What Makes the World: Mind or Brain?

That little voice that is narrating your experience as you read this—is it in your mind or in your brain? At first glance, this might seem like a stupid semantic question. But it cuts to the heart of a weighty dilemma for modern science that also has profound implications for Buddhist practice.

Common sense tells us that brains and minds are not the same. Brains are physical. Minds are not. More generally, it seems obvious that matter and mind are different things. This common-sense intuition has been enshrined in Western philosophy since at least the time of Plato and Socrates. In the 17th century, René Descartes elaborated this distinction as a duality of substances: matter which is spatially extended; and mind which is “a thing that thinks.”

The intellectual tides of modernity began to turn against dualism towards the end of the 19th century. As the natural sciences, with their emphasis on objective phenomena, demonstrated remarkable powers over the natural world, scientists and philosophers began to ridicule the idea of a mental substance. The emerging premise, that whatever causally contributes to physical events must be physical, led many to assume that mind must be reducible to matter, or that mind just is what the brain does. This is a metaphysical belief known as materialism or physicalism.

Late in the 20th century, the materialist tide started to recede as challenges to the dominant materialist/physicalist narrative accumulated. Various philosophers of consciousness pointed out an unbridgeable explanatory gap between brain and mind. David Chalmers called this the “hard problem of consciousness” and described a series of thought experiments that suggest that mind is a fundamental property of nature. Galen Strawson wrote this about materialism: “There occurred in the 20th century the most remarkable episode in the history of human thought. A number of thinkers denied the existence of something we know with certainty to exist: consciousness, conscious experience.”[1]

The early Buddhist schools also divided reality into mental and physical phenomena. Around the beginning of the Common Era, this view was challenged by the emergence of the Mahayana. Nagarjuna used reasoning to show that all phenomena are dependently arisen appearances, empty of any nature of their own. Later, Asanga and Vasubandhu went further, showing that all phenomena are merely cognition, free of the duality of subject and object, matter and mind.

These Mahayana insights mirror those of contemporary thinkers who point to the primacy of mind; reasoning that all of science—all its observations, theories, and models—exists only within people’s minds. They are not part of the furniture of reality. As philosopher and cognitive scientist Evan Thompson put it, “There’s no way to step outside consciousness and measure it against something else. Science always moves within the field of what consciousness reveals; it can enlarge this field and open up new vistas, but it can never get beyond the horizon set by consciousness.”[2]

Now, try a little experiment. Look directly at your own experience. Do you experience a brain or the mind?