Why Buddhism Is True

Notes on the book Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright. The book argues that Buddhism’s conception of the human condition and how our brains work is backed up by recent neuroscience (but sets aside the religion’s cosmology).

Thinking and feeling are deeply interconnected:

But the point of smarts, from natural selection’s perspective, isn’t to replace feelings, but rather to make them better informed. Intelligence helps animals do a more sophisticated job of figuring out what to approach or avoid, acquire or reject, that is, what to feel good about or bad about. So, over evolutionary time, though the calculations that inform our feelings get more and more elaborate, the feelings continue to be what ultimately steer us through life.

Feelings tell us what to think about, and then after all the thinking is done, they tell us what to do.

See also: motivated reasoning. It sounds like all reasoning is fundamentally motivated. When we think we’re more rational than others, it’s a clash of values, not a clash of reason vs. emotion.

The neuroscientist Luiz Pessoa has written “affective brain regions participate in cognition on the one hand, and cognitive brain regions participate in emotion.”

See also: The brain is an argument

On Peter Bloom and the “wine connoisseur” study:

This is a major theme of Bloom’s: that the stories we tell about things, and thus the beliefs we have about their history and their nature, shape our experience of them, and thus our sense of their essence.

Notably, brain scans during the study showed enhanced activation in the parts of the brain associated with pleasure as a result of the false belief that the wine was unusually expensive. People don’t just pretend more expensive wines taste better…if they believe it will, it really, truly does to them.

Interdependence:

As I observed my aversion and my wrath and these feelings lost their power, there was a moment when I imagined that feeling in my gut and his snoring as a kind of single system or organism unified by communication. In other words, I focused on the continuous stream of sound waves that had emanated from his nose, entered my brain, and elicited the aversion and wrath. For a moment, the annoyer and the annoyed weren’t two rigidly distinct things: a he and an I.

At war with our maker:

Just thing of yourself as fighting your creator: natural selection. After all, natural selection…engineered the delusions that control us: it built them into our brains… Natural selection perpetrated the delusion in order to get us to adhere slavishly to its agenda. Its agenda being, of course, to get genes into the next generation.

Mindfulness can save the world:

I think the salvation of the world can be secured via the cultivation of calm, clear minds and the wisdom they allow. Such minds can, for one thing, keep us from overreacting to threats, and thus feeding the vicious circles that intensify conflicts. Calm, clear minds can also help us soberly assess what animates the threats, and so figure out, for example, what kinds of things encourage people to join or support violent causes, and what kinds of things discourage them from doing that. We don’t have to love our enemies, but seeing them clearly is essential.

Further Reading

• A review considering the philosophical implications of Wright’s book by Lachlan Dale in Philosophy Now