Microgenesis and Buddhism: The Concept of Momentariness

·期刊原文
Microgenesis and Buddhism: The Concept of Momentariness
By Jason W. Brown
Philosophy East and West
Vol. 49, No. 3 (1999)
pp. 261-277
Copyright 1999 by University of Hawaii Press
Hawaii, USA

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There have been few attempts to relate Buddhist thought to current trends in brain psychology. This is not surprising since the dominant force in contemporary psychology, that of a modular cognitivism, considers mental contents to be logical solids that interact in a function space -- an approach that is incompatible with a metaphysics of relation and change, and equally inhospitable to process philosophy. [1] The temporality that is central to Buddhist metaphysics, and foundational to all phenomenal entities, has been largely eliminated from the reified objects of psychology, which severs the temporal relations between modules and reinserts them in the connectivity.

The aim of this article is to bring to the attention of Buddhist scholars another approach to the human mind, one that has developed out of the study of the symptoms of individuals with brain damage. This account, the microgenetic theory or cognition, had its beginnings with the disorders of language (aphasia) that result from damage to focal brain areas. The various forms of aphasia were interpreted as anticipatory phases in the neurocognitive actualization or becoming of an utterance. Gradually, it became clear that the brain model of language was applicable to the account or action and perception as hierarchic systems of momentary actualization. Indeed, such a range of clinical phenomena could be explained by this theory that microgenesis appeared to constitute a general model of brain and behavior.

According to the theory, the mind/brain state is a continuous sheet or process from self to world, rhythmically generated out or a subcortical core and distributed over phases to a neocortical rim. [2] The basic operation is a cascade of whole-to-part or context-to-item transformations, in which parts arise out of wholes through constraints on emergent form at successive phases. The progression is from the archaic to the recent in brain evolution, from the past to the present -- loosely, from memory to perception -- in a momentary cognition, from unity to multiplicity, and from the intrapsychic to the extrapersonal. Mental process is unidirectional, obligatory, and recurrent. The complete sequence from depth to surface constitutes the mind/brain state. In this theory, reality is not the starting point but the goal of an act of knowledge.

In the course of a reflection on the metaphysics of microgenetic theory, so many areas of correspondence to early Buddhist thought are evident -- the arising and perishing of phases, the recurrence or moments, the phenomenal quality of perceptions -- that one might suppose it to have been the starting point of the work in neurology. Indeed, for many years, after lectures on theoretical psychology I have

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often been asked -- to my dismay, I admit -- whether my work on microgenesis was inspired by Buddhist philosophy.

Though roughly aware of the idealist tendencies in Buddhism, namely momentariness and perspectivalism, it is only now, after the theory has reached a degree of maturity of exposition, that I have been motivated to explore the topic in greater detail to determine if there are some principles in common. The concept or momentariness that motivates this article is but one example of a convergence. However, even certain of the contradictions in Buddhism can be aligned with microgenetic concepts, for example the concept of a succession of phases in a moment that is itself nontemporal.

The Buddhist Concept of the Moment
The Maadhyamika concept of momentariness or dependent co-origination (pratiitya-samutpaada) holds that every entity is a series of momentary states bound together by similarity. An entity is reproduced through a replication of its states, each moment comprises a state of the entity, though a complete entity is the result of an imaginative reconstruction over a series of states. The sequence of the replications is linked together in the mind through the rapid succession of similar moments. This gives the continuity of experience and the appearance of persistence. Satkari Mookerjee writes that the arrow in its flight "is not one but many arrows successively appearing in the horizon, which give rise to the illusion of a persistent, entity owing to continuity of similar entities." [3] The judgment of similarity and the illusion that similar replicates constitute a single entity are subjective features.

In early (Abhidharmika) Buddhism, every entity was conceived as a discrete element, and was held to emerge and perish in its entirety. A relational theory of causal induction was applied to elements in sequence. [4] In a transition across elements, the entity did not become another entity but was replaced by the next in the succession. This was compared by T. R. V. Murti -- like Henri Bergson, from a different perspective -- to a movie strip with full stops and replacements, the observer filling in the gaps. The price of this atomism of the moment, however, was an inability to account for change. The entity, in Mookerjee's words, is "destitute of all continuity," without a past or a future. If the continuity of changeless entities arises through a subjective addition, that is, as a "fiction of the understanding" then how does subjectivity contribute change to entities that are otherwise changeless?

Continuity and comparison were problems for an encapsulated theory of the moment. In later writings, the transition from one moment to the next was conceived as governed by the causal laws of pure succession without an underlying substratum on which the laws were operative. Some commentators, most notably Ratnakiirti, emphasized that a unity of the self was necessarily prior to the individual momentary entities, in order to give them coherence. Yet if the self is a sequence of moments just like the entities it perceives, how does the fusion of moments occur? In an anaatman

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theory (no self or soul), the coherence and the duration of entities cannot be explained unless an antecedent entity is postulated through which the phenomenal experience occurs. The assumption in Yogaacaara of a consciousness anterior to experience attempts to resolve this difficulty but introduces problems of its own.

Every account of the phenomenal world requires an experiential thickness. At the most basic level, to say that a cognition is not a simple entity but emerges into being impregnated with the impression of the previous cognition might address the experience of continuity, or at least the lack of awareness of discontinuity, but if all there is in the momentary state is a subtle departure from the state of the preceding moment -- a departure that is nonconscious, for consciousness would entail a comparison across two states, not just a changed present state -- there is still no accounting of (the illusion of) duration and identity.

Duration
According to the most central concepts of Buddhism, a moment (k.sa.na) is not a time-slice that is demarcated and infinitely divisible; the moment is not infinitely brief but has a certain thickness that is fundamental. This thickness differs from a duration that is conceived as a psychic addition. The moment is epochal and atomic without incrementation; it is a minimal unit of time that itself is nontemporal.

The thickness of a moment is conceived as a durationless point in a continuum that has no definite boundaries. Stcherbatsky compared a moment -- "a momentary flashing into the phenomenal world out of an unknown source" -- to a point in space-time. The duration of the moment is "the smallest particle of time imaginable." [5] For Murti, "a thing is a point-instant, having neither a "before" nor an "after." Murti writes that the moment has no temporal span, and thus no duration. [6] The duration of the moment is bound up with a theory of momentary states of consciousness that are the phenomenal equivalents of atomic point-instants. Consciousness and the duration of conscious experience are thought-constructions of the contiguities and simultaneities of the momentary flashings.

I would agree with those commentators on Buddhist thought who hold that duration is added by the mind to the series of changing points, not secondarily through a recombination but implicitly in the act of perception (see below). [7] It is not sufficient, however, to argue that duration is a contribution of the mind to entities that are durationless. Such entities depend on the cognitive laws that govern the process of "thought-construction," and these laws are as yet unknown.

In microgenetic theory, as in the writings of Henri Bergson, the duration of an actuality is the primary datum; the points or instants are artifacts. Without a duration, consciousness is not possible. The duration extends to the barest points since even these are conceptual. According to this view, one needs an explication of the process through which a duration is established and from which the points are extracted, not an account of duration as a sum or an aggregate of points.

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The moment arises and perishes. The thickness of the moment must accommodate its kinetic phases, that is, the initial phase of arising and the terminal phase of perishing. In a slice there is no width for even such a characterization; indeed, in a slice there is no dynamic, no relation. The phases of a moment are successive; the arising and perishing do not occur simultaneously. In some accounts, a nascent phase of arising and a cessant phase of perishing enclose an intermediate phase of abiding. [8] This intermediate phase is not a stasis but a segment of change that is neither an origination nor a termination.

In other accounts, there is no distinction of phases but rather a continuous perishing. Mookerjee describes a perishing that is intrinsic to the entity. The entity is its changing states. All entities come into existence and pass out of existence, not in the sense of a passing in and out of nonexistence, though this is a topic of controversy, but of a passing from one state of existence to another state of existence. The change across different states does not necessarily entail a transition from existence to non-existence and back again. The perishing is the "ground" of the arising. An entity cannot arise from nothing. An entity cannot perish to nothing.

The problem of arising (from nothing) and perishing (to nothing) has occupied many of the best minds in Buddhist thought, especially with regard to the causal process that binds one entity to the next. In my view, the problem of a perishing into nonexistence is a confusion of an entity with an identity, the construal of a non-existence with a change in the identity of an entity, not the assumption by the entity of an altered state. The entity is no longer the same entity and in that sense no longer exists (as that entity), but one ought not to confuse nonexistence with unreality or nonbeing. The nonexistence or an occurrent entity at an antecedent or subsequent moment is its existence in another state, not its absolute nonexistence. The misconstrual of nonexistence with nonbeing results from a confusion of the momentariness of an entity with the persistence of that entity over the moments of its occurrence.

But within a moment, successive phases have been distinguished. The concept of a succession within a nontemporal span, or the concept of a nontemporal duration, is a paradoxical feature in the theory of universal flux. Unless every momentary state has some temporal width, a duration of some sort must be postulated to introduce process into instantaneous slices of physical immediacy.

In sum, an entity does not arise from nothing nor does it perish into nothing, but is a transition from one baseline state to the next. Something is retained in the causal transition that is the basis for the close replication. Otherwise, process would be chaotic. The antecedent state constrains the occurrent state, which then constrains the subsequent state. Within each moment of arising and perishing, there is no nesting of nascent/cessant pairs. Nor can a static phase of abiding be tolerated. The moment is a dynamic cycle that constitutes an indissoluble unit of existence.

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Dependent Co-origination
An event arises and perishes in relation to immediately antecedent and consequent events. Since every event depends on, or is conditioned by, these relations, and since every event itself is a relation, the event cannot be distinguished from the conditions that cause it. Thus, the event has no substantial or settled nature. One cannot say that there is the event! In Abhidharmic Buddhism, this dependence was interpreted as a strict karmic determinism. The Sarvaastivaadins were still bound to the Brahmanic idea of a self-nature (svabhaava) in which the essence of an element survives after its causal impact on the next event. The self-nature is the being or "entityhood" of the element. The Sautraantikas denied self-nature.

The absence of substantiality or self-being in an element is a limit on its degree of actuality or realness. This creates the dilemma that either an element is substantial and real or impermanent and unreal. An event or moment as a segment in continuous change is impermanent, thus devoid of explicit content or essence, and, in this sense, unreal or "empty." In Maadhyamika, these two perspectives are in dialectical tension. The middle path avoids the rigid determinism and changeless persistence (eternalism) of substantialist theories and the blind chance, continuous change, and impersistence (annihilation) of relational theories.

While the development of the moment from a nascent to a cessant phase has often been described as a becoming, there is no process of specification from potential to actual comparable to that in Aristotelian thought or in process metaphysics. Rather, there is a progression from a phase of inception to one of termination. The concept of a potential is usually illustrated by an example such as the potential of a seed to become a sprout. This is not interpreted as the presentiment of the sprout in the seed, but in terms of a series or intervening causal pairs, that is, from an earlier to a later stage in a series of states. There are occasional accounts of a potentiality that develops or "ripens" into a cognition -- by Candrakiirti, for example -- but these do not seem to contain the concept of an individuation of entities from their generative ground. [9]

An essential ingredient in becoming is the many: one or whole: part relation. The frequent statements in Buddhist writings that there are no wholes, only parts, might be taken to indicate a rejection of the notion of becoming (of wholes into parts). Similarly, there is no progression to an actuality. The Buddhist moment does not progress toward realization. In becoming, in the process through which the individuality of an actual entity is achieved, there is a zeroing in on the definiteness of a realized particular. This "movement" toward individuality is not present, so far as I can tell, in Buddhist thought. Indeed, the process of individuation is dispersed through the concept of co-dependence to a mutuality of interpenetrated entities. Becoming is a process leading -- in the metaphysics of Whitehead, for example -- from a grounded ness in the totality of eternal objects to the actuality of the one. In contrast, momentariness is the dependence of an entity throughout its transitional appearance on the totality of the universe at a given moment.

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In dependent co-origination, entities are interrelated throughout their phases: every phase in the sequence from nascent to cessant is as actual or as illusory as any other phase. In becoming, the "connectedness" or relation to all world entities of a given event -- that is, the world-ground out of which an event is realized -- is implicit only at the initial phase of potentiality This phase is earlier in becoming and evolves to an actuality as an independent entity. Put differently, the dependent co-origination of a moment in Buddhism is a "horizontal" segment of change in which all phases are equivalent, while the becoming of process theory is a "vertical" unfolding out of time as the world is generated from potential.

These comments recall the process critique of the substantialism that is inherent in a "vacuous actuality," where the entity fails to achieve a state of subjective immediacy; that is, the perishing is the means by which an entity emerges from potential to become subjectively immediate. In the metaphysics of process thought and Buddhism, the actual does not attain the substantial in order to become real. The real is always relational in both the material and the mental world. Indeed, in some schools of Buddhism, the relational is enlarged to incorporate the before and the after of every momentary event. This is the positive aspect of the relational. The absence of autonomy entails the interpenetration of every event by every other event. To paraphrase Whitehead, every actuality is somewhere, while every potentiality is everywhere.

One does not have to arrest the process of change to achieve an actuality. Mind and world are populated with seemingly concrete entities. These entities are illusory in their stability, but the presence of stabilities demands an explanation of how the flux is carved up into the manifold of appearances. It is not enough to assume that the stability of an entity is the result of a rapid succession, with duration and seriality achieved as in a movie strip by an illusory fusion of a rapid continuity or similar entities (frames) in consciousness, like a phi phenomenon. As noted, this will not work if consciousness is also momentary, for then consciousness will require an explanation of its own capacity for fusion. The anaatman position of Buddhism eliminates an absolute or enduring self that could account for the fusion of conscious moments. That is why the fundamental problem is the emergence of an entity. What is the minimal state of an entity -- how can there be entities at all in a theory of continual flux; that is, how is an entity achieved in a moment that is durationless? Or, how are durationless moments compounded to the duration of an entity?

The phase of arising arises from a preceding phase of perishing. The perishing of the preceding moment is complete it the moment is atomic, but in some sense the autonomy of a past moment cannot be absolute without losing its continuity with the present moment. Disputation in Buddhist philosophy centers on the causal linkage between discrete moments, yet there is no theory of the moment itself. The moment is atomic, thus autonomous or indivisible, yet it is also relational, thus dependent and interpenetrated. How can the contradictory descriptions be resolved? The Buddha said of dependent arising or emptiness that it "is the exhaustion of all philosophical views. I call incurable whoever holds emptiness as a philosophical view." One is reminded of Wittgenstein's comparison of philosophy to an illness that is

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seeking a cure. But the relational theory of change on which emptiness is founded is a point of view. One gives up an attachment to other points of view to accept the view of emptiness, even if that view is viewless. Or perhaps my understanding is incomplete. [10]

The consequence of a momentariness that is pervasive and ruthlessly applied is that all knowledge is restricted to the present moment which, if sufficiently brief -- the duration of a chronon, for example [11] -- could not permit experiential awareness. We live, so to say, on a knife edge of the present, even if that edge is blunted, with each present conceived as an arising/perishing that is renewed as a near replica of the immediate past. The self is also a momentary entity that is conditioned by the antecedent state. Since each state exists briefly and then passes away, how can the self introspect on its own nature? This requires a distinction of self and object in a duration sufficient for an explicit contrast. The awareness of such a contrast involves a temporal relation that, in a momentary state, would be possible only if virtual, or illusory.

Buddhism conceives a perception to be a constituent operation in the creation of the subject. The subject (self) cannot reflexively bind those perceptual moments that were ingredient in its formation. In early Buddhist thought, consciousness was held to vary with its contents. The awareness of a red object is a qualitatively different state of consciousness from the awareness of the same object when blue. In fact, the perception of a red object is a moment of a visual sensation, a moment of color, and a moment of pure consciousness arising more or less simultaneously There is no consciousness of an object, no subject-object distinction, only an object consciousness or an object perception and a state of consciousness in close association. What there is in awareness -- awareness and its objects -- is, for the moment of that awareness, all there is.

Time
A theory of time was not initially a significant part of the concept of momentariness. For the Sarvaastivaadins, the elements were nontemporal but their function was temporal. K. V. Ramanan writes that "the unit of time is the unit of function ... the minimum conceivable period (a moment) for the cycle of rising to function, carrying out the function and ceasing to function." [12] Time is in the arising and perishing of moments. The Maadhyamika of Naagaarjuna did not attempt to explain the genesis of moments or provide an account of past, present, and future in terms of a momentary Now.

Stcherbatsky notes that a point-instant "cut loose from all imagination" is timeless, and durationless, but it can be viewed (intuited, apprehended by a mind) as a particle of time, the empirical origins of which are impossible to conceive. In the school of Dharmakiirti, the timeless point-instant is a mathematical entity and the only reality in the universe. The point becomes a conscious present through the action of the imagination. The present, the now, fixes the past and the future and is essential for a direction of time. Stcherbatsky points out that the Sarvaastivaadins raised

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objections to the convention that only the present exists, or that the past exists no more or the future is unreal for it does not yet exist. [13]

A major theme in the Buddhist theory of causation is the emphasis on temporal succession or cumulative causation, that is, causal chains in the direction of "time's arrow," with the penetration of an event (dharma) conceived as a penetration by the immediate past or the totality of present causes rather than a backward causation from the future. Vasubandhu said that except for one's own self, all the elements of the universe are the general cause of an event. Charles Hartshorne has questioned whether in Buddhism there was a clear distinction of symmetric and asymmetric time. He wrote that in the tetralemmas o Naagaarjuna, the premises that earlier and later events may be mutually independent, interdependent, either, or both do not admit a time-asymmetric interpretation. [14]

In Yogaacaara, because of the role of consciousness in the creation of the moment, the past and future are viewed as symmetrically embedded in the present state. There is a causal simultaneity. Past and future exist in the present by way of an impregnation or saturation of a perceptual consciousness-event. This concept is further developed in Hua-Yen, which entails a fully time-symmetric event causation, the past and the future collapsing on a single thought-instant in the present. The present is an island of immediacy surrounded and penetrated by an ocean of past and future time. This "simultaneous mutual fusion" involves the emergence of a momentary part-event from the totality of transpired and to-be-transpired experience. This whole-part relation is one between a context or field and a core. This relation, which is central to microgenetic theory, has been compared to that between horizon and core in Heidegger or ground and figure in the Gestaltists. [15] The emergence of an occurrent particular out of a holistic surrounding of spatiotemporal totality, in which an antecedent and a subsequent temporality are compresent in the actuality of the present, is a type of whole-to-part specification not encountered in linear accounts of momentariness.

The occasional time-symmetric tendencies in Buddhist thought are not the analogue of the isotropic time of Western science. Reversibility entails a linear time with a direction that is arbitrary in these time-symmetric branches of Buddhist thought, time is conceived not so much as reversible as mutually determinate on the present. The causal inheritance from the past and the causal endowment to the future are both simultaneously active in the formation of the present. The present is the revolution in actuality of an eternity of surrounding time.

In a becoming, a construct that is in a state of simultaneity with respect to its potential elements emerges to a linear order of those elements in consciousness. Events serialize as they become actual. Asymmetric time is generated out of timelessness, as wakefulness out of dream, with the terminal segments of becoming forecast in the antecedent phases of potential. Specifically, data prevent at the nascent phase of a becoming develop into the temporal facts of perceptual experience. This occurs through a transition from the wholeness of simultaneity to the partness of temporal sequence. This is not a symmetric collapse of the past and the future in the present but a creation of past and future in the achievement of a present entity.

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The Microgenetic Theory of the Moment
Microgenesis refers to the concept of the mental state as a dynamic traversal - becoming -- over distributed segments or growth planes in the evolution of the forebrain. The traversal is a continuum of whole-to-part shifts leading from incipient phases of potential to a final phase of actuality. The actual is achieved as a cyclical derivation in which each mental state, that is, the full microgenetic sequence, displaces a preceding state that is already in decay, as the developing state unfolds over the residual activity. The state is like a fountain through which novel form pours out from a subconscious core to a perceptual surface of world objects; like a fountain, the arising of the present state issues out of the waves of a preceding state that is receding in decay.

The process of becoming is conceived as a type of traveling wave that sweeps from depth (arising) to surface (perishing) in an obligatory direction. The depth corresponds with the archaic in evolution and the experiential history of the organism in long-term memory, the surface with systems of evolutionary recency and the immediacy of short-term memory and perception. The sweep is from the past to the present with every traversal depositing a novel occasion. The mental state is framed by an arising and a perishing, but each phase in the state arises in the fading of the same phase in the just prior state as it is revived in the next traversal. [16]

Mental states are atomic units that are replaced by near replicates. Each replicate changes slightly from the prior state in the course of its becoming. In Buddhist thought, moments are continuous and recurrent. Murti writes, "change is the replacement of one entity by another; it is the cessation of one and the emergence of another." [17] In microgenesis there is a fading of activity, and an arising on this fading of a new pattern of activity. One enjoins, transforms, and replaces the other. The phase perishes in the sense that it no longer plays its role in the prior state, but it is not extinguished. The perishing has a role to play; the phase survives, degraded, as a baseline for the next traversal.

Change
The becoming of a mental state is a sequence of nascent/cessant phases, with respect to both the wavelike pattern of the occurrent state and the background activity of the prior state. The perishing of the just-prior state is the fading background on which the arising of the present state develops. The neural activity at each phase in the decay of the preceding state is reactivated in the occurrent one. At each of these phases, a novel configuration develops out of the decay pattern. The synaptic relations among the myriad neurons that constitute this pattern act as a template for the ensuing configuration. In so doing, even as it decays, the pattern conforms (constrains) this configuration to replicate closely the equivalent phase of the just-prior state.

Change is the transition from arising to a perishing and the replacement of replicates, not the nexus between them. It is the configural deviation of a replicate -- a

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point-instant or a mental state -- from the pattern of its precedent a moment before. There is no awareness of change, only a changed awareness; change lays down the awareness in a state that has also changed. That is, the change of which we are aware, the flow of objects around us, is not the change that generates the awareness, which depends on a comparison of states. This comparison is an ingredient in the content of the changed state (of consciousness); it is not a contrast across successive states. The self and its objects in the present are not compared with those of a moment ago. The contrast is anchored in a duration that arises as a virtual span across phases in a single state. The mind does not suspend a past state for comparison with a present state. The past state is past; it no longer exists. Rather, past and present are recreated within the state of the moment with the events compared serving as boundaries within the momentary state, framing a duration that is extracted from a surface/depth disparity across phases.

The replacement of one state by the next is transposed by consciousness to an external connection of cause and effect. A substitution is apprehended as a linkage. Bergson wrote of this as a spatialization of time. A point that replaces itself is spatially extended as a two-dimensional line. The nonspatial point is visualized as a chainlike concatenation of states linked together by causal forces. From the stand-point of the mental state as an atomic whole, the linkage is an unreal void "filled-in" by the changeless, timeless gaps between moments. Simple object causation is the filling in of the illusion of a linkage. The glue of passage is the absence of time (change) in these gaps. A fluidity of experience is achieved because the moments have no intervals. The intervals "between the moments" do not exist because they are timeless. Each moment is an entire existence for the observer.

Arising and Perishing
In Buddhist theory, a perishing gives way to an arising, which gives way to a perishing. Does the transition from a perishing to the next arising differ from the transition from an arising to the next perishing? Is the cessant phase of one moment the nascent phase of the next? If so, whence comes the autonomy of the moment? If change is a continuum of relations, how are moments articulated; that is, on what basis is the flux of the world segmented into nascent/cessant points? No matter how sufficient the width of a given point-instant, its relations will still be transected to give the point, and the boundaries of the point will be arbitrary.

Is the difference between a nascent and a cessant phase that of the direction of process? That is, would an arising become a perishing if the direction of time was reversed? In microgenesis, there is a nesting of arising/perishing phases within the mental slate, from the initial phase of arising, that is, the onset of the mental state, to the terminal phase of perishing, that is, the actual endpoint of the state. The arising arises from a baseline activity that itself arises from the oscillatory properties of neurons. The process goes from arising to perishing and is irreversible. There is an arising at the initial phase of a becoming, and an arising at each successive phase, but a

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perishing always provides a basis for another arising; that is, a perishing is the basis for both the ensuing phase and the recurrent phase.

Buddhist theory appears unaltered by isotropic time. There is no reason why the process could nut run backwards. In microgenetic theory, a perishing could not be an arising in a reversal of time. Change is in the direction of an arising to a perishing at each phase in the mental state, and from the onset of the state to its terminus. Process is organic and unidirectional. Nor is there a time symmetry in process metaphysics, in which perishing achieves an objective immortality in the eternal ground out of which the next actuality develops.

Constraints and Continuity
The wavelike process that is the vehicle by which the mental state is laid down is not a collection or composition of elements but a distribution into entities, a graded "materialization" -- a becoming real or actual -- of temporal facts out of a non-temporal ground. The facts, the phenomenal objects of world and mind, are the distal specifications of earlier holistic phases. Within each mental state, the whole-to-part transformation is iterated -- one should say sustained, since it is a continuum -- at successive phases through a cascade of transitions leading to the final actuality.

The mental state incorporates a sequence of phases from potential to actual. The phase of potential is an incipient object, in fact many possible objects. The potential is a proclivity or a disposition, not a multiplicity. The tendency is from unity to multiplicity, not the reverse. The final object is the realization of that potential into diverse actual entities. What entities individuate depends on the intrinsic dynamic, but mostly on the sensory delimitation of the wavelike sequence of whole/part shifts. The brain does not provide a structure on which this process unfolds. The brain is a process through which acts and objects actualize. It is only phenomenally an object. This process deposits an actual object as a final fact of experience. The final phase can deposit the object world, or an interior world of dream, or an image that is embedded in the object world. The objects of perception, dreams, and the concepts and images of introspection are all mental objects. These objects and the phases through which they are deposited constitute the mind/brain state.

The ground of the state, the resting activity of the basal phase, provides a context within which the state develops. Microgenetic states overlap. The replacement begins before the state actualizes, if the overlap were taken to the level of the point-instant, the corresponding concept in Buddhism might be the arising of a subsequent moment from the nascent phase of the preceding moment; that is, before the perishing is completed, the next arising begins. The contribution of a T-1 phase in the decay of the prior mental state to the pattern at the same phase in the occurrent state at T-2 is similar to the effect of the terminus of one nascent/cessant moment on the next arising. Through the overlap at each phase, a configuration replaces its antecedent and in turn provides a constraint on the state to follow. The influence acts at every phase in the generation of the state. A state is not activated by its antecedent.

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The antecedent does not provide the raw material for the consequent. Rather, the resting state establishes the boundaries of development and so limits the striving of process for the completion and fulfillment of those entities that are but dimly forecast in the phase of potential.

The state develops as a set of contrasts at successive phases. It is parsed by extrinsic sensory or physical "input," and by the resting background of the antecedent phase. The becoming is propelled by the forward development and the pattern of intrinsic decay and sculpted at successive phases by the occurrent sensory field. Each phase in the occurrent state is driven by constraints, not direct causal effects. If a stone falls on the surface of a tranquil pool and causes a ripple of concentric waves, in what sense does the quiescent surface contribute, as a cause, to the pattern of the spread? If another stone falls, in what sense does the prior configuration cause the ensuing one? This problem is akin to that in microgeny.

A constraint is more like a condition than a cause. A constraint does not transfer something. A condition is necessary for an effect but is uncommitted as to the nature of this necessity. The concept of constraints as conditions that determine effects but do not go into them is consistent with certain schools of Buddhism, in this respect, the theory resonates with the distinction by Naagaarjuna, anticipating Hume, of conditions and causes, and the explanatory preference for the former because, as he writes: "The essence of entities is not evident in the conditions." [18]

The present state emerges out of its precursor. The foundational phases of the state evoke, in their development, ancestral phases associated with personal memory and world knowledge, and revive the past of the individual at every phase. This past constitutes the greater part of every cognition. Indeed, the inheritance of the past -- the personal past, the life history -- shapes the present at every moment. A perception is a memory redefined by sensation. Memory elaborates, sensation eliminates, all but what is relevant to the immediate surround. A microgeny specifies the world to a point where what actualizes is apprehended as external. An actuality is a memory, a dream, shaped by sensation to a space that is apprehended as real and extrapersonal. Conversely, a perception is a memory that escapes reminiscence by actualizing at a more distal phase in the microgeny.

Mere continuity or contiguity does not give a past. It does not give a duration or the recognition of an identity. A thermostat does not remember the past. The past exists for the thermostat, or for any reflex creature, as a changed present with no present other than the change. The imaginary present (ours, not the thermostat's, which has no present) has appropriated the past, but this is a past that exists in the mind of an organism that is capable of generating a present, not the past (the before) of a system in which duration does not exist. A present is created by a mind. The point-instant cannot exist, as a present point, without an observer to be present for.

Buddhism postulates the moment, microgenesis the mental state, as the fundamental unit of experience. Each mental state is an encapsulated moment. In the autonomy of the state, the theory approaches the Buddhist concept of momentariness. The moment is a relation of phases that are internally continuous, bur discontinuous with antecedent moments. Microgenesis gives an account of the origin of the mo-

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ment as the basic unit of cognition. The process is similarity relational; the moment is equally discrete. There is an important difference, however. The summing of points to events is postulated in Buddhism to be an activity of the mind, while for microgenesis wholes are not constructed but partitioned. The moments of microgenesis are durations in which instants are artificial slices. The moments of Buddhist thought are irreducible points. Duration in microgenesis is computed from a disparity in phases; the phenomenal moment in Buddhism is a complex thought-construction of atomic point-instants. In Buddhism, points are constructed to phenomenal experience whereas in microgenesis they are the analytic termini of phenomenal wholes.

The mental state exhibits the same types of relations that govern the dependent co-origination of points. The moment is equivalent to the mental state, as the part is illustrative of the whole. The point-instant of Buddhist thought has also been related to the mental state. P. Mehta wrote, "the steps of the pa.ticca-samuppaada ... apply in relation to each and every experience, and especially to each and every mental state." [19] The mental state develops on the same basis as the point-instant. Relational dependence is universally applicable.

Like Indra's Net, holographic representation and fractal self-similarity, each point-instant is a microcosm of a phase in becoming, and each phase in becoming is a microcosm of the mental state. The points do not exist individually, nor do the phases, without a transition over the series. The state must actualize to become real, so its phases can also become real. As there is no arising without a perishing, there is no arising/perishing without another arising/perishing, so that any phase in the continuum depends on those phases in which it is embedded. The principle is the same in Buddhism and microgenesis.

Categorization and Momentariness
Stcherbatsky wrote that the leading idea of Buddhism, the keystone of its ontology, is that there is no other ultimate reality than separate, instantaneous bits of existence, with all stabilities constructed by the imagination. These thought-constructions of phenomenal experience obscure our vision of this underlying reality. For Naagaarjuna, the phenomenal world is as real or unreal as a point, and both are as real as any world can be. The relational dependence of events is true for any and every world. There is no substance, no foundational element; the points are recombined by secondary relations in the mind. But is not the very concept of the point-instant and its atomicity mind-dependent?

The mind-dependence develops on the concept of atomicity, which requires a stability of process. Pure flux is not atomic. Atomicity is a break in flux. Buddhist theory is at pains to account for the autonomy of successive occasions. How is flux resolved with stability even at the level of the point? Is the relativity of the point compatible with its replication? It there is no explanation for how the flux is carved up, there is no account of novelty, identity, randomness, chaos.

The novelty of an occasion is in the relation of all points at a given moment that impact on that occasion. Is the "sum" of all relations for each recurrence the sum of

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their causal bonds? The interpenetration of points by other points -- whether simultaneous or temporally displaced -- is consistent with either rigid causation or continuous novelty. For some, the conditionality of dependence is a restriction on causal certainty. For others, the dependence is fully deterministic. The kinetic nature of the bonds within and between events implies that the emptiness of relationality could be the emptiness of contingency. The unconditioned is the ground of contingent entities. But if the relational is the contingent, its emptiness is not its contingency; it is its transitivity.

Change is in the relational quality of the points; stability is in their capacity for replication. A constellation of moments that replicates itself with some consistency is perceived as an object. If replications are not exact facsimiles, they change, it they are exact facsimiles, they do not change. For microgenesis, change is the replacement by a near replicate. Consciousness and duration are created by the process or replacement; it is not consciousness that does the recombining. Indeed, in Buddhism, there is too much work for consciousness to do without some explanation of how the work is done. A theory of replacement is obligated to describe the change in the replicate; otherwise, the world is a static block. Perhaps for Buddhism it is, but then how and why does the illusion of change occur?

Process and stability are the problem of change and duration. The phenomenal present, the specious present of William James, is an illusion that develops in a single mental state. [20] The past event that is the hinter border of the duration no longer exists, nor do the intervening events, nor does the present event, the perception that is the forward edge of the duration. The external referent of a memory is gone, as is the referent of the perception by the time the observer perceives it. A perceived object is not "on-line" with the perception. The perceptual event is a creation "out of time" with respect to the external world, possibly with respect to the brain as well.

The world is the derivation of the conceptual into objects. Concepts are categories. The process of categorization is a primordial mental operation, a Kantian given, through which nature is articulated. The denial of categories in Maadhyamika -- or the attempt to eliminate, through right action and meditation, the attachment to concepts or categories of thought -- aims to strip off all thought-based illusions that obscure a knowledge of the real. Whether this is even possible is questionable, but the effort is justified by the categorical nature of all knowledge. It is likely that many of the categories of human knowledge approximate those of nature or tease her apart at her joints -- otherwise we would not be here -- but the categories are still mental. A moment or point-instant is a category, an isolate in the mind that takes on a contrast as a momentary focus. The emptiness of pratiityasamutpaada might be the pure flux that remains when the concept even of the point-instant dissolves. But then, the point-instant itself would disappear.

The stability of objects depends on a duration, which in turn hinges on the process of categorization. The process of category production is linked to the whole-part relation. The derivation of parts from wholes and the graded succession of whole-part shifts establish the pattern of mental process. The parts of a whole impend in the whole as the members of a category impend in the category. The whole is not a

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settled capacity but a potential for an arising of its parts. The parts are not actual items or constituents but virtual entities. There are no conclusive parts or wholes. A part that is generated can become a whole and perish for the sake of another partition. The final wholelike parts are what process deposits as the actual world.

Wholes and parts are relations. The relation of whole to part resembles the shifting contrasts and hierarchies of categories and members. This relation is fundamental to the experience of all mental and perceptual content. The shift from whole to part is the vehicle of change. The recrudescence of antecedent wholes that distribute into parts recaptures the context (concepts) from which the parts (objects) individuate. The view of mental process as the fractioning of wholes into parts -- the final partlike wholes being the entities that process achieves, with every part emerging from an antecedent whole -- corresponds with a basic theme in Indian philosophy, that unity underlies diversity, for example in the concept of causation as an emergence of event-particulars out of a causal whole, or in the concept of a universal self or absolute nature that underlies the transient self and the phenomenal world. Mehta has written, "from the many to the One; from the diversity so obvious to the senses, to the unity which is the fruit of inward realization: such is the general trend in religious thought." [21] In microgenesis, this process is reversed. The specification of parts out of wholes is conceived as unidirectional, anisotropic, like the experience of time, which is a subjective feeling that supervenes on the whole-part relation.

To say that a moment is a category implies that a moment in consciousness is a chunking by the mind of the stream of change. In fact the appearance of a stream is elaborated by the moments. There are no present moments in nonconscious nature, yet there is momentary change. There are entities, there is change, and, presumably, there is becoming, but there is no actual present. A moment in nature is not a now. In transforming moments to nows, mind exemplifies the becoming of nature. The change in a mental entity from its antecedents -- the dissipation of an entity and its replacement by another novelty, the arrow of time that flies over the points as they are vanishing, the birth, growth, and death of each moment -- is the cognitive equivalent of the change that underlies passage in the material world. The momentary cycle of a point-instant, its arising and perishing, does not require consciousness for the expansion of that momentariness to a present moment. The present develops in a complex of nascent/cessant cycles within which the point-instant is conceptualized. All moments are not present moments independent of consciousness. If a point-instant were to be regarded as a present moment, one would have to postulate a consciousness ingredient in every entity no matter how particulate.

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Notes
1. For a discussion of microgenetic theory in relation to Whiteheadian process philosophy, see Jason W. Brown, "Foundations of Cognitive Metaphysics," in Process Studies (1998) 27:79-92.

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2. For clinical material, see Jason W. Brown, Life of the Mind: Selected Papers (Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum Associates, 1988); for theory, see idem, Self and Process: Brain States and the Conscious Present (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1991), and Time, Will, and Mental Process (New York: Plenum Press. 1996).

3. Satkari Mookerjee, The Buddhist Philosophy of Universal Flux: An Exposition of the Philosophy of Critical Realism as Expounded by the School of Dignaaga (Calcutta: University or Calcutta, 1935).

4. The conjunction of successive moments through continuity, causal efficacy, the persistence of the cause in the effect, the "thickness" of the elements, the properties of onset and offset -- existence/non existence couplets -- identity across instants, causation, and so on are topics that have been extensively debated and will not be discussed at length in this article.

5. Th. Stcherbatsky, The Central Conception of Buddhism and the Meaning of the Word "Dharma" (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1923).

6. T. R. V. Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism: A Study of the Maadhyamika System (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1955), p. 71.

7. For example, in David Kalupahana, Causality: The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1975). And, elsewhere, the problem with "identifying consciousness with the passing psychical states (is that in the absence of a distinct mental entity behind the states) consciousness has been reduced to a congeries or momentary conscious units having no real nexus between" (Mookerjee, The Buddhist Philosophy of Universal Flux, p. 342).

8. See the discussion in Jay L. Garfield, trans. and comment., The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Naagaarjuna's Muulamadhyamakakaarikaa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

9. Candrakiirti writes that when a cognition is manifest from a potential then there is a "dependence on a reciprocal object" that in virtue of the dependence does not exist. The critique of before and after, and the nonexistence of dependency, has less force if the events are conceived as successive phases in becoming, since the nontemporality of becoming dissolves the problems of priority and relational dependency.

10. The insistence that emptiness is viewless because it is a lifepath that excludes or transcends all other views, though resonant with the earliest concepts of Maadhyamika, has the unfortunate effect of restricting discourse to exegesis when there is much in Buddhist philosophy that could profitably be applied to scientific thinking. In this respect, I find myself closer in spirit to Murti than to his many critics. See C. W. Huntington, Jr., with Geshe Namgyal Wangchen, The Emptiness of emptiness: An introduction to Early Indian Maadhyamika (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1989).

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11. Estimated at 10-24 seconds by G. J. Whitrow, in his The Natural Philosophy of Time (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1961).

12. K. V. Ramanan, Naagaarjuna's Philosophy (Rutland, Vermont: Charles Tuttle, 1966).

13. Th. Stcherbatsky, Buddhist Logic, vol. 1. (1930; reprint, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1993), p. 84 et seq.

14. Charles Hartshorne, "Whitehead's Differences from Buddhism," Philosophy East and West 25 (4) (October 1975): 407-426.

15. See Steve Odin, Process Metaphysics and Hua-Yen Buddhism: A Critical Study of Cumulative Penetration vs. Interpenetration (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982).

16. The term state is unfelicitous for it implies a static block or slice of time. It is used to describe the full set of kinetic phases in the dynamic "module" of a becoming sequence. The term phase refers to a transitional segment in a given state.

17. Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, p. 73.

18. See Jay L. Garfield, "Dependent Arising and the Emptiness of Emptiness: Why Did Naagaarjuna Start with Causation?" Philosophy East and West 44 (2) (April 1994): 219-250.

19. Phirozshah Mehta, Early Indian Religious Thought (London: Luzac and Co., 1956), p. 230.

20. A theory of how duration arises in the mental state, and the relation of the duration of the present to the stability of mental entities and external objects, has been discussed in previous books (see Brown, Self and Process and Time, Will, and Mental Process).

21. Mehta, Early Indian Religious Thought, p. 347.