The Dalai Lama has said that Buddhism and science are deeply compatible and has encouraged Western scholars to critically examine both the meditative practice and Buddhist ideas about the human mind. A number of scientists and philosophers have taken up this challenge. There have been brain scans of meditators and philosophical examinations of Buddhist doctrines. There have even been discussions of Darwin and the Buddha: Do early Buddhist descriptions of the mind, and of the human condition, make particular sense in light of evolutionary psychology? This course will examine how Buddhism is faring under this scrutiny. Are neuroscientists starting to understand how meditation “works”? Would such an understanding validate meditation—or might physical explanations of meditation undermine the spiritual significance attributed to it? And how are some of the basic Buddhist claims about the human mind holding up? We’ll pay special attention to some highly counterintuitive doctrines: that the self doesn’t exist, and that much of perceived reality is in some sense illusory. Do these claims, radical as they sound, make a certain kind of sense in light of modern psychology? And what are the implications of all this for how we should live our lives? Can meditation make us not just happier, but better people? All the features of this course are available for free. It does not offer a certificate upon completion.
Office Hours 2
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Buddhism and Modern Psychology
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与讲师见面
Robert WrightVisiting Lecturer
Religion Department and the Center for Human Values
Hello.
Welcome to week two of office hours.
This is still my office.
Most of it is still a mess.
I'm still not eager to show you much of it.
Unfortunately, I'm having to show you more of
it this week, because I made the mistake
last week of not taping in the format
that the Coursera platform demands a wide screen format.
So now I am doing that and you can see.
More of my office, for example, my dog, Frazier, sleeping over
there on the chair, possibly wondering why I'm doing, what I
am doing here, talking to something other than a person or
a dog which or the things he normally sees me talk to.
Okay, so this week The award for most
creative metaphor related to a meditation retreat goes to Wynn Matthews.
In the discussion forum, he said, in retreats at times of broad
stillness, I've experienced the feeling of being squeezed like a toothpaste tube.
What does he mean?
I'm going to hold you in suspense for a second and go over to the
Facebook page where Carl Mountain said something
that's related to what Win Matthew said.
Carl Mountain says having seen me say in one of the lectures that
our feelings are not necessarily to be trusted He says, I would suggest
as many Buddhist teachers have already that, that is not just feelings that
can't be trusted but moreover you can't trust your thoughts as being true.
That is certainly the case, but there is a connection between those two issues.
The, the untrustworthiness of feelings and of thoughts, and
that brings us back to the tube of toothpaste.
What Winn Mathews went on to say, about this feeling
of being squeezed like a tube, tube of toothpaste was,
there's a very subtle pressure, tension, constriction,
and out of that comes a thought stream.
A reaction to the feeling tone.
So in other words.
He was sensing, when he reflected on his interior life,
as you are inclined to do on a meditation retreat
that, that, that feelings were governing thoughts.
That feelings were eliciting thoughts.
He says earlier, every sensory input comes with a feeling counter Pleasant,
unpleasant, neutral and reactions to those
feeling tones cause certain though streams.
I, I think, I think it's right.
I mean, I think, I think thoughts
certainly can illicit feelings, but feelings can
illicit thoughts and I think they do so more subtly than we Often realize.
And you become aware of these kinds
of subtle things through the meditation practice
and, I think a retreat is particularly place, good place to become aware of them.
Now as for the virtues of this degree of attentiveness to your.
Interior life, into kind of a mindful
perspective Nguyen goes on to say the following.
This was in response to a post in the discussion forum by Camilla Alkin, who
had raised the question of distinction, distinction between feelings and emotions.
And here's What, what [UNKNOWN] Matthews went on to say in the course of his reply.
When my wife says something that I don't like, and a strong feeling of dislike
arises in the body, and when, by the way I know exactly what you're talking about,
I've been there.
He, he goes on to say that Being aware of the feeling
of dislike, rather than, than being, you know, kind of reflexively captive to it.
Changes his reaction.
He says, it may take a minute for it to pass.
But I'm able to respond to what she said, rather than react.
And I know exactly that feeling too, I remember after my
first meditation retreat, in the days after my first meditation retreat,
I remember like, my kids would do something that would make
me feel like yelling at them, and I would get the feeling
To yell at them, the feeling that normally preceded yelling at them,
but it's like I would observe it and not act on it.
It was amazing.
And, that's something that's easier for me to do right after meditation retreat.
But at anytime, if the, the more I am
practicing the meditation, the easier that kind of thing is.
So like right now I'm doing 30 to 40 minutes of meditation every morning.
It hasn't transformed me into a wonderful person,
but my wife says it makes me a better person and she should know.
So, speaking of which
Cameron Kingsbury, this was in a discussion forum,
says I have noticed an emphasis on separating the
self from an emotion instead of saying I
am angry one can say I am experiencing anger.
And that That gets at the distinction, yes, between kind
of owning the feeling and letting the feeling own you
on the one hand, and seeing the feeling as somewhere
in your realm of consciousness, but not being captivated by it.
That said, I do think it's a lot harder Than than just saying this, right?
I mean just saying, you know, you can't, I mean you could just say well, from now
on whenever I'm angry I'll just instead of saying
I am angry, I'll say I am experiencing anger.
Well, no, probably no.
But at times you, you, you know, I'll
just say without the meditation practice It's going to
be hard for little reminders like that to
really take root, at least in my experience.
Another feeling related question.
This one came in via Twitter, and again, the, probably the surest way to get a que,
make sure I at least see a question Is to address it to @darwindarma on twitter.
I mean, I'm doing my best to keep
up with everything on discussion forum, Facebook, Twitter
and, and, and my two assistants are, are, are, are as well
but I, I sometimes miss things because they go by
so quickly on the forum or, and sometimes on Facebook.
Whereas Twitter, for one thing, the traffic is just lower I guess.
Anyway, back to Melissa, whose Twitter handle is mindxgeek.
She says, if unpleasant emotions are linked to avoidance and pleasant
ones to approach, how do you How to explain rage and anger.
And this gets to something I shared when I quoted
the 19th century biologist saying that what feelings seem to
bout, be about is you know, pleasant feelings get the
organism to approach things that are good for it like food.
Unpleasant feelings like fear get it to escape from things like
predators or, or, or live the vicinity of things like toxins.
And Melissa is asking, well what about rage and anger.
The, the which kind of feel bad, I guess, I guess she's saying, they
kind of feel bad but you don't run away from the person, right?
You, you like accost the person.
Approach the person in anger.
Well first of all, I'd say That quote from the
biologist that was kind of in the first instance you know.
When feelings arose in evolution this seems to be the kind
of primordial function pos, positive and
negative, pleasant and unpleasant feelings, approach/avoidance.
Once you get to being as complicated as humans.
It's complicated so for example, I might have pleasant
feelings about one person, unpleasant feelings to another, towards another.
What that leads me to do in some cases and not, not either approach or avoid either
one, it leads me to say good things about
the first person and bad things about the other.
And there are a lot of Yeah, the more
complicated the animal the more complicated things have gotten as,
as evolution has you know, made use of these
feelings in kind of increasingly, you might say, convoluted ways.
That said, I would also suggest to Melissa, that
if she pays close attention to rage and anger.
She may feel like, that, she may see that, in some ways, you know?
There's, there's something.
Pleasant is maybe a misleading word.
[LAUGH] But, but, when your anger, it feels good.
Something, you know, to, to, to yell, to and also when
you are angry, enraged, you feel you're right and they're wrong.
And that's a good feeling, right?
It may not be a true feeling, that's the point.
And this gets back to the relationship between feelings and thoughts.
That this feeling, which is not to be trusted,
will sponsor a thought, which is not to be trusted.
Which is that you're always right and the other people are wrong.
How is Fraiser doing?
Yeah, I see he's he's not really inspired by my little discourse here.
Fraiser's the least, I have two dogs, Fraiser
is the least Buddhist dog in the house.
The less Buddhist of the two.
But maybe I'll save that for another day.
okay.
So the, the.
But one last thing on that.
The I think if I've got this quote right the,
the Buddha, is said to have said that anger is the.
Unless he was talking about hatred but I think it was anger.
The poison root with the honey tip suggesting
that that he too thought the, there was something
Actually, pleasant about anger and, and, and, and seductively pleasant.
and, in any event, it is certainly true
that all of these subtleties of feeling and their
connection to thought and so on, awareness of
that is something that, in principle, mindfulness Can foster.
And in principle, you can carry that into your everyday life.
And be you know less, less vulnerable to the the, the misleading
drift and, and the untruthful drift sometimes of both feelings and thoughts.
Now I'm going to stop here because For various reasons, and, and
then talk about some other stuff.
Okay, now some people I think in the discussion forum in
particular, have raised questions about kind
of the validity of Evolutionary psychology.
You know, how confident can we be of, of the various,
kinds of, you know, theories that you're hearing about, isn't this,
isn't this all very conjectural, actually some of it is quite conjectural
Usually I label the conjectural stuff by using the word conjectural.
I think I've said that several times in the lectures already.
When I'm talking about things that I think are, are particularly speculative.
And some things are more speculative that others in, in evolutionary psychology.
I want to talk a little about a kind
of a handicap it faces compared to some other sciences.
Okay.
You know, in physics, in much of physics, you have a theory about the way
particles behave You, you can do experiments
set up an experiment that, that could in principle falsify that hypothesis.
Depending on how it turns out you do
the experiment, it sheds light on the hypothesis.
Evolutionary psychology though is kind of about history, right.
In fact, that distinguishes it from ordinary psychology.
Ordinary psychology tries to discern the structure of the mind.
Evolutionary psychology does that as well and draws
on many of the findings of ordinary psychology.
But to that, it adds the question of well, how did this structure come to be, the
way, it is, or some aspects of the
structure, we seem to be discerning of the mind.
Design features of natural selection.
Well that's a question that's about the past.
It's about history.
And one thing you can't do, is rewind history and play it again
with some of the variables altered, to test your hypothesis about the past.
Historians can't do it.
Evolutionary psychologists can't do it.
And in fact, evolutionary biologists in general can't do it.
You know, when you think about it, some of the things you probably just accepted as
truths about the biological world, like, well, polar bears are white
because that helps them blend in in an, in an atmosphere of snow and ice, right?
It's good camouflage.
[INAUDIBLE] Well, that's a plausible story, it's probably true.
But we don't have the kind of evidence to
support that, that you sometimes see in other sciences, right?
Because we can't, we can't say, well,
let's go back, you know, millions of years.
And make half of the Arctic Circle green, and leave the other half white.
And see if.
If, if the bears that evolve in the green
part are different from the bears that evolve, right?
We can't do that.
We can't do it in the case of human evolution.
Now you don't generally see people get all
upset when people spec, you know when, when
a scientist kind of asserts that the, the
polar bears were white for purposes of camouflage.
People don't usually get all upset and go how do you know that?
Because it's not a very explosive area, right?
You know, polar bears, right?
It's like, you don't, you don't get, get
a lot of dinner table arguments about polar bears.
Whereas you do get dinner table arguments
about all kinds of aspects of human experience
And, and the role of genes in human experience, in human thought, and so on.
And so, in the case of evolutionary psychology.
The standards of evidence issue.
Although it, it is an issue that
pervades evolutionary biology, gets a particular comment.
And that's good, because, we should be clear
that, some of these theories are hard to test.
There are ways to test theories, so for example
if children are viewed from the cynical perspective
of natural selection, kind of reproductive assets, then, for
reasons I won't get into, that should mean that
different ages parents, their value to parents is different.
And, one, evolution of psychology has tested this prediction by looking
at how, the extenuate parents grieve over the deaths of children in different ages.
In theory, they should grieve over more teenager's death
than a three weeks old Three week old baby's death.
But less than a, than a, than a 59 year old child's death.
And the findings in the, you know?
The study seemed to bear out the hypothesis.
So there, there are ways, you can, you
can get around the kind of, challenges, you know?
The kind of evidentiary.
Even, kind of, I guess, epistemological.
Challenges posed by any historical science, but it's not
that easy, and we should, keep that in mind.
See, the same things with physics, by the way.
The, the cosmological, you know, the theories about the
birth of the, the universe are much harder to test.
Than theories about the, the current structure of the physical world,
so, you know, all I can say is, in general in science.
All of the different sciences have different Different
kinds of, of challenges and their findings have
and, and all of them have different findings
that are different levels of kind of solidity.
Or, or warrant different levels of confidence.
But the general rule is That
the best, the simple, choosing, the criterion is the simplest theory
that explains the data wins at least for the time being.
May turn out to be wrong, but even when, when the best
theory, quote best theory is conjectural Because that's what all the theories are.
It's still the case that, you know, that's the, for
the moment the, you know a conjectural but plausible theory that's
simpler and more straight forward and more consistent with the
facts that other theories is, is the theory we take seriously.
In, in some cases in evolutionary psychology, that is the case.
Conjectural yet In the running.
And that's and I try to you know,
calibrate, express the level of confidence that I think different theories deserve.
I, I may not always succeed.
I may not always remember to do it.
But, but I try.
And, and I just warned you, that as we go
on we will see some pretty conjectural Things that I'll say.
Because a lot of this is kind of untrodden ground.
It's not like a lot of evolutionary psychologists have, have gotten seriously
into Buddhism, and, and started trying to make the connections between the two.
So it's really it, it's fertile ground.
And when Any field of inquiry is kind of fresh, fertile ground, you see
a lot of conjectural stuff, and that's the way the scientific dialogue gets started.
Speculative theories, you throw them out there and you see what people say.
In some cases, they may provoke other people
to come up with better theories, and that's good.
That's part of the process and that's where we are here And I guess
that's about.
Is there anything else I want to say about that.
Well I guess well you know, being, being an organism and being designed to
pursue my self-interest, I should mention that my book The Moral Animal very much
Tries to address this.
It's a book for the unconvinced and I try a kind of casual book length to
explain why this world view broadly deserves confidence,
even though individual hypotheses deserve varying degrees of confidence.
And so it's there.
If anybody is just, deeply deeply interested
in the question of evolutionary psychology's validity.
But, but the main point is just, you know this is what, this is what science is.
All, you know, progress starts as, hypothesis begin as speculation.
And
and then they either amass evidence over time or, or they don't.
Or they are replaced by a hypothesis that's clearly superior.
And that's life.
And I think that's probably enough of office hours for this week.
Although there are so many good questions It's kind of frustrating.
I really think in theory, if I had enough time,
I should go to like, you know, just a, a
more, a schedule of like, you know, like every day,
or every hour, every minute, you know, take another office hours.
But, but other things
Other things in truth.
So anyway,
we'll see you when we see you.
Thing, one more thing just quickly you could
be excused for doubting that my dog Frazier is
an actual dog because he has exhibited so
little movement in the course of this office hours.
And I just want to Establish that Frasier is an actual dog.
And the way you do that, I've found is if you, if
Frasier hears the sound of me reaching into a box of shredded wheat,
that He sometimes bring to life, let's see if this works.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
[SOUND] Hey Frasier.
Look, it's a box of shredded, Shredded Wheat.
You want some?
Ray sure wouldn't mind some Shredded Wheat.
[SOUND] You want to be seen eating it on, camera?
[LAUGH] You just want to be seen eating it period.
Okay.
Let me give.
I'm going to both dogs a little Shredded Wheat.
I feel that, I shouldn't hold them in suspense like that.
I do want to show you the other dog Milo.
Because Milo is actually.
Come here Milo, I just want the people to see because.
Okay, that's Milo.
Milo is actually closer to being a Buddhist than Frasier
for reasons that maybe I'll explain in a subsequent office hours.
I mean doesn't, doesn't he look kind of wise in a way?
[INAUDIBLE] Okay.
Next time.
