Basic Element Analysis

Buddhist analyses of experience begin at the level of the most basic unit of conscious experience. They are techniques that access the architecture of experience through experience. Buddhism refers to the most basic elements of conscious experience as dharma or phenomena. Such phenomena are described as the ultimate realities or analytically irreducible units of experience. In basic element analysis, these ultimate realities are contrasted to the coherences of everyday life or conventional realities.

The process of breaking conscious reality into its basic elements is similar to Husserl’s attempt to discover the fundamental essences of intuition except that it is more successful in two

An Enactive Architecture of Conscious Experience

ways. Firstly, it is rooted in the pragmatic approach of open-ended embodied reflection and so avoids being purely theoretical. It avoids the Idealist tendency to become disconnected from the world. Secondly, unlike cognitivism, by avoiding any ontological claim to the substantive existence of the basic elements basic element analysis avoids any appeal to the Realism that emerges from the reductionism of the analytic rationalists such as Leibniz, Russell and Wittgenstein (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, pp.117-118). The implications of this position become clear in the following question.

Surely this is an interesting case study – we have here a philosophical system, a reductive system, in which reductive basic elements are postulated as ultimate realities but in which those ultimate realities are not given ontological status in the usual sense. How can that be? Emergents, of course, do not have the status of ontological entities (substances). Might we have a system here in which the basic elements are themselves emergents? The question is all the more interesting because basic element analysis was not simply an abstract, theoretical exercise. It had both a descriptive and a pragmatic motivation (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, p.118).

In other words, if the basic elements of consciousness have no substantive ontological existence but are nonetheless the most basic units of conscious experience, what kind of entities are they? Given that we know that emergents such as those that form the basis of Minsky and Papert’s societies of mind model of cognition also have no substantive ontological status, it is plausible to propose that the basic units of experience are also emergents. On this basis, basic element analysis contributes to the enactive architecture of consciousness and is employed in the forthcoming research analysis.

4.11 The Mental Factors

The mental factors, the relations that bind consciousness to its object, were introduced in section 4.7. Like the aggregates, the mental factors provide a lens through which to consider conscious experience. The first of the omnipresent mental factors, contact, is a process which has two dimensions: cause and effect. As a cause, contact represents the coming together of an object, a sense and the potential for awareness. As an effect, it represents the harmony that arises between these three components. Contact, therefore, does not require any property of sense, object or awareness as cause or as effect, rather, “it is a property of the processes by which they interact, in other words, an emergent property” (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, p.119). Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1991, p.119) argue that by understanding contact to be both cause and effect, early Buddhism was describing in different terms the logic of self-reference and the notion of circular causality, or feedback and feedforward, that form the basis of the scientific concept of emergence. Contact is an example of emergence applied at a relatively local level whereas, in the concept of codependent origination, emergence is applied at a more global level.

Operational Closure as an Alternative to Realist Representation This conceptual equivalence alone lends considerable merit to the scientific enterprise of understanding experience through the logic of emergence. As both cause and effect, contact is also always part of action within the chain of causality.

The second mental factor, feeling, was discussed in section 4.7 as the second aggregate and as one of the links in the chain of causality. Feelings have no independent ontological status and are considered separately from reactions to them. The karma the reactions to feelings perpetuate is considered neutral. Through mindful awareness practice, feelings can be observed and experienced as such. Discernment, the third mental factor, was discussed as the third aggregate in section 4.7. It usually emerges simultaneously with feeling. Through mindfulness, the practitioner can perceive passion, aggression and ignoring (discernment) as no more than emergent impulses which need not necessitate action. These impulses can be transformed into wisdom and compassion.

The fourth mental factor, intention, was discussed in section 4.7 as the means by which volitional actions continue to manifest in later links of the chain of co-arising. By becoming aware of intentions, however, the practitioner can break the links of the chain at craving and recreate intentions. The last mental factor, attention, creates focus for the direction of intention, it holds consciousness to its object. All five of the mental factors, then, are forms of emergent relation.

The five omnipresent mental factors in tandem with alternatively present mental factors combine within consciousness to create the character of any moment of experience (see section 4.7).

The mental factors present at a given moment interact with each other such that the quality of each factor as well as the resultant consciousness is an emergent. Ego-self, then, is the historical pattern among moment-to-moment emergent formations. To make use of a scientific metaphor, we could say that such traces (karma) are one’s experiential ontogeny (including but not restricted to learning) … On an even larger scale, karma also expresses phylogeny, for it conditions experience through the accumulated and collective history of our species. (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, p.121)

This analysis suggests that, at the level of a single moment, consciousness can be seen as emergent. Similarly, the analysis of causality suggests that the experience of coherence is emergent. Both consciousness and coherence can be explained without an ego-self or any independent ontological entity.