Tagged: Cognitive science
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Polak - Language, Conscious Experience and the Self in Early Buddhism (2018)
1This article reconstructs early Buddhist thought to argue that ordinary conscious experience is fundamentally shaped by language and conceptualization, a process that creates an illusory Self which is the root of suffering. This cognitive distortion begins with *saññā* (apperception), a labeling function that, through its inherent link to language, imposes a discrete, manifold structure (*papañca*) onto reality. The mind's tendency to reify grammatical forms is then misapplied to personal pronouns, constructing a continuous "narrative self" that is mistakenly identified as a real agent—a "speaker and feeler" (*vado vedeyyo*). Drawing on parallels in Western philosophy and modern cognitive science, the text argues this delusion involves misinterpreting phenomenal consciousness (represented by the five *khandha-s*)—which is merely a limited, unified representation of vast, non-conscious bodily processes—as the actual source of agency and subjectivity. This fundamental error of identifying with a fictional, linguistically-generated entity is psychologically taxing, distorts the experience of time, and constitutes the core of human suffering.
Polak - The Pleasure of Not Experiencing Anything (2023)
2Grzegorz Polak's article reconstructs the philosophical basis for the early Buddhist claim that the pleasure (*sukha*) of nibbāna lies in the absence of experience (*vedayita*). The author argues that *vedayita* and the five aggregates (*khandhas*) do not represent all cognition but a specific type of introspectable, reportable "access consciousness" that is inherently fabricated (*saṅkhāra*) and tied to a mistaken sense of self. Drawing on modern cognitive science, the paper posits that this form of consciousness is not continuous and its very generation is correlated with a subtle tension and fundamental discomfort (*dukkha*). Consequently, states of deep absorption or "flow" are pleasurable due to a lower frequency of this self-conscious awareness. The ultimate psychological transformation, therefore, involves ceasing to identify with one's consciousness, which allows for its absence to be realized not as annihilation, but as a profound, non-introspectable comfort (*sukha*) while the organism remains intelligently and receptively engaged with the world.