MIND-BODY PROBLEM IN INDIAN PHILOSOPHY

Abstract

The thriving contemporary enterprise of Consciousness Studies owes its success in large measure to two late 20th-century intellectual developments in cognitive science and its allied philosophy of mind: a growing interest in the study of the neurobiological processes that underlie consciousness and cognition, and the rehabilitation of first-person approaches to the study of consciousness associated with the 20th-century European tradition of phenomenological philosophy. The first development marks a shift away from preoccupations with the status of mental representation to understanding the function of perception, attention, action, and cognition in embodied and enactive, rather than purely representational, terms. The second acknowledges the importance of fine-grained accounts of experience for the purpose of mapping out the neural correlates of consciousness. Both developments recognize that empirical research is essential to advancing any robust philosophical and scientific theory of consciousness. At the same time, these developments also open up the possibility that there may be aspects of consciousness that are not empirically tractable, aspects whose understanding require that we revise the way we conceptualize both the easy and hard problems of consciousness. It is this revisionary approach that has opened the door to systematic contributions to the study of consciousness that take its phenomenological and transcendental dimensions seriously. Indian philosophy is host to a rich tradition of such systematic examinations of consciousness that focus primarily, though not exclusively, on its phenomenological and transcendental dimensions. Indeed, one could go as far as to argue that the nature and function of consciousness is perhaps the single most contentious issue among the different schools of Indian philosophy, a development without parallel in the West, prior to Descartes, Kant, and the British empiricists. From its earliest association in the Upaniṣads with the principle of individuation or the self (ātman), to its indispensability to any theory of knowledge, the concept of consciousness (variously rendered in Sanskrit as cit, citta, vijñāna) has been at the center of debates about personal identity, agency, and the grounds of epistemic reliability. Not only are analyses of the different aspects of consciousness essential to the problem of self-knowledge, they are also fundamental in settling metaphysical claims about the nature of reality (Siderits 2015). Much of the debate follows the familiar terrain of inquiries into such pressing matters as the reach of perception, the nature of mental content, and the character of veridical states of cognitive awareness. But the tradition is also 7 CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM IN INDIAN PHILOSOPHY