Recently, UC Berkeley Professor George Lakoff and I had a riveting discussion during his office hours. When he described his second book co-authored with Mark Johnson, what immediately came to mind was karma.[1]
According to Lakoff and Johnson, human beings have an enormous metaphoric conceptual system that is built up by a process of neural selection.
Philosophy in the Flesh asserts that sensory perception is experienced through the mediation of neural connections that conceptualize and reason metaphorically. According to Lakoff and Johnson, human beings have an enormous metaphoric conceptual system that is built up by a process of neural selection. Neural connections among the 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synaptic connections in the brain are random at first, but soon develop activation patterns. Those neural connections between the activated source- and target-domain networks that are used most often have an increased synaptic weight from their constant firing. The more these connections are activated, the more the weights increase, until permanent connections are forged. These neural networks determine what concepts a person has access to, since conceptual structures are neural structures, and what kind of reasoning he or she is capable of doing.
As neural beings, people form categories to make sense of their experience; however, they do not have full conscious control over how they categorize because most of human thought is unconscious. Lakoff and Johnson emphasize that thought “operates beneath the level of cognitive awareness, inaccessible to consciousness and operating too quickly to be focused on” [10]. The results of the neural connections are “projected” from the sensorimotor source network to the subjective judgment target network. Activation flows both ways between the source and target networks. Lakoff and Johnson contend that because our conceptual systems depend on neural connections, which are relatively fixed in our brains, and because most thought is automatic and unconscious, humans do not have complete control over how they conceptualize experience and reason. For this reason, conceptual change is slow and difficult.
Could their breakthrough study provide a biological explanation of what for a long time Indian philosophy has called karma?
The authors show that thought is a metaphoric process in which sense data is conceived through activated patterns of habitually forged neural connections. Could their break-through study provide a biological explanation of what for a long time Indian philosophy has called karma? Their model focuses on conceptualizing processes, which in Buddhism relate to the skandha called saṃjñā (apperception). According to Buddhism, accumulations of karma that enter our conscious mind in each moment create the structures through which we use language to make sense of our experience.
If the flow of thoughts and actions activate near-automatic neural patterns, then there is little space for free will and spontaneity. Our intention, when appropriate, to go against the karmic current and open to the moment becomes the critical component for innovation and creativity. Could “going with the flow” be dangerous for an uncritical mind, resulting in being swept away by a stream of recurring habits? Is it possible to distinguish between going with the flow of external conditions and the flow of internal conditions belonging to the mind, since it is only through the mind that we experience the world? And if our brains are neurally programmed, is spontaneity a myth? Since our brains are constantly mapping patterns, there is no escape from mental structures. For this reason, we have to be very careful of the patterns that we continuously create in our mind and of our intentions to change the ones we have already in place. While neural pathways do not explain the arising of conditions in an interconnected causal matrix or in what form the latent karma transmigrates, the automation of neural connections is helpful to understand individual responsibility in habituating oneself toward a certain embodied relationship with the world.
[1] George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. (New York: Basic Books, 1999).