Last year, during the height of the pandemic when many universities shifted to remote learning platforms, I was privileged to be able to audit a class at the Harvard Divinity School taught by Jay Garfield. One of the texts we read was Dignāga’s Investigation of the Percept which contains a short root text and auto-commentary by the Indian Buddhist logician and philosopher, Dignāga, along with contemporary and classical commentaries on the text. The root text is only two pages in English translation, but I found it led to an interesting thought experiment. Here are my thoughts from last year.
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This week, I am engaging in a thought experiment of sorts. I am going to try to imagine that my sense faculties are different than they are, not defective as with Dignaga’s two moons example, but that I have a compound eye, like a bee, or that I can see a much wider expanse of the electromagnetic spectrum like a lobster, to see if these arguments still make sense. I will also make the, certainly problematic assumption, that the mental consciousness of these animals remains similar to my own. I hope that this will elucidate some additional questions. I am doing this in the context of Dignaga’s root text, his auto-commentary, and Vinitadeva’s sub-commentary.
The first verse does not seem to depend on having normal human sense faculties. This makes sense, because the position being refuted, that there are external objects composed of fundamental particles, does not seem to place any particular requirement on a human sensory apparatus. For example, a lobster can sense “color” and reflected “depth” that are not available to us due to differences between the retinal configuration of the eye as well as the use of rectilinear mirrors rather than lenses in the eye of the lobster or many hexagonal lenses in the case of the bee. In either case, though, the fundamental particle can still not be a percept because, the color or motion perceived still cannot be the object perceived. That is, when a bee sees a flower using its compound eyes, it still can (presumably) distinguish the shape and color of the flower in order to direct its motion towards it, rather than say, a rock. But a rock also is composed of fundamental particles, and is also visible, yet it is not perceived as a flower, and certainly neither is perceived as an invisible fundamental particle.
Similarly, when the lobster sees a worm writhing in the mud using its unique visual system, it can certainly distinguish between the worm as a source of food, and the mud which is not, even when our own human system would be unable to do so. In this case, both the worm and the mud, even if they were composed of fundamental particles, do not appear to the lobster as fundamental particles, Dignaga, in his autocommentary, allows that the fundamental particles may be the cause (p. 41), while Vinitadeva elaborates that they do not “correspond to their representations.”
The second verse, refuting that collections are percepts, would appear to be more problematic in the case of bees and lobsters. After all, a compound eye would produce multiple images of the moon (and other objects of perception), but unlike double vision in a human subject, which is a defect of the sensory faculties caused by disease, or intoxication, the compound vision of a bee or lobster is a feature of the sensory faculties that provide an enhancement to the visual sense of these animals that provides them an advantage. Here I make an assumption that the cognition of a bee or a lobster includes some mechanism to collate the multiple images coming from the retinas of their two compound eyes and three “simple” eyes into a constructed framework in an analogous way that the human neuro-sensory system is able to combine the images from two eyes into a single perception. If this is the case, then the argument remains the same. That is the perception is caused by the mental construction of the system, rather than the “raw sense data” from the retina (here, perhaps drastically oversimplifying the role of the retina as a passive detector of sense phenomena).
But, what if there is not a sensory construction analogous to normal binocular human vision? In that case, the argument is exactly the same as Dignaga’s double moon. A bee seeing the moon as a thousand points of light does not imply that the thousand points of light are the result of a thousand different moons.
In either case, Dignaga’s argument is that the collection is not substantially real. The bee and lobster example provide a strong support for this argument, since it is apparent that a single object of perception is not multiplied simply by the number of the lenses or reflectors in the eye. Rather, the number of images is result of the configuration of the sensory organs themselves, and the perception of a single object is an internal construct rather than something inherent externally. In this case, the collection may correspond to the representation, but it cannot be the cause.
The third verse, regarding collected features also seems like it might present problems for lobster or bee perception. In his autocommentary, Dignaga, states the opponent’s position that “while all objects have many features, they are perceived with only a few features.” This might be problematic because bees and lobsters are able to perceive features of objects that humans cannot. That is, a bee might perceive features of an object that is only perceptible with a visual sense faculty that is sensitive to ultraviolet wavelengths, or can distinguish between shades of blue that are not distinct to humans. Nonetheless, at least some of these features (or properties) of objects, like Dignaga’s example of solidity, are also not objects of visual consciousness to bees (and probably, not to lobsters, even if they can see, to a certain extent, “behind” objects).
Verses four and five do not seem to depend on a human sensory faculty. The first part of verse four refutes an argument that collected features are universal, that is that there is a “form of cup” (using Platonic language) that would be a collected feature present in fundamental particles that make up a cup, and that there is a “form of pot” as a collected feature in pots. But, according to Vinitadeva, this would lead to a mis-identification of cups as pots since in his interpretation of Dignaga this argument does not allow for for different cognitions of fundamental objects. I am not sure that I follow his argument here, however, a similar argument could be made that a potter might create a pot and a cup out of the same substance (clay), and that when both pots and cups break they become the same substance (pottery shards), but that pots and cups are distinct from each other, as pots and cups, they are distinct from each other as my cup and your cup, and their broken shards are distinct from each other (as the one on the floor, and the one embedded in my foot after I step on it).
Similarly, the last part of the verse four, and continuing on to verse five, which discusses the spherical geometry of fundamental particles does not change whether the subject is human, bee, or lobster.
Verse five concludes the refutation of external objects as percepts. All of the arguments stated seem to apply equally well for bee and lobster cognition as they do for human.
Verse six would seem to follow almost directly from the compound eye example. That is, Dignaga posits an internal cognitive object, which really must be some form of construction in the case of the bee (with its five eyes including two compound eyes) or in the lobster with its strange rectilinear reflective eye structure. Furthermore he posits that the internal cognitive object appears to be external, but it is really a construction (or cognition). And furthermore, this cognition is reflexive (“because it [the cognition] is its condition”). That is, as Vinitadeva says, “cognition is itself the condition of cognition” (p. 96).
Verses seven and eight do not seem to be specifically dependent on human versus non-human perception. First Dignaga explains that cognitions can still be conditions that arise simultaneously because the perception requires the conditions to be concomitant. The bee seeing a flower through its compound eyes is a result both of the nature of its visual faculty (with its many eyes) and the cognitive construct that aggregates these sensory data into a unitary percept. Dignaga explains that the cognition is also sequential, because, as Vinitadeva says, “[it] produces a subsequent cognition that corresponds to itself.” Furthermore, Dignaga defines sense faculties as “cooperating sense capacities,” thus positing a unity between object and sense faculty. This again is clearly illustrated with the bee looking at the moon example, where, for the bee, there really is no distinction between the moon, and the manner in which the bee’s visual faculty presents the moon to its cognitive faculty. And in fact, this is what Dignaga claims in verse eight, “It is not contradictory for this capacity to also be in cognition” (p 39). Lastly Dignaga concludes that this process is cyclical, with no beginning or end.
