‘Beyond the Self’: A Buddhist and Neuroscientist Debate Our Essential Being

A review of ‘Beyond the Self’, by Matthieu Ricard and Wolf Singer; MIT Press, 2017.

The premise of Beyond the Self is simple: a Buddhist monk and a neuroscientist have a conversation. Of course, it helps that the Buddhist monk in question — Matthieu Ricard, once dubbed ‘the world’s happiest man’—completed his doctoral thesis in biochemistry at the Institute Pasteur, and can therefore hold his own in highly scientific discussions. In the course of several dialogues taking place around the world, the two men explore the overlap between science and spirituality, the nature of consciousness, and the presence—or absence—of the self.

And that — the self — is the main theme. Matthieu argues that the self is an illusion: simply the label we attach to the stream of thoughts that accompany us throughout our lives. But this paints a slightly simplistic picture of what many Buddhists think. In Buddhism, there are two levels of reality: the conventional and the absolute. The conventional deals with the practical and everyday. The absolute deals with the basic nature of reality. At the absolute level, there is no self. There are no ‘things’ at all. There is no stack of books beneath my desk, no half-drunk bottle of wine on it, no shoe collection next door. There is simply flow. Everything is always changing and acting on everything else. Panta rhei, as Heraclitus put it: ‘Everything flows’. In Buddhism, nothing has an essence or ‘self’. And yet some things maintain their characteristics for long enough for us to give them a label. Hence why I was, am and will continue to be (unless I do myself a fatal mischief sometime soon) called Harry. Here we find a resolution to the paradox of the Ship of Theseus. If we change all the panels of the ship, it is not, in the absolute sense, the same ship. In the conventional sense, it is. It has the same function, the same purpose, the same name. So it remains Theseus’ ship.

In Buddhism, nothing has an essence or ‘self’. And yet some things maintain their characteristics for long enough for us to give them a label.

The end goal of meditation is to see this for ourselves. We sit, we breathe, perhaps we count; and if we do this for long enough then we begin to realise that what we are basically is not the stream of thoughts that flows through our head at every moment, but whatever it is that is watching it. After all, if ‘I’ can watch my thoughts, who is the one doing the thinking? Clearly it isn’t me. It is beyond the scope of this article to explore that particular question in any more depth; but one answer is that when we engage in meta-cognition, which is to say when we think about thinking, we are identifying more with that flow that is everything. (This is not as woo-woo as it might sound at first, certainly not in the field of quantum physics, which abandoned the naïve materialist view of reality long ago. Read my piece on pan-psychism if this sort of thing interests you.)

But I digress. Both Matthieu and Wolf rightly see the central flaw in neuroscience, which is that it deals with facts and not meanings. Some have contemptuously described the attempt of neuroscience to explain everything as ‘neuro-nonsense’. Bound up with this is what Mary Midgeley calls ‘the school of nothing buttery’, which seeks to reduce even the most profound human experiences to brain activity (I have written about this elsewhere). A useful way to think about facts and meanings is to set the image of Mona Lisa against the substances with which Leonardo made his painting. Is the Mona Lisa ‘nothing but’ paint on canvas? Clearly not. Wolf understands that we need to understand what it means for this or that part of the brain to light up like a Christmas tree. And this is where psychology, philosophy and spirituality come in.

I suppose in theory the challenge of putting such a book together is that you cannot guarantee your subjects will have a fruitful or entertaining conversation – or at least, one that is sufficiently interesting for people to want to read it, written out in full like a script. The editors should be congratulated on putting this particular pairing together, since their discussion is rarely boring and sometimes absolutely riveting. It is a huge strength of the book that Wolf is at times quite sceptical of the things Matthieu says, and there are times when you can detect a prickliness and impatience from both men (one of whom, being a Buddhist monk, really doesn’t have a good excuse).

The editors should be congratulated on putting this particular pairing together, since their discussion is rarely boring and sometimes absolutely riveting.

You never really have the sense that you are eavesdropping on a private chat, however, which is arguably the beauty of a good podcast: you feel like a mute participant. There is something too clear, too sharp, too directed about the whole thing for that. This is probably necessary. I do not think it is a flaw that arguments are built up in the course of a discussion either, rather than presented in a linear fashion all in one go, as in a debate. It is useful to go over the same ground several times. Slowly, a mental picture builds up.

There is something about a dialogue that communicates ideas effectively. Socrates, of course, set the tone with his persistent questioning of people who did not get that he was winding them up. But when two people have something to say and give a damn what the other person has to say as well, ideas are refined to their essence not so much by interrogation or attack, but by the flames of curiosity and a hunger to understand. And so it is with Beyond the Self, whose protagonists collaborate in a project to get to the heart of things, and so present a far richer, more nuanced study of the mind, brain and self than you might find elsewhere.