The Logic of the One-Mind Doctrine

·期刊原文
The Logic of the One-Mind Doctrine
David Drake
Philosophy East and West
Vol.16 No.3/4 (1967)
pp.207-219
Copyright by University of Hawaii Press

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

p.207

I. INTRODUCTION

IN THIS ESSAY, we attempt a definition of the "mind-only" and "one-mind" doctrines of Mahaayaana Buddhism in terms of the logical structure of experience. The definition does not exist explicitly in Mahaayaana literature, but, rather, arrives at the positions taken explicitly (perhaps at different times and in "different" schools) in Mahaayaana literature, for which claim documentation is provided. The definitions, however, are true to the psychology of the Mahaayaanist of any school.

The motivation of embedding Mahaayaanist metaphysics in Western logic is to make the metaphysics more intelligible and plausible to the contemporary philosopher in the West. We do not intend to "explain away" Mahaayaana metaphysics, but simply to explain it. For the same reason, we shall consider in sections IV and V the main objections in contemporary Western thinking to Mahaayaana metaphysics. The objections are those implicit in the behaviorist theory of language, and the theory of mind as epiphenomenon to brain functioning. Views of the Western philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell will be noted in particular.

The central logical problem of the Mahaayaana is the insight that everything is mind-only and one-mind, simultaneous with the realization that this statement can have no discriminatory meaning if there is no objectivity to define a contrast to mind-only, and no plurality outside it to define its oneness. The problem is explicit in the literature:

Where there is something to be known ...knowledge evolves; where there is nothing, none evolves . . . . That [transcendental] knowledge is unattainable is due to the recognition that there is nothing in the world but what is seen of the Mind . . . .[1]

______________________________________________________________________________

1.D. T. Suzuki, trans., The Lankavatara Sutra (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1932), pp. 146-147.

p.208

... if anyone listens to this Discourse in faith with a pure lucid mind, he will thereupon conceive an idea of Fundamental Reality .... Such an idea . . . is not in fact a distinctive idea .... "Idea of Fundamental Reality" is merely a name.[2]

We propose a solution to the problem stated above in terms of the internal logical structure of experience, rather than in terms of the evident absurdity of a predicate pertaining to every part of experience.

II. MIND-ONLY

It is generally understood what is meant, in an experiential way, when one says that an object is or is not in our field of consciousness. But let us consider the language that results when, instead of saying, "I see that ...," "I hear that ...," etc., we simply say, "There is ...," meaning by "there is," not an assertion of objective existence (by whatever definition), but simply phenomenal or experiential presence. Furthermore, let us not include in this language any sentence whose meaning is not experienced by or phenomenally present to the speaker. We are concerned with the question: What is the over-all structure of the world "meant" by all these experiential utterances, of all speakers, and at all times, at least, as far as we have historical access to that structure? The world so obtained we shall call the "phenomenal world," and the use of the language we have indicated we shall call "phenomenal language."

When the phenomenal world is compared to the objective world as ordinarily conceptualized, two outstanding differences appear. First, the phenomenal world "branches off" into dreams, hallucinations, so-called illusions; that is, content not acknowledged in the objective world. We note the following passages in the literature in which the illusions are taken as part of the phenomenal world, generally, of course, in the context of comparing all experience to them:

... it is like a man who, dreaming in his sleep of a country variously filled with women, men, elephants ...mountains, rivers ... is awakened.[3] ... all things and conditions in the phenomenal world ... have no more reality than the images in a mirror.[4] ... it is like trees reflected in the water ... the trees are [real] figures, and yet no figures.[5]

_______________________________________________________________________________

2.A. F. Price, trans. (from the Chinese), The Diamond Sutra (London: Buddhist Society, 1947), p. 43.

3.The Lankavatara Sutra, pp. 79-80.

4.D. T. Suzuki, trans., The Awekeninq of Faith. in tke Mah^ay^ana (Chicago: Open Court, 1900), p. 77.

5.The Lankavatara Sutra, p. 82.

p.209

Note also how close Huang Po comes to our definition of phenomenal language: "Sentient beings do not enter the Dharmadhaatu nor do the Buddhas issue from it .... This being so, why this talk of 'I see ...,''I hear ....'"[6] However, to make every experience "illusory" involves the problems noted at the beginning of this section. We now propose the following internalstructural definition of the "illusoriness," which does not have the same problem: the phenomenal world is contradictory, one part of another. Thus my dream of your actions contradicts the reality of them at a certain time--but your actions are in turn contradicted by my dream. Thus no portion of the phenomenal world has a reality totally independent of context in time and the perspective of the speaker. This, then, provides a partial definition of the formula that experience is "mind-only."

It is commonly thought that, since a contradiction implies every statement, the contradictoriness of phenomenal language trivializes it utterly. It must be noted, however, that phenomenal language is not a language of deduction--no implications are carried out in it--since it is a language of pure experiential report. Therefore, it is not trivialized by the presence of contradictions.

The second outstanding feature of the phenomenal world compared to any ordinary conceptualization of the "objective world" is that the phenomenal world is "incomplete" in various respects, lacking, e.g., those "objective" realities that no one is, at that moment, experiencing.

This incompleteness of experience relative to everything that "really" happens is one of the most prominent aspects of our use of "subjective" in everyday life. However, to enable it to make a further contribution to the mind-only doctrine, we must recast it into logical terms that are independent of an independent criterion of objectivity. The claim of the Mahaayaana is that no experience is an absolute insight, a claim that the contemporary westerner is probably quite willing to concede when put into logical form.

The solution is that all experiences are incomplete with respect to their own space or time, relative to what other moments or other perspectives respectively include for that same place and time. Now let us see that this incompleteness is precisely the logical concept, just as earlier contradictoriness was the logical concept.

Logicians say of a language that it is "incomplete" if it is not the case that every sentence that is well-formed (grammatical, meaningful) in the language, or its negation, is derivable. Loosely: not every sentence is true or false. We note that an axiom is derivable trivially, and statements of obvious _________________________________________________________________________

6.John Blofeld, trans., The Zen Teaching of Huanq Po (New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 117.

p.210

fact or data in a scientific language play the role of axioms. To put it another way: Aristotle's Law of the Excluded Middle fails in the phenomenal world, because the untruth of an assertion is not necessarily phenomenally present. The failure of excluded middle has already been proposed for the philosophy of Naagaarjuna.[7] The failure of excluded middle is also observed by the intuitionist mathematicians of the West, who start with a phenomenalist position.[8] It seems that logical studies upon Buddhist metaphysics would be much more appropriately carried out in intuitionist logic, than, say, in the standard Russellian logic.

Within phenomenal language itself no logical derivations are appropriate as means to arriving at phenomenal fact: phenomenal fact is all axiomatic, already there. Intuitionist logic follows the phenomenal fact in reporting transitions or figural reorganizations among phenomena that have occurred. Objective language, by contrast, uses logic as a means of "filling in" the details of the objective world. The objective world, in other words, is that meant by the language which results from the application of logic (including excluded middle) to phenomenal reports. Some of the reports are then, of course, falsified (e.g., hallucinations), but the world is also conceptually extended.

For example, suppose individuals A and B are seated on opposite sides of A's desk, so that A sees the drawers of the desk and the top, and B sees the top and the back of the desk. Then a phenomenally true relational statement by A could be, "There are drawers (handles, anyway) just below and in front of the desk," where by "drawer," "top," "desk," etc., he means phenomenal appearances appropriately called by those terms. A true statement by B would be, "Below the top of the desk is a smooth wooden back." But it is not a phenomenally true statement that there is a smooth wooden back directly behind the drawers, because this is not part of the structure of the experienced world.

Logical incompleteness of experience, as we have defined it, can be classified as of several kinds: (a) Incompleteness of properties or details of experienced objects. The contents of a closed drawer do not exist phenomenally, at least not when the drawer is closed. (b) Incompleteness of the dimensions applied to phenomena at any one time for observing properties. The awareness of the absence of a property involves some kind of consideration of the property. (c) Incompleteness of the relationships of the details that are present: one notices both the ashtray and the pen on the desk, but not which

_________________________________________________________________________

7.Y. Tokuryu, "Problems of Logic in Philosophy East and West," Japanese Religions, III (1963), No. 3, 1.

8.This is explained in A. Heyting, Intuitionism, an Introduction (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1956), pp. 1-12.

p.211

is in front. (d) Incompleteness of levels of discourse and thought concerning the phenomena: the top of the desk is phenomenally present, and of brown color, and so the utterance, "The desk top is brown," is phenomenally true. But the thought "the utterance 'the desk top is brown' is phenomenally true" may not be present at all, let alone any further level.

The incompleteness of type (a) is obvious to the most philosophically naïve. Let us now consider incompleteness of type (b) in the literature: Long and short... exist mutually bound up; when existence is asserted, there is nonexistence....[9]

Where there is a perception of space, there is side by side a perception of a variety of things .... Space therefore exists only in relation to our particularizing consciousness.[10]

If there are no thoughts, there will not even be an absence-of-thought. Absence means absence of what?[11]

A particular kind of incompleteness of type (c) of the phenomenal world is in the failure of "transitivity," as the logicians call it, of various relations in time. For example, it is phenomenally clear and vivid that, say, two successive notes of a song succeed each other; our awareness of melody depends on interval relationships spanning some small interval of time. But relatively large spaces of time are not spanned by phenomenally vivid relationships, but, rather, by conceptual reconstructions. Consider this example: "Let's see . . . I went to the lunch after the lecture; I had my wallet to pay for lunch; and so I must have not lost it at the lecture." The speaker is not already and directly aware of bringing out his wallet after having heard the lecture.

You may want to say that, of course, one is not simultaneously aware of what happens at different times, but the apparent tautology hinges on an ambiguity of "simultaneously"-does "simultaneously" mean at the same "instant," or within the scope of phenomenal fact, and across time, i.e., at the same "moment"? It is a phenomenal fact, and not a mere semantic convention, that consciousness, i.e., phenomenal relationships, span "small" but not "large" intervals of time.

The failure of relatedness to span long durations "explains" how it is that the present moment has only the faintest memory or anticipation of past or future, without invoking a concept of coming into existence or going out of existence in time, or of an ego successively spanning momentary portions of a reality extending through time. We note the following quotations:

______________________________________________________________

9.The Lankavatara Sutra, p. 49.

10.The Awakening of Faith in the Mah^ay^ana, p. 107.

11.Wing-tsit Chan, trans., The Platform Scripture (New York: St. John's University Press, 1963), p. 53.

p.212

That all things are devoid of self-nature means that there is a constant and uninterrupted becoming, a momentary change from one state of existence to another . . . .[12]

If an ordinary man, when he is about to die ... could only see the real Mind formless and neither coming nor going; his nature as something neither commencing at his birth nor perishing at his death, but as whole and motionless in its very depths; his Mind and environmental objects as one ... he would receive Enlightenment in a flash.[13]

The incompleteness of type (d) also has relevance to the "non-ego" doctrine. Specifically, by employing a phenomenal language, as we are doing, we dispense with any necessary "subject" of the phenomena. We have dropped "I see that ..." as routine usage, because what we see is taken as what there is, phenomenally speaking. Then, it varies. with the occasion whether "I see that ..." is also true. For, phenomenally, the desk is there, but the body with thoughts and volitions in control of eye movements that control the presence or absence of the desk need not simultaneously be phenomenally present. Thus, in general, in phenomenal discourse, "object A is present" does not imply that "I see object A" or "I perceive object A," let alone the higher-level thought-constructions "I perceive that I perceive A." This last is not equivalent phenomenally to "I perceive object A," since it involves, not only a picturing of one's body in relation to object A, but also a thought-picturing of that perception, separate from the perception. We do not seem capable of. more than a very few such levels.

The incompleteness of levels shows that no ego is necessary to consciousness, but that ego can arise, and therefore it is a meaningful quest to avoid ego-preoccupation. The sense in which ego is "illusory" is precisely that the self-picture, projected at any moment back in time (what "I" did yesterday) or forward in time (what "I" will do tomorrow), probably did not or will not exist at those other times, certainly not identically with the current self-picture. We consider the following item in the literature: "By ego consciousness, we mean that all ignorant minds through their succession-consciousness cling to the conception of I and not-I ...."[14]

III. ONE-MIND

The relationship of different moments of time is the analogue of the relationships between perspectives of two persons sitting in the same room. The two persons share, e.g., the experience of the top of the desk, but not the front

_______________________________________________________________________

12.The Lankavatara Sutra, p. 67.

13.The Zen Teaching of Huang Po, pp. 45-46.

14.The Awakening of Faith in the Mah^ay6ana, p. 78.

p.213

or the back. You may want to say, no, they have different perceptions, even of the top. Recall that we are speaking a phenomenal language now, in which we do not speak of perceptions, "mine" and "yours," but simply say, "There is a desk top," and, since we agree, the world constructed from our phenomena) statements is shared to the extent of that agreement. No more but no less is meant. There are not two desk tops ("my" perception and "your" perception) in a directly phenomenal language, because no one person is saying, "There are two desks in this room." Thus, it is semantic--but also metaphysical, in that this semantic convention is possible--that the perspectives of different people overlap. The sharing is not perfect in any phenomenal place--it is a sharing of the logic, of the structures of utterances. But it is sufficient to define phenomenal places. ("Where is the ashtray?" "Look on top of the desk." "Oh, yes, there it is.")

All of this analysis is within the world of experience-including the experience of bodies and their gestures and utterances--and logically prior to any scientific model of perception in terms of sense-organs, brains, or whatever. The fact that different human bodies have different brains is not at all relevant at this stage of the analysis, whatever the correlations between phenomenal events and events in the brain. (An analysis of the relationship of mind and brains will be given in section V.)

We are finally enabled to say that the logical realm of sentient experience is "one-mind"--it is mind-only, and, as we have now seen, has overlap and sharing between the scope of integration as reported by different bodies or as reportable by the same body at different times. Among the aspects of our use of the word "one" is the connectedness of the part of experience referred to, while we use "several" or "many" with reference to a disconnected part of experience. In this spatial meaning of "one," different perspectives are literally, not just metaphorically, one, when connected through a shared portion. The "oneness" is not in contrast with a "many" outside itself, but, rather, is an aspect of the internal logical structure of experience: experience is a set of events, which set is internally connected by experienced relationships among the events, from perspective to perspective as well as moment to moment.

Metaphysically, our participation in one-mind is as strongly or as weakly established as our being, each of us, a mind throughout a lifetime. Human egoism, particularly as elevated into monad--or individual--or soul-doctrines in the West, tends to exaggerate continuity of experience through time as reported by a time-continuous body, and to minimize the continuity between the reports of different bodies. The non-ego and one-mind doctrines are the dialectical correction of this human tendency.

p.214

Now let us note the presentation of the one-mind doctrine in the literature:

Not only is there seen a fire-flame spreading out in one continuity and yet showing a variety of flames, but from one seed ... are produced, also in one continuity, stems, shoots . . . flowers, fruit, branches, all individualised.[15]

...the ignorant take in varieties of situations, like the waves of the ocean.... The error-existence is not, but as this water is manifest to other people it is not a non-existence either.[16]

When the oneness of the totality of things is not recognized, then ignorance... arises. . . .[17]

IV. THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A PHENOMENAL LANGUAGE

Much of contemporary Western philosophy denies the possibility of a phenomenal language with the following argument: our words and syntactic constructions can mean only what they were shown to mean in the process of learning to speak the language; this showing can only have been, ultimately, by the medium of physically real objects and situations; therefore, language constructions can mean only such things. In particular, language cannot refer to the content of dreams, mystic vision, fantasy, or even perception of the material world, as simply perception. This argument would disallow a consideration of the structure of the phenomenal world before we could begin to investigate it.

Let us note some typical statements of this school, taken from the work of Wittgenstein :

Seeing, hearing... are not the subject of psychology in the same sense as that in which the movement of bodies ... are the subject of physics .... The physicist sees, hears ... these phenomena, and the psychologist observes the external reactions (the behavior) of the subject.[18]

How do words refer to sensations? ... How is the connexion between the name and the thing named set up? . . . 'So you are saying the word "pain" merely means crying?'--On the contrary: the verbal expression of pain replaces crying . . . .[19]

A refutation of the behaviorist argument is difficult within a Western metaphysics of individual minds, but very easy within the one-mind viewpoint. The fallacy of the argument then appears in its second proposition, that

________________________________________________________________

15.The Lankauatara Sutra, p. 17.

16.Ibid., p. 92. (Italics mine.)

17.The Awakening of Faith in the Mah^ay^ana, p. 79.

18.L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: D. Blackwell, 1953), p. 151.

19.Ibid., p. 89.

p.215

showing the meanings of verbal constructions is the showing of physical objects. For in a one-mind phenomenalism, the showing is of phenomenal objects in shared regions of the minds of the teacher and student, that is, in a region of one-mind to which they are both responding as utterers of a language.

Let us momentarily adopt a dualistic language to make the point clear: when we show baby the ball, and say "ball," and the baby points vaguely and says "ba," what we have in fact shown is not a physical ball in the conceptual world of physics, but an experienced ball in the common region of the logical space of experience--the appearance of a ball to both us and the baby. We are showing a closed figure of a certain general form, segregated from the ground, having a phenomenal color, etc., all of these aspects being essentially mental. The ball could be a common hallucination: if our and the baby's responses to it were appropriate, it would serve to define a ball. If this seems absurd, imagine that a family sees from their car the mirage of a lake and does not know that it is a mirage, and that the parents take the occasion to explain to the child what "lake" means. Thereafter the child is able to use "lake" quite correctly.

Thus the problem of generalizing phenomenal discourse to "private" experience is no problem at all, any more than it is a problem for a traveler to describe to me, e.g., Japan, which I have not seen. "Your" dreams contain the same kinds of phenomenal objects and qualities for which we have already established a vocabulary in the region of mind common to us. When I say, "I dreamed that ...," it is not to alter the meaning of the reported phenomena, but to make a very complicated judgment about the relationships of the dream phenomena to other phenomena.

The concept of showing, as we have implicitly used it, is not exhaustive, and eventually runs up against the classically recognized problem of phenomenal reference: how to reference qualities that are generally private, such as pain (in that we seldom project a pain into the same phenomenal place, and usually the pains I report are in my body image and the ones you report are in yours). Anti-phenomenalists perversely insist on beginning the development of a phenomenal language with such difficult cases, and then giving up the whole enterprise. I shall here merely indicate a line of attack.

The sharing of phenomena for the defining process is a locating device; the important thing is that the person for whom an event is being defined experiences the event. The locating can be achieved by the event's being embedded in an already established structure of the phenomenal world. For instance, we can inflict a pain on someone at a certain part of his body and point out that a quality is present at that part that was not present formerly. This is what

p.216

we in fact often do with children: "Don't pinch your little sister--try pinching yourself and see what it feels like."

It is perhaps most interesting to see that the concept of the field of consciousness itself can be ostensively defined. This is necessary, if we are to define at the beginning what we meant by a phenomenal language. The ostensive definition can occur, but only after non-phenomenal (objective) reference has been developed by the speakers. Of course, if someone is not already speaking in an objective language, there is no need to show him how to refrain from doing it. And, in fact, "in experience" is not a predicate in a purely experiential language, for no non-phenomenal entities can be referenced to give it discriminatory meaning. (Cf. "Existence is not a predicate.")

In a mixed objective-phenomenal language, a definition procedure could be performed, e.g., as follows: let us stand side by side and face in the same direction, and let me define to you the predicate "in consciousness," or "in experience." I shall speak of the various things we see in front of us or that we hear as "in consciousness," and speak, conceptually, of course, of other objects in the world as counter-examples. Thus, the predicate is established. In this paragraph I have had to use the words "we see," "we hear," which are already partial synonyms of "in consciousness," but this is not circular; the present description tells only how to proceed with the definition, and in the ostensive definition-process, the words "see" and "hear" need not be used at all.

But then we have the problem of eliminating what is thought of, from the thought as phenomenon. We can, for example, evoke thoughts by utterances, then refer back to what (almost certainly) occurred in the thought and what (almost certainly) did not occur in the thought but exists in the object the thought is "about." For example, I say "The chalk board behind your back," and then, right after my utterance, offer as examples of your "thoughts" the edges and corners, and as counter-examples, the particular erasure-streak two inches from the left and three inches from the top. I will make many mistakes, but hopefully you will eventually recognize what I am trying to point to in your thought-world.

V. MIND AND BRAINS

The major conceptual barrier to the appreciation of the one-mind doctrine would seem to be the persuasiveness of the brain-model of mind phenomena: that the phenomenal structures reported by one person have an isomorphic relationship to some class of events in the brain of that person. Since different persons have separate brains, they cannot share phenomenal experience. Let us now examine carefully just what this isomorphism means.

p.217

It does not mean, when we are speaking in a phenomenal language and so are able to speak of phenomenal events, that mind is identical with brain events, or is simply a different way of reporting brain events, or any such thing. The phenomena of my experience are independently referenced, in a phenomenal language, from the phenomena observed by the neurophysiologist. It would be possible, for example, to compare one's own phenomenal experience of, say, music, with one's own brain events by watching electric tracings from one's own auditory areas, and to observe that the two classes of appearances are different.

The isomorphism that is postulated on current evidence is of a purely logical nature: it is a correspondence between events in the brain and the moment's elementary contents of the field of consciousness, such that the correspondence preserves a certain relational structure on each class of events. For example, if there are greenness and a circle in my phenomenal field, and in fact the circle is green, then some brain event corresponds to circle, some event to green, and some event that is a relation of these events corresponds to the fact that it is the circle that is green.

Just as we do not expect to see in the brain a miniature picture of the world as on a movie screen, neither should we expect any relation of phenomena to go over into the same relation of brain events; the logical concept of isomorphism requires only a corresponding relation. Thus, experiential spatial relations and temporal relations will not correspond merely to spatial and temporal relations between the brain events. For example, a spatial relation of phenomena may correspond to the logical event that the brain events corresponding to phenomena A and B are, e.g., interacting through one neural network rather than another.

Once isomorphism is understood, we arrive at the basic question: Why are there two such classes, of mind and brain events, with their structures isomorphic? Why the isomorphism? The answer proposed makes sense only in a combined conceptual-phenomena1 language, but there it takes on an almost analytic character. It has been proposed before by Bertrand Russell, as we shall see. Let us assume (speaking conceptually) that there is an "outer" (to human experience) world of indirectly known events, which are the causal matrix of the world of experience. The sentient being is capable of "reflecting" or "mapping" this outer world, as a means of survival in its causal fabric. That is to say, the continuous process that we call a sentient being includes, among mechanisms that maintain its continuity, a mechanism for mapping the events outside of itself. Thus it avoids dangers, finds food, and so forth. This mapping is not perfect; it is an abstraction from outer events and their relationships. The domain of this mapping is anything in the physical universe whose relations to other things in the physical universe are correctly mapped

p.218

under some coherent definition of the mapping. The map is the structured field of consciousness of the sentient being. We assume that there is an outer world that the field of consciousness maps, but the rest is definition. In particular, that the field of consciousness is part of the process of the sentient being, and "in" the universe as a whole, is definitional, of "sentient being" and of "universe."

Now we note that, in the conceptual model we are constructing, the reflection of the outer world by mind is a kind of causal process. Therefore, mind is to some extent embedded in the causal fabric of the outer events, and it is not implausible to expect that mind could to some extent "catch a glimpse of" itself. The same causal transformation that takes conceptual outer events to mind could take mind events (as outer events) to mind. If this happens, we should expect to find in mind something like a reduced map of the structure of the rest of mind.

But brain events, as the scientist experiences them, are precisely such a reduced map within mind, of mind (as reported by the subject of neurophysiologic observation). So, if we can make this identification of brain events as we observe them, it becomes an analytic fact that brain is a reflection of mind (not vice versa), has less information than mind, follows mind slightly in time (the time of the causal process from the subject's mind to the scientist's mind where "brain" is being observed), and is the subjective image of what objectively is mind.

One may want to say that the brain is not merely our observations of a brain (as required by phenomenal language), but the conceptualized reality behind those observations. But the most plausible and least redundant hypothesis as to what is really behind those aspects of brain action corresponding to the phenomenal field is the phenomenal field itself.

Now let us note Russell's statements in this connection:

The light from a star travels over intervening space and causes a disturbance in the optic nerve ending in an occurrence in the brain. What I maintain is that the occurrence in the brain is a visual sensation .... What you see when you look at a brain ...is part of your private world. It is the effect in you of a long causal process starting from the brain that you say you are looking at.[20]

The question confronting us now is: By what right can we speak of "one-mind," if the individual portions of it are obviously separated in conceptual-causal space, as indicated by the fact that we have separate brains?

________________________________________________________________________

20.B. Russell, My Philosophical Development (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1959), pp. 25-26.

p.219

The solution we propose is semantic and very simple. Conceptual-causal space and phenomenal (experienced) space are not to be identified; one merely reflects the other. So, when we are experiencing the same "phenomenal place," e.g., both looking at the same desk, what we expect in the causal-conceptual model is not that our brains merge, but simply that similarly structured processes are occurring in each.

But our visualization of the conceptual-causal model and its space uses phenomenal space. Our spatial diagrams of the brain are an example, If the phenomenal properties of the model (as distinct from the logical structure conveyed) are taken literally, they are a falsification. Thus, two brains separated by intuitive or phenomenal space present a false phenomenal picture of what happens when we look at the same object. This has a better illustration, in, for example, a print having a mostly transparent plastic overlay with some additional objects. The views (with the overlay up or down) are partly shared and partly different, and both are not seen in the same space.

Similar considerations apply to all phenomenal properties: the appearance of a brain that is seeing redness is a phenomenal falsification (although a causal-logic representation) of phenomenal redness, which is the reality meant by "red." Color, spatial depth, value qualities, etc., and the sharing of these, are themselves the realities of the phenomenal world.

VI. SUMMARY

We have proposed interpreting the mind-only doctrine of experience as pointing to the logical properties of contradictoriness and incompleteness, We have proposed interpreting the one-mind doctrine as indicating the connectedness of experiences of different persons or times, through a chain of sharings of experience. We have shown that the sharing of experience makes possible the development of a language of phenomena, avoiding Western criticisms of "subjective" use of language. Finally, we have observed that brain observation can be interpreted as reflecting mind events, so that a basically phenomenalist metaphysics is not in conflict with the Western science of neurophysiology. Our over-all purpose has been to show the inner logic of the Mahaayaana metaphysics and its ability to subsume the prevailing Western logics of language and of the brain-world relationship.