Audio recorded at Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 25-minute Mind Science Forum panel discussion, His Holiness the Dalai Lama engages neuroscientists and philosophers on the mind-body problem and the nature of consciousness. The exchange opens with questions about whether pure thought can cause physical change in the brain without prior neurological activity, invoking Gilbert Ryle’s category-mistake argument. Panelists debate consciousness seriously—addressing depression as a looming global health crisis, the emerging power of neuroimaging and genomics, and the importance of Buddhist introspective meditation techniques for understanding mental states. The Dalai Lama emphasizes finding common ground between scientific and contemplative approaches rather than choosing between them, proposing a two-level dialogue: immediate practical work on developing calm and happiness, and longer-term investigation into consciousness itself. The session balances rigorous philosophical critique with openness to evidence from both neurobiology and Buddhist practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2024-05-02 – 2A – ANU – HHDL.mp3
UUID: 0f749f14-b8a0-4e79-a7e7-326feb9f3b36
Teacher: HH Dalai Lama
Collection: Mind Science Forum
Date: 2024-05-02
Recorded at: Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide
Words: ~3,358
Related to this issue, this whole business of causal mechanism. In fact, on several occasions I’ve asked neurobiologist, neuroscientist that you know from the neurobiological understanding of the mental processes, it seems to be very clear that many mental activities, mental phenomenon such as emotions and perceptions and thoughts and so on, seems to occur as a result of certain, you know, physical activities, whether it be chemical or biological activities taking place in the brain. And as a result, you experience certain thoughts, emotions and so on. I’ve asked the question, however, is it, at least in principle, possible to envision certain thoughts and emotions occurring simply as a result of pure thought process without a prior requirement of physical activity taking place. So far most of the answers has been really to say that we assume that mental functions are a product of brain activities.
But that is an assumption. That’s yeah. Certainly is an assumption but it’s one that almost all scientists I think make and most philosophers that I know. And it works the other way. You see the problem I was talking about.
Isn’t that amazing? My arm moved. We trace it all the way back to some little delicate process in a neuron in my brain. So we can imagine just to simplify grossly, here’s an electron minding its own business going along in its path and suddenly, it swerved because I had the thought I want to move my arm. Now can thoughts really make electrons swerve like that?
Or is this just a confusion of concepts? Is this just simply trying to mix together two different levels of description, the mental level and the physical level? And are we committing the fallacy that Gilbert Ryle, I think, pointed out many years ago that his analogy was it’s like trying to talk about the interaction between the house the house of commons and the British constitution. These are simply two different levels of description of the world, and they can’t be physically coupled. We can give parallel descriptions, but we can’t really think of the British constitution causing an event in the House of Commons, not in a physical sense.
And it doesn’t work very well either. Max, I’ll come to you in the summing up if I may, but Frank. Let me make a couple of comments about this. Paul rightly asks the question, how can a thought make a difference in the world? Well, of course if you’re a materialist, it’s not a hard question.
The thought is one and the same as a certain process in the brain and there’s no mystery about how processes in the brain can can make a change in the world. But Paul also canvases possibly going down the Rylean path where basically what Ryle said was, as Paul said, it’s a terrible category mistake to talk about these causal connections across the the mind body divide, but this is really a very hard path to to go down. When you think how important the mind is for finding our way around the world, it’s awfully well, awkward to put it mildly to deny the mind a really important causal role in the world. I mean to think what happens when you see something. When you see something, you have a perceptual experience that represents the world as being a certain way.
You then use that experience to navigate your way through the world. Now, the perceptual experience had no causal power in the world, it wouldn’t be much use in enabling you to get across the room. So that’s that’s why the Ryle position is so hard to accept. And in the Buddhist point of view, it certainly is part of Buddhist thought that mental states have causal powers, But as the Dalai Lama’s made clear to us I think, he would step back from the materialist way of thinking about this. He thinks of the mental states as being sort of extras, although very intimately connected with what’s going on in the brain and the neuroscience.
I take it that that that’s his view. Well, is the last part of the afternoon and I’ll ask each of the speakers to say something for about three minutes. And then finally, His Holiness, the Dalai Lama can react to what is being said and Max you go first and then I’ll come down the line as before. Well, I’d like to perhaps move the conversation a little bit away from what my colleagues are saying down at the other end of the podium here, and that is that we know that by the year 2020 the greatest disabling phenomenon for the health of the human race will be depression. Not a straining, not heart disease, not AIDS, not cancer, but depression.
And right now between six and eight percent of the population of Australia, eight percent in the developing world are disabled with depression. On top of that, right across the globe, one percent of the population is out of it with schizophrenia and nearly one percent with bipolar manic depression. So these are hideous figures and what can neurobiology do about it? I think without going to too much hyperbole that neurobiology stands on the threshold of a great era and the reasons of this: one is the input from philosophers. Philosophers have taught us in the last decade that we’re being very naive with neurobiologists.
For example, when we study emotion, all we’ve been looking at is fear, mostly fear which occupies a small space of time like fear of a snake or fear of a spider, the philosophers have pointed out to us that there are other emotions. There are things like gratitude, envy, hatred, conjugal love, all these sorts of things that we better get our acts together and try and find out what’s going on in the brain when these are happening. The other side of the coin is a technical one. We now have these amazing new technologies such as means of looking at the activity of the brain of humans and other animals without having to take off the skull case at all. So we can see that during depression the frontal lobes are turned off on the left side, for example, which is very important in relationship to understanding brain function.
And then on top of that, two years ago, we suddenly found out after a lot of work that humans have 35,000 genes. And now we’re in the position of determining which genes are responsible for which activities of the brain, which neurons, what connections etc. So we stand I think on the threshold of an era where neurobiology can contribute in very important ways to the amelioration of those conditions which lead to so much mental suffering in the world. Thank you. Jack Pettigrew, another physiologist.
I’m not sure the 35,000 genes are going to be very helpful in the sense that one’s height is determined by a large number of genes and I don’t think anyone would suggest that they’d spend a million dollars genotyping you to find out what all the different genes were that were contributing to your height when you could actually measure the height. So I think this and I think this is true for some brain phenotypes as well. For example the switch rate is determined by many, many genes. You can determine this by looking at the difference between identical twins and fraternal twins. So I’m not quite so sanguine as Max is about the Human Genome Project helping to illuminate problems of the brain.
I would like to go the other way. It seems to me the future lies in the direction of embracing something that we’ve been loath to embrace and that is these powerful introspective techniques. If if the Buddhist tradition can discover truths about the way the mind operates that we’re only just beginning to verify with with modern techniques, surely in the future what we must do is to embrace that tradition and bring together what I would call the first person things, studies of meditation and so on with the third person attributes. And I think the problem that Paul was addressing is in that area because Schrodinger a long time ago when he persuaded lots of physicists to get out of physics and get into biology and gave rise to the modern revolution in molecular biology. He pointed out, Schrodinger pointed out in the thirties that that so called objective science, the physics we pride ourselves on, ultimately is subjective.
Okay? It gets back to our own individual human experience, and that’s what is the ultimate puzzle really. It seems to me that right? I mean, this lump of gray matter up here is responsible. I mean, I feel like I’m here in front of this.
There’s the problem of subjectivity. So surely first person first person studies should be brought into the realm. I suffer in my own department. I’m trained as a physiologist, medico and people in my own department reckon I shouldn’t be there. They reckon I should be in a philosophy department or a psychology department because I’m doing introspective experiments.
I show things to my class and they tell me what they see. I’m interested in individual variation introspection. So it seems to me the when Max said, for example, there’s a big problem with depression ahead of us. I agree with that. It’s very interesting.
If you go to Dharamsala, you go up through the fog in midwinter, and you come out in the bright sunshine. It’s like going to heaven in winter. You know, you you come through the smog, and there you are with lots of wildlife, falcons, and so on. And what strikes you immediately is the happy smiling faces of the Tibetans who don’t have much. They’ve been terribly deprived, and yet they’re happy.
Well, why are they happy? They work at it. They don’t take their Prozac in the left hand and pop the pop the pill. They can I work I’m working on a little fish that switches between the two sides of its brain? I can see just by looking at its eyeballs because the eyes are totally crossed.
If the right eye moves, I know that’s the left brain. And if the left eye moves, then that’s the right brain. The eyes never work together. They switch backwards and forwards, so I I can put the fish on Prozac and what happens is that in most fish, there are a few individuals who are mavericks the other way around, but most fish, the left brain becomes more active. And I think that’s what happens in in humans too.
And so these monks that have been studied by Richard Davidson that are very positive, they’ve got no material possessions, it’s a grind, it’s cold, there’s not much food, but they’re happy. They work at it. They work at it. And I think that we can learn something from that. I think that, you know, the answer is not just a pill, that that you can actually work at it.
You can learn these techniques. I was amazed a couple years ago when I discovered Tonglen that I can anesthetize myself. I had a burnt hand and with that technique it was like an anesthetic had been injected to my arm and I could get rid of the pain of the burn. Absolutely powerful techniques. Now that’s just kindergarten stuff for these guys.
Right? I mean, Tonglen Tonglen, I mean, they just do it automatically as they’re walking around the world. They’re doing Tonglen. Now if it was so powerful that works so well for me, who am I to disregard or mistrust the rest of the teachings? Am I I don’t have the time to go to a cave and sit there for a few years and learn the you know, get the PhD in it, but it seems to me that we know we can pay we can pay attention to that.
Seems to me that so the the future, I think, is that we bring the worlds together. We don’t allow a schism to develop. We don’t allow the radical materialists to reckon they’ve got it all typed because they’ve got the human genome in their pocket. I think that’s nonsense. I think that the complexity of culture in the human brain isn’t going to be reducible to 35,000 genes at all.
Thank you Jack. But neither do I Jack. Frank, you’re at the center of the brain revolution, philosophers. Well, I guess what I’ve taken away is how extraordinarily hard these problems are and as will be obvious from from what I’ve been saying, I think it’s an absolutely central problem to get clear about the relationship between mental events and brain events. Sooner or later, we’ve got to face up to that issue and we’ve been talking lots about all sorts of intimate causal connections and no one doubts that that they they obtain.
But sooner or later we’ve got to face sort of issue that Paul put his finger on. If the mental events are something separate from the brain events, What are the causal laws connecting these mental events and brain events? And are we sort of having something outside the physical world transferring some energy to bits of the brain to allow the mental events which are separate from the brain events to make my arm go up or whatever it might be. I think that that’s the crux issue and obviously my money is on identification. I’d like to go for the view that the mental events in fact are brain events.
And then of course the big issue is what I call the dream of neuroscience, which Max was skeptical about. Because after all mental events are brain events, then one day we should be able to explain everything about a human’s behavioral and environmental flexibility in terms of neuroscience. And that would be the dream down the track and some neuroscientists have got it and obviously the two neuroscientists on this panel are much more skeptical, but that seems to me the huge intellectual challenge of the future. We think about the relationship between the mind and the brain. Is this dream of neuroscience going to be realized or not?
Paul. Now the reason I’ve taken a somewhat hard and skeptical line in this discussion is because I do take consciousness seriously. Many of my biology colleagues say consciousness, oh, well that’s just some quirky little solution to a particular evolutionary problem like eyebrows and fingernails. That we make a big deal out of it because we’ve got a lot of it and it’s often connected with discussions of intelligence on the claim that we’ve got a lot of that too. Now, it’s easy to belittle these things.
It’s easy to say that consciousness and intelligence are just one particular solution that works well for a particular organism in a particular evolutionary niche. But I see consciousness and in particular what follows from it understanding, the thing I was talking about earlier, as being absolutely central because as a physicist, would like to feel that all phenomena including that of consciousness can be brought under the umbrella of physical laws that we can come to understand consciousness as part of physics. And yet at the moment, we clearly can’t. It’s almost ring fenced. It’s a taboo subject for physical scientists.
And so we clearly have some work to do. Now, some of my colleagues would like to just define consciousness away. They say it’s just a confusion of terms that at the end of the day will have a complete physical description of the world and consciousness won’t appear in it. The reason I don’t like that, I find it very hard to accept, is the point I touched on earlier. That it’s not just that we have got consciousness, it’s that we’ve got understanding.
That through science, we can come to know the hidden rules on which the universe runs. And this seems to me to be extremely significant. It’s as if the essence of our being, our conscious selves, is somehow tied in to the deepest processes of the universe. And I find that more than just a coincidence. It’s easy to imagine a world in which we could be both conscious and intelligent, but still have no idea about the underlying laws of nature.
We could make no sense at all of the deep law like rules on which the universe runs. So the fact we can do science and make sense of the world, I think, is the significant thing about consciousness. But I must remind everybody here that we came to talk about the nonconscious mind. And just very briefly, we I think we’re all agreed that the nonconscious mind can do all sorts of wonderful things. And so it does make you wonder why do we need consciousness at all?
What is consciousness there for? How does it fit in? It does seem to be almost surplus to requirements, and that is what I’m taking away. That’s the deep mystery. Why do we need consciousness at all?
What role does it play in the world? Thank you, Paul. One of the most impressive things that the Dalai Lama said this afternoon as far as I’m concerned is the willingness of Buddhists such as him to change his mind, change their minds according to the latest scientific information, secure scientific information. As you see there’s an awful lot of debate. So Dalai Lama, may I ask you to sum up your final words for five minutes?
If it’s longer than five minutes you’ll miss your plane. On the thoughts of the unconscious mind, the unconscious brain, and consciousness. Of course, when we speak of consciousness and mind, it’s extremely conceptually, it’s it’s an extremely difficult problem. You know, we are very difficult to you know, we find it extremely difficult to articulate, but at the per personal level, we all undergo its experience on a day to day basis. So I feel that in this kind of interface between the two different intellectual traditions, investigative traditions, perhaps there might be two levels of dialogue.
One is our conversation. One is for the time being, maybe this issue, this question, what exactly is mind? What exactly is consciousness? What is its nature? With this hugely complex issue, maybe we for the time being, we can bracket it and then seek what can we learn from What what can be because of what can because of that.
What way to develop more calm mind, more happy mind? Just concentrate on it. That’s one level. Then another level, like continuation sort of investigation, what is mind? Perhaps our generation Our lifetime.
Maybe our lifetime may find more answer or Next. Next generation or another word, next reincarnation. We might get deeper understanding about mind. So investigation or experiment will continue. I think that is important.
Even purely economic sort of field, I think expand our knowledge. Now not only external sort of space, but internal space here. Small size, but a lot of mysterious things there. So I think that also, I think, very important to pursue continuously. I think, perhaps, I think combination, The scientific sort of modern scientific Approach.
Approach way of approach, then meditation as sort of Interesting. Sort of their experience and their explanation according to their own experience. And combinedly, perhaps, I think better chance to find what’s mind. Everybody now talking mind, so their target somewhere, but nobody sees very clearly. So imagine, I think we might see and catch.
Okay. Thank you. Thank you. So I wonder how many reincarnations it will take to solve some of these problems. Thank you very much for coming.
Thanks to the Australian National University, and thank you to the Center for the Mind. Also to the panel, many thanks, and the Dalai Lama.