[Buddha-l] buddhism and brain studies

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Tuesday 11 November 2008 09:02:08 Jamie Hubbard wrote:

> I am team-teaching a course with a psychologist at the moment,

Gosh, Jamie, you have my condolences.

> Interestingly, he tends to dismiss the studies showing people to be
> generally pretty satisfied as subjective reporting and hence unreliable
> whereas I tend to accept the studies--and my personal experience of the
> folks around me (other than American Buddhists)-- and thus dismiss the
> Buddhist diagnosis as simply false (at best) or a religious "bait and
> switch" at worse (agreeing with HHDL that everybody wants to be happy
> and avoid suffering is easy, but is really a slippery slope to shaving
> your head and leaving your "loved ones" behind). 

Obviously, I am on your side in this debate. I have been trying really hard to 
understand why anyone would dismiss something that can only be subjective 
(namely, whether one feels happy) on the grounds that it is subjective. 
Whereas it is easy to see how one might be mistaken about whether he or she 
is healthy, obese, sober, good-looking to Italian homosexuals over the age of 
45, capable of running a mile in less than seven minutes and in possession of 
an IQ over 78, it is not easy to see how one could be mistaken about whether 
one feels happy. To BE happy, it seems to me, can only mean to FEEL happy, 
and feelings by their very nature cannot possibly be misidentified. Feelings 
are precisely what they, well, FEEL that they are. Therein lies their 
difference from things that can be measured.

It goes without saying, of course, that people (even those who are not 
Republicans) can lie about how they feel, but I see no reliable method to 
tell whether one is lying about feelings. In the absence of a reliable method 
of detecting lies about people's actual feelings, one has no alternative to 
believing what people say about their feelings.

Philosophers (and not only Buddhist ones) are notorious for trying to convince 
people that they could be much happier than they are. Philosophers love to 
point out that people routinely settle for lesser degrees of happiness than 
they could have if they were more virtuous. No one disputes that someone who 
really enjoys a good meal is happy after being fed one (especially if the 
person reports such happiness); but someone might try to argue that a really 
fat person (such as myself) might be even happier if he forwent the pleasures 
of good meals in order to enjoy the even greater pleasures of being more 
healthy. This, it seems to me is pretty much what Buddhists have always done. 
They do not deny that people are really happy quite a bit of the time. 
Rather, they tend to say that most happiness does not last and therefore an 
even greater contentment would arise from opting out of the pursuit of 
happiness and learning to accept whatever comes one's way than arises from 
pursuing one transitory pleasure after another. 

Given the enormous complexity of life and human psychology, I think 
philosophers who argue that one could be even more happy if one were even 
more virtuous are pushing a dogma that can neither be verified or falsified. 
Almost all accounts of what makes one happy are simplistic, and most are 
based on the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. (B followed A, therefore A 
must have caused B.) Buddhists are especially prone to this sort of 
fallacious reasoning. They take up meditation. They feel happy. And then they 
fallaciously conclude that practicing meditation made them feel happy. There 
is perhaps no great harm in this simple-mindedness. It is just one of the 
many declarations of blind faith that people are wont to make. My own tastes 
are such that I would probably rather see someone believe that meditation 
might make them happier than to believe that being a really effective suicide 
bomber might make them happier.

Meditation may not make meditators happy but it does seem to make merchants of 
meditation supplies richer. Someone put a 56-age DharmaCrafts catalog in my 
mailbox. It is full of statues, bells, cushions, benches, mats, electric 
timers, incense holders, prayer shawls, tea cups, folding screens, paintings 
and framed inspiration sayings that are designed to enhance one's meditative 
experience. The more gadgets you buy, the better you'll meditate, and the 
better you mediate, the happier you'll be. (What's that sound? Did I just 
hear the Buddha doing some projective vomiting?)

> The "happiness" of the 
> positive psych folks is not at all the same as the "awakening" or
> "dukkha-nirodha" of the Buddhists.

Psychologists (and their evil twins, sociologists) tend to operate on the 
fallacy that only measurable results are worthy of any kind of credence. They 
live in an impoverished intellectual world of data. Data, as any humanist 
knows, are inherently meaningless but can be given pseudo-meaning by those 
with an obsessive attachment to meaningfulness (itself an unmeasurable 
commodity). It's just a sad thing to witness someone who 1) believes in facts 
and then compounds that delusion with the further delusion that 2) data are 
facts. As sad as that is to witness, it is even sadder to see people who 
believe in data-facticity becoming the administrators of universities who 
drive everyone crazy with their feverish attempts to measure teaching 
effectiveness, scholarly productivity and how their university compares with 
Smith College.

I'm feeling ready to retire, Jamie. Just thinking about all the delusion that 
has taken root in our academic culture makes me momentarily unhappy. (Sorry, 
unless you can fit my corpulent corpse into an fMRI to see whether my 
neuronal activity shows that I'm REALLY unhappy or just laboring under some 
sort of confusion about my actual feelings, you'll have to take my word for 
it.)

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Common Sense
University of New Mexico