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of

s I think we all know,Buddhism and cognitive

science are increasinglycoming into dialogue with oneanother these days. For thisinterchange to be successful,something from Buddhism orsomething from cognitive science(depending on which side yourelooking from) should affect theother in a way that really changeshat fields mode of operation.

Perhaps Buddhism, for example, inits dialogue with cognitive science,

will expand its focus in some wayhat it did not before. For my part,

I am excited about a particularcontribution Buddhism can makeo the contemporary understanding

of mind and cognitive science. Ithas to do with concepts and howwe understand concepts. oday, Iwant to give you a sense of what

he problems are, the kinds of

things that have been done so far,and what a next step might be. It

is a step that brings in a Buddhistanalysis of concepts and applies itin a way that Buddhists themselvesdidnt apply it before.

Until recently, in cognitivescience and the philosophy ofmind, concepts have been seen asabstract. If you look at philosopherswriting about concepts up tothe late nineteenth century,their paradigms for concepts

were mathematical concepts andtheir analyses used mathematicalexamples. Number and certaintywere the kinds of concepts theyreally paid attention to. But wehave come to learn that the thingswe privilege in mathematics arenot what we privilege in normal,human discourse. So we need toshift our way of thinking about

concepts from abstract analyses tomuch more embodied analyses.

ognitive science is at a stagenow where its more willing toconsider seriously the issue ofhe embodiment of knowledge.

e context of our physical bodysystems, such as the fact that we

ave two arms and two legs, or thatwe have eyes in the front and earson the side of our heads, may seemincidental to the way concepts arestructured, but they are actuallypretty important to what concepts

are about.

Theory of Concepts

Let me start with the differencebetween an abstract theoryof concepts and a metaphoricalheory. An abstract theory of

concepts wants to understand twohings: What is the definition

ncepts

The

Rajesh Kasturirangan

Tis talk was given as part of

a weekend program at BCBScalled Cognitive Science and theBuddhist Understanding of Mind

n January, 2005.

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of a concept? and How is thisdefinition actually true of things inhe world? Lets take as an examplehis cup sitting before me on theable. We want to know not only

what the definition of a cup might

e but how the concept of cup sodefined actually maps to the cupwe see in the world or to all the

hings we call cups. is turns outo be one of those classic starting

points everyone thought was goingo be easy, but which turned out toe very hard indeed.

Its like the story of the professorat MIT who, in the early yearsof artificial intelligence research

(the nineteen sixties), assigned anundergraduate computing studentwhat he thought would be a simplesummer project: build a visionsystem that recognizes objects inhe world. It turns out that is a

very hard thing to do. Now, morehan forty years and an entire

computer science later, not onlydo we still not have a vision systemhat recognizes even faces, we dont

even know how our mind doeshat. So the hubris of the early

artificial intelligence researchers iskind of laughable now, but thatshe way the field moves. ere are

many such painful and unexpectedobstacles.

One impediment to ourunderstanding of concepts has

een a tendency to idealize bothconcepts and reasoning as logicaland as going in certain analytical

paths. But when you pay attentiono the phenomenology of concepts,

which is to say, how you actuallyuse them, they turn out to be verymetaphorical. Even in science, forexample, when we build atomicmodels, we conceptualize electronsas hard spheres rotating aroundother hard spheres which representhe protons and the neutrons.

But, of course, thats not the waythose things are. We know throughquantum mechanics that they areust not localizable.

Yet this metaphorical projection

of what we know is the only kind ofknowledge we have, so its what weuse to understand our world andto transcend its own limitations.e real issue here is that we havethis capacity to conceptualize, andthat it is actually quite useful. Itsbased on spatial and temporal waysof being in this world, and those

simple ways are what we transcendand generalize in order to talkabout many more complex topics.ese simple concepts of space andtime that we start out with, I think,are valid concepts, and as a toolfor understanding we map them,metaphorically, onto more diffi cult

things.

Embodied Cognition

There is a whole field ofembodied cognition thesedays, based on the work of peoplelike Lakoff, Talmy and Johnson.It says we have basic concepts thatpertain to the physical world, things

ike force, space, and time, whichwe use and generalize in order tospeak about everything else. We useso many metaphors: Time is likea river, or, Hes the head of thegovernment. We can also look at

more social or abstract phenomena.I might say of a particularlyaggressive salesman, He pushedme into buying the radio. Here Iam taking the term push, which

as a primary meaning that isphysical, and am metaphoricallymapping it to something muchmore abstract in the psychologicalrealm. Pushing here doesnt meanphysical interchangethere may

not have been any contact betweenhese two peoplebut somehowhe psychological meaning or social

relationship is conceptualized in thesame way as physical relationships.

It works the other way too.In poetry, for example, we oftenuse nonphysical language toalk about physical things; we

anthropomorphize or agent-iseentities in the world. We might talkabout the beauty or the lightnessof the sunshine, qualities thatfrom a purely physical perspectiveare not there. But even then thereis something we learn about thephysical world when we take thisess physical cognitive language andmap it onto the world.

I think science would not workvery well if the only language we

ad to talk about the physical wordwas the immediately concrete,

push-and-pull kind of language,ecause we now know thats nothe way physics works. If the

only language we could use toalk about planets and stars and

atoms involved things pushing andpulling each other, then Newtonianmechanics wouldnt have happened,et alone Einstein and quantummechanics and all of these other

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wonderful things that we knowabout our strange universe.

e ability to metaphoricallyproject meaning from one sphere ofexperience on to another is a very

powerful tool that we have, which

is why metaphor is so crucial. If itwere merely a weak tool allowingus to make simple analogies butdid not give us a real purchaseon things we find important, itwould not matter so much. Butit has a very strong functionaluse. Somewhere underneath thesephysics-like concepts is a structurehat allows us to go back and forth

from the concrete to the abstract.And that, to me, is the importantstructure that we need to naildown, both as cognitive scientistsand by using Buddhist philosophy,

ecause I think that in some senseBuddhist philosophy captures whatis at the heart of the structure ofconcepts.

What is a Cup?

As cognitive science has movedfrom mathematically symbolico an embodied metaphorical

approach to concepts, we still dontunderstand the basic problem thatmetaphors are solving in some way.It is essentially a mapping problem.Where is it that concepts get the

structure allowing them to mapbetween more abstract things andless abstract things? We can evenstart by asking something muchmore basic: how is it that conceptsare able to refer to the world at all?

How is it that when I say cup,I mean cup? eutterance cup,is just a sound.How is it thata sound evergets to a thing?Experientiallya sound hasan auditorydimension,

and maybe itas a meaningdimension, but

an object cup doesnt have any ofthese. is cup before me is green;it has a handle; it has shape; it hassides; it has location. e wordcup doesnt have any of these.

So how is it that something withgeometric specificity gets labeled bysomething which has absolutely nogeometric capacity at all?

e same kind of problem existswith the myriad abstract conceptswhich make up our world ofpsychology and social relationships.So much of our conceptualworld has no shape or size or anyphysical structure, but somehowwe are able to use physical languagemetaphorically to great effect.e deep question has to do withunderstanding the underlying

structures allowing us to take thesevery different kinds of things andput them together. I think thiscapacity lies at the very heart ofcognition. e chief factor of ourintelligence has to do with takingthings that are different from eachother and putting them together.For example, the auditory systemreceives an input which is different

from a visual system. And yet whenwe perceive the world we map itinto this coherent whole with bothauditory and visual characteristics.is is the binding problem. Howis it that an object, when we see it,

as color, shape, size, all of themin the same location, even thoughhe inputs into the system are very

different things? Color is not likeshape at all.

Another big problem withconcepts is that they turn out to be

ard to define. What, for example,really is a cup? Is it just somethinghat contains other things? No,ecause what is contained? Fluids?

Yes, but not exclusively. Is a cupsomething that has a handle? Notnecessarily. If I took the handleoff this cup, you would still sayits a cup. Is a cup something that

as a handle and is of a certainsize, but allows you to be able todrink? Maybe. But if you made acup big enough for a person whowas a giant, twenty feet tall, thatwould still be a cup for them, whilefor a child youd need a muchsmaller cup. You can go throughany concept you want, and it turnsout that you just cannot nail itdown precisely. is is a form ofhe same problem we saw before:

precise, mathematical specificity issomething scientists want, but is ofittle interest to human beings inheir normal discourse.

Emptiness

Now is the time to bring in theBuddhist perspective. Fromhakyamuni to Nagarjuna to Hui

Neng, Buddhists have put forward adeconstructive and interdependentanalysis of concepts. ey have saidall along that concepts cannot beseen as independent and isolated,and thus they cannot be fully

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characterized. Concepts are usefulo us precisely because they interact

with other concepts. eyre fluid,metaphorical, and projectible, notsomething independent of theirfunctional, human, or organismic

perspective. is is a perspectivehat I think even an evolutionaryiologist would accept. It also gives

us a useful possible hypothesis,which is that concepts are empty.Emptyis a term that can be appliednot only in the classic Buddhistsense but also perhaps as acontribution to a possible modernheory of concepts that formalizes

what emptiness means in the realm

of cognitive science and semiotics.I dont want to get too

echnical, but the main idea ishat the fundamental structureehind concepts is a structurehat allows you to map one set

of concepts onto another. It ishe interdependent structure of

mappings that is important, nothe concepts themselves. What

underlies concepts is this ability,which I think is an innate mind-structure or mental structure, thatallows us to map very differentkinds of things onto each other.And this is the fundamental,domain-independent, cognitivemechanism we have that allows uso be flexible in our intelligence.

To put it another way, thecentral capacity we have, whichis manifested as metaphors whenwe use language, is the ability to

ake two different domains andmap them onto each other. It ishe structure of mappings itselfhat we need to concentrate on,

not the various domains. e bestway to understand concepts, inother words, is not to individuallyunderstand concepts of law,concepts of physics, concepts ofchemistry, concepts of emotion,

and then study what they are allabout. Rather it is our ability tolink these concepts together thatis important. I believe there canactually be a formalizable, scientifictheory of those mappings, by which

I mean specifying a relationshipbetween two different domains.

For example, we can map therelationships between words andobjects, or between conceptsof psychology and concepts ofphysics. is ability to map twodifferent things onto each otheris, I think, at the heart of thecognitive enterprise. Furthermore,emptiness, in a precise technicalsense, is a fundamental insight intothe nature of these mappings, i.e.,the emptiness of concepts makes it

possible for concepts in one domainto map to concepts in anotherdomain.

onclusion

o let me try to restate myasic idea. Cognitive science

has changed enough that we havegone from thinking of conceptssymbolically to things that areembodied, but we still dont have

a theory of concepts. I think thisis because we dont even knowwhat the problem is, nor do weunderstand the phenomenon weare studying. We dont have a clueof what something could be if itcant be defined. e reason I findthe Buddhist analysis of emptinessso interesting in this regard isbecause it is precisely a theory of

what things could be if theyre notisolated and definable. ere is aprofound literature in Buddhismhat addresses the question, Why

is it that everything is empty? Andit has been applied to all domains:

ings are empty of causes, thingsare empty of self-nature, causality isempty, definitions are empty, this isempty, that is empty. Within thisanguage lies a logic of emptinesshat drives our understanding of

why is it that things are empty.

What Id like to do is to bringhat logic into cognitive science

and use it to help provide a newway of understanding concepts.

We need to recognize there areno longer independent, artificialhings living in isolation which are

definable and which can be studiedmathematically. Rather, there areinterdependent entities that havespecific structures and follow acertain logic, but the logic is nothe ordinary logic of yes and no. It

is a different logic, an empty logic.I think the logic of concepts is aogic that accepts contradictions.

When I say concepts are empty, itis not that the particular content ofan individual concept like cup iswithout meaning, but it is sayingsomething important about therelational structure that underlieshem.

My guess is that reality itself iscontradictory, and that ordinaryogic is just the wrong logic forunderstanding reality. We are at a

stage where even to understand theworld we embody in concepts, wewill have to bring in forms of logic

hat are currently seen as mistaken.

ajesh Kasturirangan is a Research Scientistt MIT and a faculty member at the Nationalnstitute for Advanced Studies in Bangalore,ndia.

Buddhist philosophy

captures what is

at the heart of the

structure of concepts.