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Chapter 8 Is Nirva ˉn .a the Same as Insentience? Chinese Struggles with an Indian Buddhist Ideal Robert H. Sharf Certain forms of perplexity—for example, about freedom, knowledge, and the meaning of life—seem to me to embody more insight than any of the supposed solutions to those problems. —Thomas Nagel Preamble What makes an animate thing animate? How do we know if something is sentient ? Is consciousness ultimately material or immaterial? Or is it neither— perhaps an “emergent property” that cannot be reduced to or disaggregated from a physical substrate? These are big, complex, and conceptually muddy questions about which philosophers , biologists, and ethicists have had much to say over the millennia. Recently , cognitive psychology has gotten into the act as well, producing hundreds of empirical studies on the cognitive foundations of the conceptual distinction we make between the animate and inanimate. Studies show that very young children have markedly different predispositions (or cognitive intuitions) with regard to animate versus inanimate things, intuitions that cannot be explained as the result of language acquisition and socialization alone. Newborn infants, for example, respond to animate objects differently than they do to inanimate ones: animate entities sustain their attention for significantly longer periods of time. And young 142 Robert H. Sharf children have markedly different intuitions about the unseen interiors of objects depending upon whether said objects are registered as animate or inanimate.1 The growing literature on the subject, representing various disciplinary and methodological perspectives, suggests that the animate/inanimate distinction is innate rather than acquired.2 “Animacy” or “agency” is not the only cognitive category that appears to be hardwired, but it certainly has garnered the lion’s share of attention to date. This is owing to the role agency-detection is presumed to play in “theory of mind” on the one hand, and in the cross-cultural belief in supernatural agents on the other. “Theory of mind” refers to the cognitive capacity or insight that allows young children to relate to others as conscious subjects rather than mere objects. The early acquisition of theory of mind is, according to the “theory-of-mind” theory, essential to human empathy and social bonding; a deficiency or impairment in this capacity may be responsible for autism spectrum disorders.3 It would seem, then, that humans have evolved to distinguish, virtually from birth, animate from inanimate things, and as a species we are neurologically predisposed to regard animate entities as centers of sentient experience—in Nagel’s terms, “there is something it is like to be that organism.”4 Evolutionary theory offers a ready explanation for our innate neurological capacity for agency-detection: the ability to instantly register the presence of predators in the wild would have had considerable survival value for our prehistoric ancestors. But this selective advantage is gained only insofar as the agency -detection mechanism errs on the side of caution. Is that a tiger I see in the bushes? In such ambiguous situations, those who are biased toward false positives rather than false negatives are more likely to survive. Our agency-detection circuit explains, according to some scholars of religion, the widespread but erroneous belief that the natural world is populated by spirits, ghosts, ancestors, gods, and other supernatural agents. The evolution of a trigger-happy agency-detection neural module has become a popular naturalistic explanation for the emergence and persistence of religious belief.5 Does the distinction we make between “animate” and “inanimate” correspond to an objective fact—something “out there” in the natural world? Or is it merely epiphenomenal, a somewhat accidental byproduct of our cognitive evolution? The tendency, I believe, is to assume that our agency-detection circuit affords us a selective advantage precisely because it attunes us to a natural state of affairs. But the relationship between our percepts and what exists in the noumenal world is, as philosophers since the “axial age” have pointed out, a complex one, and there is reason to suspect that our perception of agency may be epiphenomenal in .141.30.162] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 08:49 GMT) Is Nirva ˉn .a the Same as Insentience? 143 the same sense that our perception of color or taste or sound is epiphenomenal. That is to say, the relationship between the experience of “red” or “bitter” or “euphonious ” on the one hand, and the physical and biological conditions that occasion such experiences on the other, is not mimetic in any simple sense; qualia such as “red” and “bitter” and...

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