Empty and extended craving: an application of the extended mind thesis to the four noble truths

摘要

Abstract According to Buddhism's four noble truths, (1) we find our lives filled with anguished suffering because (2) we habitually crave for life to be other than it is; and (3) this habit of craving will cease (4) only if we cultivate in our lives the Buddha's path of mental discipline, wisdom, and moral conduct. The aim of Buddhist practice is to cure craving. There is a model of the self that can be derived from the recent work of some philosophers in the field of cognitive science, Andy Clark in particular. His writings suggest a model of the self that is spread out or extended. I will argue that the model of the extended self offers contemporary insight for interpreting what craving is in the Buddhist sense and how to cure it. Notes 1. Clark Citation2008, xxviii. 2. Otto's notebook is the most famous (in some circles) example, elaborated in 'The Extended Mind.' (That essay, co-authored by Clark and David Chalmers, hatched the extended mind thesis. The paper was published in Analysis in 1998 and is reprinted as an appendix in Clark Citation2008.) In the thought experiment Otto, who has Alzheimer's, always carries a notebook to write down new information, and then consults the notebook as needed to retrieve information, such as: Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) is on 53rd Street. The notebook is Otto's memory and its information functions like the information in an ordinary non-occurrent belief. Thus, Clark concludes, 'beliefs can be constituted partly by features of the environment, when those features play the right sort of role in driving cognitive processes. If so, the mind extends into the world' (Clark Citation2008, 226). 3. Clark Citation2008, xxvii. 4. Clark Citation2008, xxvii, sections 1.3–1.5, and see this pair of passages: 'Sensing here acts as a constantly available channel that productively couples agent and environment rather than as a kind of 'veil of transduction' whereby world-originating signals must be converted into a persisting inner model of the external scene…. Instead of using sensing to get enough information inside, past the visual bottleneck, so as to allow the reasoning system to 'throw away the world' and solve the problem wholly internally, [extended sensorimotor strategies] use the sensor as an open conduit allowing environmental magnitudes to exert a constant influence on behavior. Sensing is here depicted as the opening of a channel, with successful whole-system behavior emerging when activity in this channel is kept within a certain range. What is created is thus a kind of new, task-specific agent-world circuit' (Clark Citation2008, 15–16). 5. Clark Citation2008, 39. 6. Clark Citation2008, 31. Examples of such extended agents include all kinds of fluent tool use, as well as more surprising cases, such as 'a brain-machine interface… that allows a macaque monkey to use thought control to move a robot arm' (p. 33) and Tactile-Visual Substitution Systems that allow blind people to recognize faces and to bat rolling balls (p. 35). Clark explores the agent-tool extension in detail in chapter 2, and this is also the launching point for his book, Natural-born cyborgs (Clark Citation2003). 7. See Clark Citation2008, 59–75. 8. See Clark Citation2008, 40. 9. See Clark Citation2008, 232. 10. Newland Citation2008, 14. The founder of the Ge-luk sect of Tibetan Buddhism is Tsong-kha-pa, who in 1402 presented a synthesizing vision of Buddhism in his Great treatise. Tsong-kha-pa is of the Madhyamaka tradition of Buddhist philosophy and relies heavily on the writings of Nāgārjuna. Guy Newland is an editor of the three volume English translation of the Great treatise (Snow Lion Publications, 2000–2004). Newland's Introduction to emptiness is a distillation, summary, and restatement of Tsong-kha-pa's key ideas, aimed at a contemporary but educated audience. In what follows I rely on Newland for statements of the views of Tsong-kha-pa. 11. Newland Citation2008, 44. 12. See Clark Citation2008, 118. In this passage