Philosophy of language in the Five Nikayas
by K.T.S. Sarao | 2013 | 141,449 words
This page relates ‘Brains as ‘Thinking Matter’’ of the study of the Philosophy of language in the Five Nikayas, from the perspective of linguistics. The Five Nikayas, in Theravada Buddhism, refers to the five books of the Sutta Pitaka (“Basket of Sutra”), which itself is the second division of the Pali Tipitaka of the Buddhist Canon (literature).
2.1. Brains as ‘Thinking Matter’
A source of great difficulty, then as now, was the relationship between thinking and matter. When Descartes claimed that matter is inert, then, it was tantamount to claiming that matter could not think. The question of whether there could be such a thing as ‘thinking matter’ was argued vigorously during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, without there being any conclusive outcome. It was not a naive debate, but an extremely sophisticated one, and it’s doubtful whether more modern philosophers have got much further with it.
Locke
In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Volume 2), Locke (1959: 192-3) says:
We have the ideas of matter and thinking, but possibly shall never be able to know whether any mere material being thinks or no; it being impossible for us, by the contemplation of our own ideas, without revelation, to discover whether Omnipotency has not given to some systems of matter, fitly disposed, power to perceive and think, or else joined and fixed to matter, so disposed, a thinking immaterial substance: it being, in respect of our notions, not much more remote from our comprehension to conceive that God can, if he pleases, superadd to matter a faculty of thinking than that he should superadd to it another substance with a faculty of thinking; since we know not wherein thinking consists, nor to what sort of substances the Almighty has been pleased to give that power, which cannot be in any created being, but merely by the good pleasure and bounty of the Creator.
These words of Locke’s, which might appear harmless enough to modern eyes, caused a furore. Yet Locke seems to be very moderate in what he is claiming: not that matter can think, but that it is not impossible for God to have given it the power to do so. If thinking could be associated with matter, then the soul, the thinking part of human beings, might be material rather than immaterial. And what would that mean for the immortality of the soul?
Although Locke did not say that God had given matter the power to think, in some ways the reactions to what he did say were reactions to further notions that might be considered to follow. He had started them thinking in more materialist ways than they were used to. And that led to curiosity about whether we might be machines, in spite of Descartes’ confident claim that we were not.