My strong aversion against using buzz-words (e.g. meditation) is grounded, I think, in what I just wrote over there: A meaningless word which is used in a wide variety of circumstances has a hidden meaning. But at the same time it is a pointer to an unconscious aspect of ideology. Therefore this words/pointers are very valuable in a way. They point to hidden collective meanings because if more or less meaningless buzz-words lead to mutual understanding of a group they must transport an information. On a group level a decisive move would therefore ensue if the group would decide collectively to unearth these hidden meanings. I think this could be something to re- or decommission bodhisattva-vows and strange things like the activation of bodhicitta. It could be one part of a process of interaction in which a true sociality could emerge in a group… My emphasis in re-wording buzz-words has to do with this aspect of group work. In re-wording we are forced to establish a meaning which otherwise stays unconscious. In a group willing to unearth the old zombies such a re-wording necessarily leads to ideas i.e. the new…

As a last thought, concerning non-buddhism and the rethinking of Buddhist postulates: What happens with the bodhisattva-vow in this circumstances? Where does loving-kindness comes from looked at it from the perspective I just sketched?

I was about to answer this one way, and then, on second reading, it looked like two distinct questions. Given your and Srnicek comments on Metzinger: (1) How might we re-commission (if not decommission) the postulate that holds the necessity of the bodhisattva-vow, and (2) How do we reconcile the seeming non-intentionality of our subconscious cognitive mechanisms with the x-buddhist postulate that holds the inherent reality of “loving-kindness” (which is only in need of activation and cultivation)?

Putting my original response aside, I now wonder if Tom’s comment suggests the form an answer to both (?) questions might take:

All meaning is produced at the level of ideology, not neurology, in collective language not individual neural connections. That is why the mind is not going to be found in the brain…The “self” is not in the brain, but is a construct of the symbolic/imaginary system, and this system always requires multiple brains to arise.

Every x-buddhist version of the two postulates with which I am familiar seems to assume an atmanistic/atomistic location of affective qualities. X-buddhism’s neuroscience allies, naturally, concur. That’s why we have such a strong strain of scientism in the contemporary western discourse on x-buddhism. What I find so valuable in this shift to social, ideological, and collective language critique is that it dispenses once and for all with untenable metaphysical tools of thinking, such as human nature. In that sense, I am wholly anti-humanist. (I should probably clarify at some point why I use terms like “the human.” Or maybe I’ll just stop doing so.) It is, of course, beyond ironic that ostensibly anatmanistic x-buddhism should not itself insist on this shift. In any case, what if the answer to many of the questions posed here and elsewhere were to be found by reflecting on how ideology and social-symbolic systems function, and the role of language in all of it?

What I am rejecting, and what I take Robert to be rejecting as well, is the idea that the mind is in the brain, that neuroscience can explain ideology.

Tom (# 53), taking the example of Metzinger again, I don’t see that he’s trying to say that the “mind” is in the brain or that the neuroscience can explain ideology. His multilayered picture of consciousness shows how the sense of self is anchored in the representational phenomenal space that in the first place has been produced by the living organisms that were trying to increase the coherence of their already too complicated biological systems. That coherence has been achieved by creating an impenetrable closure in the form of phenomenal transparency that then allowed the quick and reliable sub-personal mechanisms to stay behind it. The by-product that was formed by this epistemic closure opened a phenomenal space that then become available for the higher cognitive processes such as accessing new facts and new forms of knowledge. So as you say the symbolic “system requires multiple brains to arise” and I would add, requires brains that are equipped by the evolution with virtual organs, ego tunnels enabling them to see each other and communicate together. Without these virtual organs of biologically based consciousness any ideology wouldn’t be possible. There wouldn’t be mind in a collective sense.

I think you are absolutely right that there is no “intention” or “meaning” in our subconscious (neural) cognitive mechanisms. This is the problem. All meaning is produced at the level of ideology, not neurology, in collective language not individual neural connections. That is why the mind is not going to be found in the brain. I don’t think anybody is rejecting neuroscience. The brain is a necessary condition for our mind, and it is always better to know how it works. What I am rejecting, and what I take Robert to be rejecting as well, is the idea that the mind is in the brain, that neuroscience can explain ideology. The “self” is not in the brain, but is a construct of the symbolic/imaginary system, and this system always requires multiple brains to arise.

Nick Srnicek outlines some of the parallels between Kant and Metzinger in “Neuroscience, The Apocalypse, and Specula- tive Realism”, his response to Bakker’s “The End of the World As We Knew It: Neuroscience and the Semantic Apocalypse”. “Both Kant and Metzinger are asking what conditions are required for experience to be possible. But of course, rather than ultimately finding the source of these conditions within a transcendental subject, Metzinger finds them in the brain. And rather than describing experience as a single formal structure comprised of intuitions and categories, Metzinger offers a much more nuanced view of experience. Despite these advances though, in framing the interpretation of neuroscience this way, Metzinger still seems to place neurology in the clutches of a classic Kantian problem. And Metzinger himself even seems somewhat aware of it, as he will repeatedly argue that phenomenal immediacy is not epistemic immediacy, or as Kant might have put it – the phenomenal is not the noumenal. What appears as immediately and intuitively given has no necessary relation with an independent world.” [http://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/the-semantic-apocalypse/]

This is a far more nuanced treatment at the same time giving reference points with which I can really work – namely Kant. (an)atman is not such a point. Kant’s pure or transcendental apperception, is this atman? Is there in Metzinger’s Selfmodel-Theory of Subjectivity an atman? Before we can answer this question we have to solve the problem that it is quite difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend atman as it was understood in the time of the so called Buddha. My (hermeneutical) position about this is that we can only to some extent, if at all, access the connotational field of this term. The impression that I have a certain understanding of anatman is always an understanding I have in a certain situation in which I am. This situation incorporates, for example, the transmission of the tradition in which the term is used in a way which is always ‘contaminated’ by the circumstances in which the tradition is transmitted (Walter Benjamin: Articulating something historical does not mean, to realize “how it really was”.) This results always, in my view, in a distortion. But, as this wouldn’t be already complicated enough, this view still implies an original which is distorted on the way. As I understand through Derrida this original simply doesn’t exist. I would say, distortion is our original being. I think what Heidegger and Derrida in this regard – the original – worked out is backed up today by neuroscience, process oriented thinking and acting, the flow etc.

This said, one is inviting misunderstanding after misunderstanding if one uses terms like (an)atman without in every case exactly defining what one wants to mean it denotatively (whereby with the denotation the problem of the original arises again but this would go far too far right now). Instead I would find it much more helpful to use, for example, Kant’s transcendental apperception in this critique here. This is a term we can work with and it is a notion of something about what we really can now say that it doesn’t exist in the way we thought – wether this has something to with atman doesn’t matter any more because we are at the heart of the problem already. Even Kant, I understand, had this nagging thought, that there is something wrong with his transcendental apperception (but I am not that far with my Kant to go into this).

One other aspect why neuroscience is greeted partly with such aversion might come from the fact that it confronts us with far reaching problems. What emerges is a picture in which it becomes clear that the nature of our subconscious cognitive mechanisms aren’t intentional. The nature of this system doesn’t wants us to be good or bad in our meaning. There is no intention to be good or bad. With this the whole framework for morality breaks down and we are striped naked. We have no more ground to build a morality on. This is also a consequence of “I am not”. I find this so shocking that while thinking and writing about it my heart-rate goes up…

As a last thought, concerning non-buddhism and the rethinking of Buddhist postulates: What happens with the bodhisattva-vow in this circumstances? Where does loving-kindness comes from looked at it from the perspective I just sketched?

There is a tendency to think that we can “experience” nothing, that we can become a non-self. This usually leads to the kind of subtle atman, the belief that we can reach a state of consciousness that is completely non-transitive, that has no object–a consciousness that is “empty” of content, …

It strikes me that this subtle atman is exactly what the neuro-scientific argument posits, a sense of self without context, an effect of the inner workings of the brain prior to language and ideology. But this idea of a generic self is essentially as nonsensical as its x-buddhist counterpart of a generic non-self, an experience of nothing. A self can only ever manifest as contextual, and this context can only ever be provided by the symbolic, by language. Where else could context originate?

The essay by William Waldren that Tom mentions in comment 27 leans heavily on findings in evolutionary biology to make this argument without the need for “a computational tool that helps it in owning its own hardware”, and as such is an implied critique of what I take to be Metzinger’s approach. It’s well worth reading.