FromPerception and Consciousness: A Conversation

From Sensory to Conceptual Consciousness

DALAI LAMA: In ancient India many Hindu philosophers maintained that the mode of conceptual thoughts engaging with objects was direct and nonselective. It's a matter of engagement through affirmation. It's a matter of the mind engaging with the object—"Ah, this is this"—by a process of pure affirmation rather than a process of "not this, not this, not this." The Buddhist logicians, on the other hand, maintain that the relation of conceptual thought and the object develops through exclusion. You perceive what something is by excluding what it is not.

JEREMY W. HAYWARD: If I look through the window and say, "I see a tree," in the first moment what happens is that I see something, then I name it tree. Is it correct from the Buddhists' point of view that there is a sequence, a small time interval, during which that something becomes "tree" in my mind?

DALAI LAMA: When you see something and you think it's a tree, there are two levels of discrimination, one being sensory and the other operating in the realm of the conceptual. When you first see an object like a tree, the first moment of awareness is sensory. In English you would say there is no consciousness; you're not conscious of it. But after that, perhaps a split-second later, you're conscious of it. Then you know it's a tree, and the mental consciousness is working. This mental consciousness can be active while you're looking at the tree and also, even when you're not looking at the tree, you might be conscious of the tree. You can have an image of it. Between the two, there is a difference. The mental consciousness that you have of tree when you're actually looking at a tree is much more vivid than the one you have when you're not looking at it.

HAYWARD: The sensory level is not yet conscious, but how does it go from sensory to conscious? From the scientific point of view, there is a time between the beginning of treeness arising and the final tree. Even if I see the tree as continuous—treeeeeeeeeeeeee—actually, in my perceptual system, what is taking place is tree, tree, tree, tree, tree, very fast. When light from that external reality impinges on the retina, some vague form occurs due to the operation of the retina itself. This vague form is then acted on, although it's still not conscious, and is either accepted or rejected by the brain. This is then further operated on, and some name occurs, at which point the experience becomes conscious. At that point it becomes the tree, while at the beginning it was that vague nameless formless object.

This is why I was asking about the time sequence. This vague whatever-it-is that hits the eye seems to go through several stages, until suddenly I see a tree. That process takes time.

FRANCISCO J. VARELA: From the point of view of neuroscientists, this is a matter of the emerging patterns in the human brain. It takes a little while for a pattern to emerge, and this little while is something like that [Varela snaps his fingers]. I think this is a question that has been of great interest to scientists; and also, this point connects with the meditative practitioner's discovery of the intermittency of the self in meditation. My self is not one solid thing but is composed of moments of experience. I see that and I see that and I see that. Perhaps there is a correspondence between the intermittency of self and the fact that, for the brain to construct a perception, it takes a little while, on the order of one-tenth of a second. I think Jeremy's point is that from the Western standpoint this process actually takes time, at least a fraction of a second. The question is, Between the moment my eye encounters a sensory moment and I can see patches up to the point where I discriminate an object, what is the process? Is that a unitary duration or can it be divided? Is there observation of that in meditation? What would be the shortest duration that we are capable of perceiving as "now"?

GESHE PALDEN DRAKPA: We can answer with certainty that there is a sequence that does occur in perception. Let's take the example of the visual perception of the color blue. The visual perception of the color blue occurs, but the perceiver has not yet ascertained it, so a mental ascertainment does follow that visual perception. It would be very rapid, a matter of two or three moments (moments in the Buddhist sense of extremely brief durations). But exactly what fraction of a second, this tradition does not say.

Ascertaining and Nonascertaining Consciousness

DALAI LAMA: There are two types of perceptions. One happens when you are distracted to a second object at the moment when you are already looking at something. At that time there is a perception of the first object, which is one type of perception. There is another type where you are actually paying attention to the object. Both are perceptions, but the second one is ascertaining and the other one is not ascertaining.

HAYWARD: In the nonascertaining one, there can nevertheless be action. The organism can act on the basis of that nonascertaining cognition even though is doesn't become conscious.

VARELA: This is factually true. For example, you do something, and only afterward there is a second moment in which you become conscious of your action, but the action is already done. For example, in driving my car, I often brake before I am conscious of doing so.

B. ALAN WALLACE [interpreter]: His Holiness points out that this comes from past conditioning. If you have never driven a car before and you see someone coming toward you, you don't have the response of hitting the brake immediately. Likewise with something coming toward your eye, you don't have to have a whole conceptual process to think to close the eye. This does seem to depend on previous conditioning.

THUBTEN JINPA [interpreter]: I think we have to make clear what we mean by consciousness, because in English it seems that when you say "conscious," there is some kind of mental conceptual ascertainment. When we use consciousness in the Buddhist context, the term is wider. Anything that is the subject of experience is consciousness, including nonascertaining awareness.

HAYWARD: Say I am sitting here and you are translating something His Holiness just said, so I'm very interested and paying attention. Now from the corner of my eye I see this glass and I take a drink, because my throat is dry. Then I put the glass down, all the while continuing to listen. Later on, I think I would like a drink, but I discover the glass is empty! As I was listening I never knew that I took a drink. Now, do you call that action conscious?

DALAI LAMA: It is conscious. But if you didn't know the glass was there in the first place, how would you do that?

WALLACE: His Holiness, Thubten Jinpa and I have tried to understand what you mean by conscious, and what we've come up with is conceptual mental ascertainment. Now this is very, very important.

DALAI LAMA: In Buddhist philosophy, when you speak of something being ascertained, you consider it to be identified; you know, you are sure, it is there. And that ascertaining awareness would seem to be necessarily mental and necessarily conceptual. Thus a conceptual ascertainment would seem to be equivalent to what you are speaking of as consciousness. Buddhists also speak of visual perception apprehending an object. But what determines whether visual perception knows the object or not is whether it's able to lead to or yield a mental ascertainment. With this criterion, you can have something that appears to visual perception without its knowing it, because this was nonascertaining awareness. Although it appeared to visual perception, later on you don't know whether you've seen it or not, because it did not yield the mental ascertainment. Therefore you would say that visual perception did not know its object even though the object appeared to it. The criterion is whether or not the visual perception yields an ascertainment.