KNOWING BLUE: EARLY BUDDHIST ACCOUNTS OF NON-CONCEPTUAL SENSE PERCEPTION Robert H. Sharf Group in Buddhist Studies, University of California, Berkeley
[email protected] And I find myself knowing the things that I knew Which is all that you can know on this side of the blue Joanna Newsom Is there such a thing as direct, non-conceptual experience, or is all experience, by its very nature, conceptually mediated? Is some notion of non-conceptual sensory awareness required to account for our ability to represent and negotiate our physical environment, or is it merely an artifact of deep-seated but ultimately misguided Cartesian metaphysical assump- tions? Perhaps conscious experience in humans is inextricably tied to the representational or self-reflexive capacities of language; if so, does it necessarily follow that newborn infants and animals are not conscious? Is the very notion of non-conceptual experience logically incoherent or unintelligible? Or perhaps the problem lies in our use of concepts to describe phenomena that lie, by definition, beyond the confines of conceptual thought. Surely, that we can’t conceive of something is insufficient ground to conclude that it doesn’t exist. These are, of course, much debated issues in contemporary philosophy of mind. Recently, the debates have been framed in terms of “first-order” (or “same-order”) theories of consciousness versus higher-order theories; the latter maintain that subjective awareness consists in a second-order representation of a first-order state (consciousness is said to be “transitive”), while the former argue that consciousness is “intransitive” or “self-intimating,” and thus the phenomenon of self-awareness need not entail secondary or higher-order cognitive processing.