reflexive awareness is a basic feature of each individual experiential episode.
At bottom, each episode of experience is its own subject.
In addition to the epistemic role of svasavedana, we also find it playing a
transcendental rolethat is, self-luminosity comes to be seen as the distinguishing mark
(svalakana) or very nature of consciousness. In Madhyamaklakra 16, ntarakita
(2005, 53) argues:
Consciousness rises as the contrary
Of matter, gross, inanimate.
By nature, mind is immaterial
And it is self-aware.

On this view, matter is inherently inanimate and insentient (jaa), while consciousness is
inherently luminous and cognizant that is, reflexive and intentional. There is nothing it
is like to be a stone, and it has no states that are intentionally directed toward an object. In
contrast, dynamic sentience is the very mode of being of consciousness, and for
ntarakita, the sentience or phenomenality of consciousness is understood in terms of
its reflexivity. As his Tibetan commentator, Jamgon Mipham, remarks in this context:
Objects like pots, being material, are devoid of clarity [luminosity] and
awareness [cognizance]. For them to be cognized, it is necessary to rely on
something that is quite different from them, namely, the luminous and
knowing mind. The nature of consciousness, on the other hand, is unlike

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matter. For it to be known, it depends on no condition other than itself. ...

In the very instant that consciousness arises, the factors of clarity and
knowing are present to it. Although other things are known by it, it is not
itself known by something else and is never without self-awareness (it is
never self-unaware) (ntarakita 2005, 202).

The distinction drawn here is similar to Searles distinction between those things with a
first-person ontology and those with a third-person ontology. On Searles view,
consciousness has a first-person ontology; that is, it only exists as experienced by some
human or animal, and therefore, it cannot be reduced to something that has a third-person
ontology, something that exists independently of experiences (Searle 2002, 60). Objects
like pots do not have experiences and apparently exist independently of their being
experienced. Conscious states, on the other hand, do not exist independently of being
experiencedtheir very mode of being is to be experienced
Mipham goes on to argue, following the Indian Buddhist reflexivists, that:
It is thanks to reflexive awareness that, conventionally, phenomenal
appearances are established as the mind, and the mind [i.e. a cognitive
episode] is in turn undeniably established as the object-experiencer. If
reflexive awareness is not accepted, the mind would be disconnected from
its own experience of phenomena and the experience of outer objects
would be impossible (ntarakita 2005, 123).

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That is, for these thinkers, the experiential object is recognized to be a phenomenal
appearance (bhsa) or representation (kra) that is not distinct from the cognition
within which it is presented. In other words, one sees that the supposed external object is
in fact merely the objective-face of an experience and thus an aspect of the experience
itself. Further, on this reflexivist view, absence of pre-reflective self-awareness would
yield a kind of mind-blindness (the mind disconnected from its own experiences)
wherein at any given time one might be having any number of phenomenal experiences
without any awareness that one was having them, in absence of which their intentional
objects would not be phenomenally present. In such cases, ones cognition would be
more like blindsight than phenomenal consciousness. That is, if conscious states have a
first-person ontologythey only exist in so far as they are experienced or undergone
then they presuppose a subjective or first-person point of view within which they appear.
This basic conscious point of view is reflexive awareness, in the absence of which one
would have no access to ones own states and their contents. Hence, on this view,
reflexivity or luminosity constitutes the necessary condition of any phenomenal
appearance, subjective or objective. In this sense, reflexivity or self-luminosity comes to
be seen as transcendental.
The upshot of these considerations, I take it, is that consciousness has a kind of
primacy. As Michel Bitbol puts it, [consciousness] is not something we have, but it
identifies with what we are in the first place. It is not something that can be known or
described by us in the third person as if we were separated from it; but it is what we dwell
in and what we live through in the first person (Bitbol 2008, 56). It is that through which
anything can be meaningful, known, doubted, affirmed, or denied. It is that by which

22

anything can show up objectively or subjectively. Indeed, from this point of view, every
theory, objective description, or explanatory framework is an achievement of, and
therefore presupposes, conscious, cognizant sentient beings. On my liberal naturalist
interpretation, when Buddhist thinkers such as ntarakita hold that svasavedana is the
fundamental prama and that, conventionally, all phenomena are not distinct from
mind, we can reject their tendency toward ontological idealism, while affirming the more
modest epistemic-transcendental point that consciousness, for sentient beings, has this
irreducible primacy.
Now, one of the most interesting and important features of ntarakitas thought
for my purposes here is that he can, with the Yogcrins, affirm the epistemictranscendental primacy of consciousness, while, as a Mdhyamika in good standing, he
rejects the ontological primacy consciousness. For him the mind has irreducible primacy
at the conventional level, but in the final analysis it is, like all phenomena, empty of
svabhva (inherent existence). An entity is svabhva when it is ontologically independent
of other objects, has an intrinsic and fixed nature or essence, and can be individuated
mind-independently. To use a Tibetan phrase, a svabhvic entity exists from its own
side. Thus the semantic range of svabhva overlaps not only with our notions of
substance and essence, but also with our notions of a thing-in-itself and an
absolutely or really real existent. Importantly, then, to say that an entity is (or has)
svabhva is not simply to claim that it exists, but rather to specify its mode of existence:
it is claimed to exist independently or absolutely. Mdhyamikas deny that anything could
have this mode of existence and point out that the deep assumption that to be real is to be
svabhva inexorably leads to paradox. To say that an entity lacks svabhva is just to say

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that the entity is empty (nya). Moreover, the emptiness of phenomena is said to be an
implication of phenomena being dependently originated (and vice verse).
The Madhyamaka view that all things are empty of svabhva implies the rejection
metaphysical realism. According to Putnam, metaphysical realism can be characterize, at
least in its strongest form, as follows:
On this perspective, the world consists of some fixed totality of mindindependent objects. There is exactly one true and complete description of
the way the world is. Truth involves some sort of correspondence
relation between words or thought-signs and external things and sets of
things. [We can] call this perspective externalist perspective, because its
favorite point of view is a Gods Eye point of view. (Putnam 1981, 49)

Elsewhere Putnam elaborates on the first point by claiming that the metaphysical realist
is committed to the belief in a ready-made world: the idea that the world is uniquely and
mind-independently partitioned into objects, properties, and relations. Moreover, these
objects are things-in-themselves that have fixed intrinsic natures independently of our
interest, concepts, and descriptions. As Putnam says of this view, the world divides itself
up into objects and properties in one definite unique way (Putnam 1992, 123). There
will be a uniquely complete and correct description of reality and the correctness of this
description will involve correspondence between the description and metaphysically pregiven way the world is.
For the neo-ntarakitan, to hold that all things are empty is to give up the
picture of a ready-made world. If all things are empty, there is no unique, mind-

24

independent partitioning of the world into objects, properties, and relations (or, for that
matter, tropes, events, and processes). This has two important implications for our current
discussion. First, the neo-ntarakitan will give up on all absolute ontologies:
physicalist, dualist, or idealist. The shared assumption of these views is that reality can be
captured in terms of a single, absolute ontology. Further, note that both physicalism and
the trope dualism share a commitment to ontological foundationalismthe idea that
nature is constituted by a vertical chain of dependence relations, that this chain is wellfounded, and therefore that it bottoms out in an ultimately real foundation somewhere. In
contrast, for the Mdhyamikas, the ubiquity and interminability of dependent origination
implies that all phenomena are empty of svabhva. Thus they arrive at an ontological
anti-foundationalism in which there is no single well-founded hierarchy of dependence
relations bottoming out in an ultimate independent foundation. Rather, we find ourselves
perpetually in the midst of an open-ended network interrelated phenomena no domain of
which has absolute priority over all the others. All of our explanatory work takes place
within this horizon of dependent origination. This implies a kind of ontological parity in
which no one domain is absolutely more fundamental than another. All phenomena are
dependently arisen and all are empty of svabhva.
Furthermore, in giving up absolute ontologies and ontological foundationalism,
the neo-ntarakitan affirms conceptual pluralism. We deploy (and need) an irreducible
plurality of conceptual frameworks, modes of understanding, representations, and models
of phenomena. The objectivist, physical framework is extremely powerful and useful for
describing and understanding a wide range of phenomena. Yet, as much recent work on
the autonomy of the special sciences argues, the framework of physics isnt everything

25

we need, even for the natural sciences. Moreover, the third-person frameworks of the
natural sciences do a poor job at getting at the phenomena of conscious experience. These
kinds of explanatory gaps are not surprising, unless we assume that there is in principle
one true description of reality that corresponds to the single absolute ontology of reality.
From this pluralist perspective, physicalism fails on two counts. Reductive physicalism
fails just in so far as the explanatory reduction of the mental to the physical fails.11 Nonreductive physicalism gets it right in giving up any pretensions to the explanatory
reduction of (all of) the mental to the physical, but fails in its continued insistence that, in
the end, physicalism is the correct ultimate ontology. Dualism has the virtue of
highlighting the inadequacy of objective, third-person frameworks for capturing the
nature of mind and the epistemic and transcendental primacy of intentional
consciousness. However, it too fails by illicitly moving from an explanatory gap to an
absolute ontological gap. For the neo-ntarakitan, explanatory gaps (even big ones like
the mental-physical gap) dont imply an absolute ontological gap because the very idea of
an absolute ontology is mistaken. Explanatory gaps are a function of inescapable
conceptual pluralism, not reflections of some supposedly ultimate ontological divide.
Finally, on the question of mental causation, the neo-ntarakitan pluralist will
want to dissolve rather than solve the problem. That is, on this view, mental and
physical (and biological, social, etc.) are neither ultimately separate nor ultimately
identical. Rather, our causal explanations only make sense within particular conceptual
frameworks and ways of interacting with phenomena. Since there is an irreducible
plurality of conceptual frameworks needed for understanding actions, our mental causal
accounts dont compete with our other causal accounts. Moreover, the physical causal

26

account does not tell us what is really going on because it has no absolute priority over
other accounts. Physical causes dont exclude mental causes because there is no ultimate
ontological distinction between mental and physical causes, and physical descriptions are
not complete descriptions of reality because there is no complete description of reality to
be had.

Conclusion
Must the naturalistic Buddhist choose between neurophysicalism and wishful
hocus-pocus? Ive argued that this is a false dichotomy and that there are accounts of the
mind inspired by classical Buddhism that are both naturalistic and non-physicalist. I have
not argued that either neo-Dharmakrtian trope dualism or neo-ntarakitan pragmatic
pluralism is the correct account of the mind. I do think that that both are interesting,
plausible, and worthy of further exploration. Perhaps in the end something like
Flanagans subjective realism and neurophysicalism will turn out to be the best approach
for a naturalized Buddhism. Whatever turns out to be the case, I am confident that the
cosmopolitan philosophical project to which Flanagan and I are committed will benefit
from vigorous exploration and criticism of a variety of approaches to the metaphysics of
mind, including those that challenge fundamental aspects of the physicalist orthodoxy in
contemporary philosophy of mind.

Bibliography
Bitbol, Michel. Is Consciousness Primary? Neuroquantology, 6, no. 1 (2008): 53-71.

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Dharmakrti. Pramavrttika. sDe dge edition 4210. Sanskrit and Tibetan ed. Y.
Miyasaka. Acta Indologica 2, 1972, 1 206

Flanagan, Owen. Consciousness Reconsidered. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992.

. Varieties of Naturalism. In The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science,

edited by Philip Clayton and Zachary Simpson, 430-452. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006.

. The Bodhisattvas Brain: Buddhism Naturalized. Cambridge, MA: The MIT

Press, 2011.

Putnam, Hilary. Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981.

. Renewing Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

ntarakita. The Adornment of the Middle Way: ntarakitas Madhyamaklakra

with Commentary by Jamgon Mipham, trans. Padmakara Translation Group. Boston:
Shambhala Publications, 2005

Searle, J. Why I Am Not a Property Dualist. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 9, no.

12 (2002): 57-64.

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Strawson, Galen. Realistic Monism. In Consciousness and Its Place in Nature, edited
by Anthony Freeman, 3-31. Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2006.

It is important to emphasize that theses views are contemporary philosophical

reconstructions based on the Indian sources. I make no claim to follow either

Dharmakrti or ntarakita in every detail, and the views I reconstruct will in fact
contradict some of their fundamental views.
2

Im remaining agnostic about the right way to think about natural laws here.

I say directly or indirectly because one need not hold that all relations are causal, only

that the non-causal relations are grounded in or dependent on the causal in the right way,
e.g., supervenience.
4

Both what we take to be enduring objects (substances) as well as events and processes,

then, are ultimately reducible to sequences of trope bundles. Individuation of these

constructions is ultimately a matter of our conventions and interests in successful
practice.
5

Prabhsvaram ida citta prakty PV II.208.

Indeed, on some accounts, the notion of luminosity bears striking resemblance to what

is currently termed phenomenal intentionality.

7

In what follows, Ill use tropes and properties more or less interchangeably.

Note that the problem here cannot be dismissed simply by pointing out the possibility of

extensional equivalence. If it turns out that the morning star just is the evening star or that
Clark Kent just is Superman, we may be surprised, but the identity is intelligible because

29

the two things identified can be accommodated within the same conceptual framework.
What we lack with regard to the mental-physical relation is any common framework
within which the identity could make sense. Thus it is more like claiming that Obama just
is the Pythagorean theorem.
9

Physical closure: If a physical event has a sufficient cause that occurs at t, it has a

physical sufficient cause that occurs at t.

10

The natural choice for the neo-Dharmakrtian, given Dharmakrtis work on causation

and causal explanation, might be counterfactualist.

11

Of course, it isnt at all clear that we should take explanatory reduction to physics as

the gold standard of explanation even in the natural sciences, let alone other domains.

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