Does modern science lend support to Buddhist ideas about the human mind?

In the Buddha’s discourse on the not-self, his teaching about the human mind suggests that the five aggregates of “form, consciousness, perception, feeling, and mental formation” are all that there are about a person. But there is no ground for the person to identify with any part of these as a self being in control of himself. Besides, like everything else, these aggregates are impermanent such that, in reality, there is no consistent self throughout the person’s life which is discernable.

Indeed Buddha advised his disciplines to regard each of the 5 aggregates with proper wisdom, according to reality, thus: “this is not mine; this I am not; this is not my Self.” Though Buddha might not have proclaimed the non-existence of self per se, the essence of his doctrine on the not-self seems to be pointing to a person’s conscious self as being in total control of his thinking and behaviour as being delusional. This also supports the core idea behind the second of the four Noble Truths that the urges of clinging and craving arising out of delusions of the mind – as all things are impermanent in reality – form the true cause of human sufferings.  

After 2,500 years since the original Buddha’s teaching, there are parallels to be drawn from theories and experiments in modern psychology which question the significance of the conscious self in influencing behaviour. In the 19^th century, the renowned Sigmund Freud suggested that behaviour is influenced by subconscious thoughts to a large extent (hence “the Freudian slip” which has for long evolved into a common phrase in day-to-day language).

There are contemporary psychologists, not least Rob Kurzban and Jerome Barlow, who suggest that the conscious self as we commonly perceive as being in charge is, in reality, simply operating in the business of public relations, projecting impressions to the outside world as the kinds of person we want to be – usually conforming to the coherent norms of social value. As such it also functions to justify a person’s motivations for doing certain things.

Quoting Jerome Barlow, “the primary evolutionary function of the self is more an organ of impression management than one of decision-making.”

Indeed there is a natural tendency for people to attribute successes to things they consciously do or because of who they are, and failures to things outside their control or plain bad luck.

An emerging theory, namely the modular view of the mind, which attempts to unravel the mystery of the workings of the human mind, also seems to be in line with the Buddhist idea about the not-self. In this theory, there is no place for a conscious Self acting like a CEO being in charge of a person’s thinking and behaviour which, instead, are being influenced, governed or even dictated by modules of intuition and cognitive responses to the environmental stimulus. In day-to-day language, therefore, a person can be in different “frames of mind”.

The key point about the modular view of mind is that there is not a supreme self which the different modules of mind report to and which dictates which particular module is to be in charge at any one time. Instead they are all part of a self-organizing system. Which particular module exerts more influence over behaviour depends to a large extent on the situation the person finds himself in and the surrounding environment factors that may be at play. It is also possible that different modules may be interacting among themselves and operating at the same time in influencing behaviour. Related modern psychological experiments indeed point to the evidence of how people’s traits which are generally considered as inherent may change according to the frames of mind they are in.

In conclusion, various sources of modern science do concur with the Buddhist ideas about the human mind, in particular, the two main themes of skepticism about the self:

1)     There is no coherent self which persists through time.

2)     There is generally no conscious control of what goes on in a person’s mind, which usually operates with various complexes of thoughts, perceptions, feelings and senses arising in responses to surrounding stimuli competing for "conscious attention" and control .

Of course, no person convicted of wrongdoing can simply apply Buddha's no-self doctrine or the modular view of mind of modern behavioural psychology and expect to be readily exonerated. 

So what is the practical lesson for us mere mortals? 

The power of meditation for being mindful of what exactly is going on in the mind.