Buddhism & Personhood

Personhood has been a controversial topic within philosophy. This is because we cannot address free will, ethics  or meaning without first understanding a person. If I have a Lego man, and I swap the head for another, is it still the same Lego man? When Luke Skywalker lost his hand to Darth Vader and had it replaced with an animatronic one, was he still Luke Skywalker? To answer these questions, we must ask ourselves, what is a human fundamentally? A question everyone must ask themself at some point.

So, what is a person? And what do we class as one? There are many theories: animalism, dualism, constitutionalism, and monism to name a few. Rather than scrutinise each one (because they already do that to each other), I will present my own theory to negate the others, oudeism (not at all related to deism). This is not something that I believe to be true, but rather something that is a backdrop to the others. I view all these other theories as inductive hypothesises; they are ideas of modality, what could be, not what is. For instance, how does Descartes know that we have a separate soul to our body? Where does this come from? It’s simply an idea, a possibility. When all others fail, oudeism is the backdrop, a theory that people don’t exist, or at least that we are no different from the rest of existence.

Oudeism (Anatta)

Oudeism is by no means a new concept. Buddhism uses the same concept under the name ‘Anatta’ meaning ‘no self’. This is a ‘Mark of Existence’, a key teaching point for Buddhists to live their lives by. A monk by the name of Nagasena described the concept of Anatta in the 40 questions of King Milinda using the analogy of a chariot. If you were to completely take apart a chariot into its individual pieces, there would be nothing left, there is nothing which is essentially that chariot. Buddhists believe that human beings are made up of five ‘aggregates’ (sometimes called ‘skandhas’), but that they are all in constant change (due to Anicca, the first mark of existence) and there is no fixed point of a human, hence there is no self. Now I myself find this very contradictory with other ideas of Buddhism such as Karma, Samsara and rebirth, but regardless, this Buddhist philosophy is essentially the same way of thinking as oudeism.

The core aspect of oudeism is nothingness. Every single part of ‘us’ continues to change, both physically and mentally. Within seven years, every single one of my cells will have died and been replaced. We constantly shed ions and atoms, even my fundamental fermions and bosons constantly change. And if you believe Quantum Field Theory, there never was any constant state of me, only vibrations in unbound fields that gives the illusion of matter. Similarly, if you believe the holographic principle, ‘I’ am just a projection from something else that may also be a projection that could eventually cease. Just as a criminal is innocent until proven guilty, oudeism is true until proven false by counter example. There is no reason for us to assume we exist. This is the ‘Fundamenta Inanis’ – the groundwork you assume in the absence of certainty.  

Imagine Diogenes of Sinope (400 B.C – 325 B.C) is sat in his barrel contemplating who to urinate on next, when suddenly a cloaked man appears and begins heckling him about philosophy, spewing all sorts of nonsense, morology after morology, induction after induction. He claims that the sun is actually a giant lamp attached to the sky, he claims that the universe is orbiting around Diogenes’ very barrel and that birds can fly because the Gods loved them more than man. Now, Diogenes think about these claims. They could be true, they could be wrong, but he has no way of confirming either possibility, they are meaningless. So, he simply does not accept them until he needs to, because why would he accept these inductions as proof? Until the time of evidence, he remains in his barrel believing that the sun is not a lamp and that the universe does not orbit him and that birds are not blessed.

This is the key principle of the Fundamenta Inanis, that until we accept evidence of x, we assume nothing. You have probably heard it said that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and this is correct. There is no evidence for oudeism, but the Fundamenta Inanis is something that we use every day, we should not assume dualism or constitutionalism or any other theory as truth, but we can assume oudeism because it is the bare minimum, all other theories build up from this. I don’t want this to be seen as an absolute proof or a brute fact of existence, it is not. It is a logically assumed paradigm about the way things are until such time as a paradigm shift. Oudeism is a starting point for other theories of the self.

Language, Thought, & Reality

There are three main things which people believe a human being is defined. First, by our body, the mind is produced by the brain so ‘I’ am my body. But then this encounters the problem mentioned earlier, that our body is not constant, so how can I still be me if no part of me is still constant? It has often been argued that although every part of me will change, whatever parts make up my body at that time are me, ‘I’ am constant even though my parts are in change. To negate this, I turn to the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

‘The word “Excalibur”, say, is a proper name in the ordinary sense. The word Excalibur consists of parts combined in a particular way. If they are combined differently, Excalibur does not exist. But it is clear that the sentence “Excalibur has a sharp blade” makes sense whether Excalibur is still whole or is broken up. But if “Excalibur” is the name of an object, this object no longer exists when Excalibur is broken into pieces; and as no object would then correspond to the name it would have no meaning’ (Philosophical Investigations, 1953)

We can assign a name to whatever collection of parts currently occupies a space, but this is only meaningful within that ‘language-game’. If Diogenes chooses to call an axe a sword he can do so but it does not mean that the axe is essentially a sword. In the same way we can assign the parts that make up a body a ‘person’, but it doesn’t mean that this sum of parts is a person, only that it is regarded as this by another sum of parts.

Another belief of how a human being is defined is by their mind. This is still a form of dualism, often called ‘property dualism’, that we are ‘made’ out of mental and physical matter. This is often intertwined with epiphenomenalism (as shown by Frank Jackson), that physical states cause mental states but not the other way around.

I’m not here to argue for or against epiphenomenalism or property dualism, I do however contend that mental states do not define a person. In ten years, you will think differently to the way you do now, and ten years prior you thought very differently as well. If we take epiphenomenalism as a foundation here, we know that the brain, like the rest of our body, is in constant change. This explains why the mind changes so much. We know from empirical evidence that the mind can change overnight when the brain is physically affected. The mind is therefore susceptible to the same scrutiny as the body, just because it is a mental state does not mean that it is constant, thus it does not define a human being.

It is only by asking why that we uncover some sort of truth, and that truth can be verified by again asking why, and so on so forth. Why are these other theories true? They can’t disprove them, and I don’t intend to try, but slice them to the bone with Occam’s Razor and ‘why’ is unanswerable. It could be said that this borders dangerously close to nihilism, cosmicism or any other pessimistic view on life. And in all honesty, you may be right, but that is not sufficient motivation for me to adopt a different stance on life. I am aware that this theory leaves no room for any social or political absolutism, and that’s absolutely fine, as it is fine to assume something that does allow such leeway, because people’s fear of chaos blinds their eyes to the problem of induction. There are no reasons for me to be abruptly pessimistic or optimistic, I will just take the viewpoint of not assuming metaphysical absurdities of other philosophers, for against stupidity, the Gods themselves struggle in vain.