Buddhistic musings

Derek Parfit writes (p.281 of Reasons and Persons):

Is this truth [of reductionism] depressing? Some may find it so. But I find it liberating, and consoling. When I believed that my existence was a such a further fact, I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.

Even though, I do not share Parfit’s reductionism, I think this passage is intriguing because it acknowledges that the question of personal identity, even when approached from the most abstract, rational, secular perspective, is always an issue of great personal, psychological, even spiritual import, whatever conclusions we may draw. I suppose it should not be surprising that personal identity is personal.

To what extent can Parfit’s views be seen to parallel the Buddhist doctrine of anatta / anatman? Has Parfit attained nirvana?

Questions about Buddhism:

— Suppose there is karma and samsara. Now, let us suppose atman was true. I should be concerned about my next life, because it will be me who suffers or benefits in it. Then, suppose atman is false. Then, why should I be concerned about the next life, since if there is no common self which exists across lives, then it is not me who suffers or benefits, but some other person whom my deeds or cravings caused to exist — why should I care for them?

— Suppose there is karma and samsara. Now, let us suppose atman is true, and furthermore the atman incapable of any merger or division, and can occupy but one body at a time. Hence, after each death, there can only be one immediately subsequent rebirth, and before each birth, there can only be one immediately subsequent death. But, suppose on the contrary, anatman, and the bundle theory (of skandhas) often associated with it are true. Now, in the later case, why should I assume that one bundle gives rise to only one immediately subsequent bundle, or that one bundle is only given rise to by one immediately preceding bundle? Would it not be equally possible, for I to have multiple immediately subsequent lives, or for I to have multiple immediately preceding lives? Might not the bundle elements simply return to the All, only to be taken out of it again, in some essentially random configuration, such that I could have no reason to think I am the successor of any preceding person any more than any other, or that any future person will be any more or less my successor than any other? But if this is the case, I should not be concerned by karma.

Nick Bostrom writes (in Are you living in a computer simulation?):

Further rumination on these themes could climax in a naturalistic theogony that would study the structure of this hierarchy, and the constraints imposed on its inhabitants by the possibility that their actions on their own level may affect the treatment they receive from dwellers of deeper levels. For example, if nobody can be sure that they are at the basement-level, then everybody would have to consider the possibility that their actions will be rewarded or punished, based perhaps on moral criteria, by their simulators. An afterlife would be a real possibility. Because of this fundamental uncertainty, even the basement civilization may have a reason to behave ethically. The fact that it has such a reason for moral behavior would of course add to everybody else’s reason for behaving morally, and so on, in truly virtuous circle. One might get a kind of universal ethical imperative, which it would be in everybody’s self-interest to obey, as it were “from nowhere”.

Let us suppose that we are living in a computer simulation. Let us furthermore suppose, that our simulators have simulated us to fulfil some petty desire of theirs (e.g. I want to be a Hollywood movie star), and that all the horrors of human history (wars, holocausts, etc.) have been accurately simulated, so that the authenticity of the fulfilment of the petty desire can be better guaranteed. Having done so, let us say our simulators feel some twang of guilt (And all time past, was it all for this?, to quote Swinburne), and wish to justify to themselves their behaviour by saying: “Well, let us at the end give them the same opportunity that we have; let us even assume, the same opportunity as we had, for as surely as there are those beneath us, there must also be others above us, who have treated us in the very same way; we cannot give up our desires — for without desire fulfilment, what is the point of existence? — but, if there is no ”

One day you are walking down the street, and you see a man hitting his girlfriend. You try to intervene, and he pulls out a gun and shoots you dead. The media lauds you as a noble good Samaritan, innocent victim, etc.; but, nevertheless, you are dead.

You awake from after the bullet wound. A being appears before you and says: I am a representative of the beings who created your world; you have lived your life, in order that their desires might be fulfilled through the existence of your world and all that is within it; how your life fulfilled those desires, however large or small a role it had in their fulfilment, is irrelevant. But, having so been used, it is only right that we atone by giving you the power to use others as we ourselves have used you. What, then, do you wish for?

What might you answer? Maybe, for a world in which you were not gunned down trying to save a total stranger. And, maybe, you might wish: I want a world in which the man who shot me has the worst life he possibly could.

So it seems, that some variation of Bostrom’s naturalistic theogony can result in a phenomenon not dissimilar to Karma.

Another question:

— If Karma is a theory of causation, must we assume that it is temporal? Suppose the universe is temporally finite and unbounded, and thus that time is cyclic. Then every world line is a closed time-like curve. If that was so, there would be no reason to assume that only the past can cause the future; so long as we allow indirect causation, there is seemingly no reason why the future cannot cause the past, and thus the Karmic consequences of an action might not be reaped before or after or simultaneously with the action itself. And, if every world-line is a CTC, might it be the case that not every such world-line has maximal circumference? In which case, we can make time-reversed causation as direct as we’d like, by making the circumference as small as we’d like.

The branch line case is seen by many as terminal for Cartesianism. If we assume that there is, at any one time, a one-to-one correspondence between bodies and souls, then either one, the other, or neither of the succeeding lines can still possess the same soul as the anterior line. And yet, neither of these three choices seems satisfactory. Thus, it is argued, Cartesianism must fail. But, suppose we deny the claim of one-to-one-correspondence. I might then analyse a branch-line case in my future as follows. Right now, I have two souls, which are absolutely identical, except that, when the branch-line occurs in my future, one soul will follow one line the other the other; the point of branching is the time at which they become distinct.

As much as I might branch, might I not also come together? At the moment, we experience our first-hand experiences first-hand; whereas we experience the first-hand experiences of others only third-hand. But suppose you and I were joined in such a way, that whatever you saw I saw, whatever you felt I felt, whatever you thought I thought, etc. Would we not, quickly, become unable to tell ourselves apart? Would we not then, cease to be two different persons, but have merged together as one? Or, to give a more Cartesian reading, just as in the branch-line case two previously identical souls have become distinct, so in the merger case two previously distinct souls have become identical.

Parfit feels liberated from the glass tunnel by his reductionism. And yet suppose the glass was real, not merely illusory — am I then condemned to live within it, as long as I live, or else forever? What if the branch line, and the merger line, were not merely philosophical gedanken, or rare actual occurrence, but the reality in the lives of all of us? What if we had one single predecessor, of which we are all branch lines? What if we have one single successor, which is of us all a merger? Indeed, if we had one single ultimate predecessor and one single ultimate successor, might it not be that the two were in fact one and the same, in one great cycle of time? And if we were to give a Cartesian reading to such a chain of events, might we not conclude that the glass wall is but a temporary phenomenon; the wall is broken in branching and merging; and, in the beginning and the end, then many walls reduce to one wall, which encompasses all that is. Thus, to be liberated from our glass walls, we do not have to pretend not to see them.

What is the point of anatta? To escape the glass wall?

We can consider two models of the Cartesian soul. One, a fuller model, in which the soul is the person, and it has all the properties which can be ascribed to a person — likes, dislikes, loves, hates, desires, beliefs, a name, a history; etc. — and a simple model, in which the souls has no properties other than being exposed to a particular qualia stream; anything we might ascribe to a person is reducible to certain qualia in the qualia stream, either of that person or of some other; a reductionism, not of psychological states to physical states, but rather a reductionism of both psychological and physical states to qualia. Is the point of anatta, to deny the fuller model, to deny the permanence of these myriad attributes? For if that is the intention, then the simpler model equal denies the myriad attributes; they are but the ephemera of qualia; they come and go as the qualia change. And, if the branching and merging of all be true, then they change from and to something which cannot be identified with the person of the fuller model, even if it remains the atom of subjective identity, bound to a Q-space region, which the simpler model assumes.