Descartes vs Buddha - Was Descartes wrong?

Question

Descartes imagined an Evil Demon to suggest that the external world could be a complete illusion. This Evil Demon would have the power to trick all your senses. This idea is similar to the Buddhist concept of Maya or the simulation hypothesis which is known world wide because of films such us ExistenceX, The Thirteenth Floor or The Matrix series.

Was Descartes wrong assuming that you are a thinking entity? How can you know that your thoughts are really your thoughts and not induced or created by another entity (evil demon, karma, an AI machine in the Matrix, etc)?

Is Buddha right assuming that you are not your mind and your mind creates your ego (idea of the self) which is also an illusion and you don’t need to think to know you exist? (experienced meditators know this creating huge gaps between thoughts such us in emptiness meditation)

Answer 1

▻ MATRIX-TYPE THOUGHTS

How can you know that your thoughts are really your thoughts and not induced or created by another entity (evil demon, karma, an AI machine in the Matrix, etc)?

I think you are skidding on 'your'. They are only not 'your' thoughts in the sense that they have been externally induced (without your knowing it). But they are still 'your' thoughts in the sense that you have them. However they came about, the thoughts are within your consciousness and hence are 'yours'.

▻ DESCARTES AS A THINKING ENTITY

Was Descartes wrong assuming that you are a thinking entity?

It isn't strictly correct to say that he assumed this. His first certainty was 'I think (and thinking), I exist' (Meditation 2). In the more usual form, 'I think, therefore I exist' only has a point-instant certainty. It is true only whenever it is enacted. If X enacts the thought now, and enacts it five minutes later, it does not follow (and Descartes does not think it does) that X has had a continuous existence as an entity between the two enactments.

Take a parallel with a clock : whenever it is working it shows the right time. Because it shows the right time on Monday and the right time on Wednesday, it does not follow that the clock has had a continuous existence between the two days. It may have been dismantled on Tuesday and not existed as a clock at all.

Descartes argues the case for his being a thinking entity (a continuant). It is may not be a cogent argument but it is an argument, set out in Meditations 2 and 6.

▻ ILLUSION

Is Buddha right [in] assuming that you are not your mind and your mind creates your ego (idea of the self) which is also an illusion and you don’t need to think to know you exist?

I am not sure about the exact line of thought here. Probably my fault. But if it is an illusion that one is one's mind and an illusion (generated by the mind) that one is an ego or self, the question naturally suggests itself : to whom or what do the illusions occur ? Who or what is 'illuded' ? There can't be an illusion without something that has it. What is the 'one' that is not its mind and is not an ego or self ? What remains to have the illusions ?

If 'one' is itself an illusion, the question recurs : to whom or what does the illusion of being 'one' occur ?

REFERENCES

J. Cottingham, Descartes, Oxford : Blackwell, 1986, ch. 2.

Alan Tomhave, 'Cartesian Intuitions, Humean Puzzles, and the Buddhist Conception of the Self', Philosophy East and West, Vol. 60, No. 4 (OCTOBER 2010), pp. 443-457.

Answer 2

I think that Descartes did a good thing when he said "if the Evil Demon deceives me, there is still an 'I' to be deceived." It sounds like the Buddha asks you to throw this away, since I is "no-thing".

There seems to be an inconsistency in thinking that "I" can attain emptiness, if emptiness means non-existence... clearly, if it takes work to do, then there is me, doing that work. Emptiness of own-nature then has a peculiar meaning that I have difficulty understanding.

Still, I think that each of these approaches provides an effective self-fulfilling prophecy: Descartes claims to exist; but a buddha has acknowledged (or attained) "emptiness of own-nature". Non-existence has the same power as solipsism ("only I exist") against various logical objections.

Since neither claim seems to be refutable, we are simply left with a choice! I prefer Descartes for two reasons: first, I am skeptical that my interests could still be preserved if I let go of my own nature in favor of nothing.

Second, because under Descartes' thinking I don't have to submit to objections like "if you try too hard to understand the doctrine, you will not understand the doctrine."

This is not to say that there is no place for a thinking person to submit. But it is better and more comforting to submit to a person who is worthy of submission than to submit to nothingness.

Answer 3

I suppose some of the distinctions I'm about to make depend upon the strand of Buddhist thought to which you're referring. I'm going to approach this from an ancient Indian Madhyamaka perspective.

Was Descartes wrong assuming that you are a thinking entity? How can you know that your thoughts are really your thoughts and not induced or created by another entity (evil demon, karma, an AI machine in the Matrix, etc)?

It isn't that Descartes is wrong about the thinking part of the 'thinking thing' assertion; his assertion is flawed, according to Madhyamaka Buddhist thought, because, within that assertion, Descartes is already presupposing real existence of essence -- a claim about self's thinghood, which is a claim about the ultimate truth of self. But, since self can't be understood as independently arisen, it is therefore empty (of ultimate truth.) It should be noted that this does not imply a theory of self cannot be conventionally/provisionally true.

Is Buddha right assuming that you are not your mind and your mind creates your ego (idea of the self) which is also an illusion and you don’t need to think to know you exist? (experienced meditators know this creating huge gaps between thoughts such us in emptiness meditation)

Again, according to the tradition I'm reading in, Buddha demonstrates the illusory of self in order to show such notion is ultimately empty, not to argue against the 'thinking' aspect. I think the distinction I'm drawing here is best understood in terms of the two truths.

It is important to note that emptiness of essence does not preclude provisional existence or truth. Nagarjuna even argues that emptiness is, itself, empty.

Answer 4

Descartes is at very different purposes with his Evil Demon than the role of maya or the simulation hypothesis. Descartes places primacy on mental experience, which makes the regularities in the material world problematic - which he accounts for with the mentality of a deity, an inevitable consequence of substance dualism (but not property dualism). It may appear that theism is not essential to Cartesian dualism, but it makes the unity of the external world at the very least require the 'god of the philosophers', or deism. Materialism or physicalism, places primacy on material experiences, which makes accounting for subjective experience or qualia problematic, resulting in the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

Maya is translated as 'pretence' or 'deceit', a negative mental quality like lust. In Buddhism, conventional experience is always founded in misconceptions, is always a kind of dream or illusion. There is no other kind of subjective or self-identifying experience. Delusion, craving, suffering, and the arising of causal chains and identity, are seen as of a piece, in the chain of dependent arising. There is no true unity in the external world, except in what is regular in the nature of minds and their shared history together or codependent arising.

Descartes says there is this thinking I, which he already makes assumptions about the capacities of - such as access to apriori concepts. Buddhism says, whatever locus of experience there is, that is the self. And then by reflection and direct experiencd, identifies that there being a locus for events is in fact an illusion. The former cannot deal with the Private Language Argument. The latter prefigures it (imho).

"David Chalmers has argued that we should consider the 'simulation hypothesis' not as a skeptical hypothesis that threatens our having knowledge of the external world but as a metaphysical hypothesis regarding what our world is actually made of. " http://philosophycommons.typepad.com/flickers_of_freedom/2014/08/the-case-for-libertarian-compatibilism-a-brief-overview.html (discussed here Are we living in a simulation? The evidence). This can be used to reconcile subjective mental experience, and the experience of a shared external world, such as through the Peer-To-Peer Reality idea - very like Indra's Net, a model of mind and reality shared by Hindu and Buddhist thinkers.

So, Descartes is wrong not because he can't be sure they are his thoughts, but because he can't have the conceptual notion of a self without an inheritence, without a prconception of a shared and collectively generated reality. In Buddhism this is called karma, and can be analysed for instance as Eight Consciousnesses (very similar to Aristotle's three souls).You thinking about it, is you being a self - so using thought can never unpick your being or negate any existence. It's like using a telescope to try and look at itself. In meditation you first try and see how clear is the lense, then about why you feel motivated to turn the telescope to certain things, then you put the telescope down and see what happens. This is not using thoughts to look at thoughts, creating thinking-self. It is observing, settling, observing, just watching what your mind does without pushing it anywhere.