Two Questions Called Consciousness: Comparing the Western Scientific and Buddhist Architectures of Mind

Abstract

Two companion papers examined the Western scientific and Buddhist analyses of consciousness separately. This paper puts them together and argues that the common framing is wrong: across much of their range the traditions address different questions sharing an English word. The argument maps referents. Consciousness science divides its object into level, content, access, and phenomenality, pitching claims at five distinguishable strengths; Buddhist analysis divides its object into differentiated consciousness-of, the appropriated “I,” and—in later Tibetan sources—awareness as such. Overlap is real but partial: vijñāna maps closely onto content consciousness and the appropriative “I” onto self-representation, but awareness as such has no stable counterpart in the scientific programme, and the generation question none in the Buddhist one. The central claim concerns why the divergence resists better translation. The categories available in the scientific vocabulary—state, process, function, representation, property—are those the Buddhist term for awareness is defined against, so a translation employing them misdescribes by construction rather than imprecision. The mismatch is categorial rather than lexical: what fails is not comprehension but transplantation into a working inferential role, which distinguishes this account from the partial-overlap positions common in comparative philosophy of mind. Two cases are worked through: dreamless sleep, where the traditions genuinely engage though the strongest contemplative position turns out to be Advaitin rather than Buddhist, and the neural correlates programme, where the operative question is which consciousness has been correlated. Three syntheses are rejected, including the increasingly common reading that both traditions locate consciousness at the base of reality, and the paper closes by specifying what each tradition can legitimately ask of the other.