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Is There Only One Mind in the Universe?
When René Descartes, in an attempt to establish a solid foundation for knowledge, meditated on what it is possible to doubt, he famously concluded cogito, ergo sum: “I think therefore I am”. As he wrote in a marginal note, “we cannot doubt of our existence while doubting.” Yet arguably he does not go quite far enough. The Buddha reached a different conclusion in his meditations: the self, as an entity separate from thought itself, does not exist. Perhaps what Descartes should have concluded — rather more awkwardly — was “I think therefore my thoughts exist”.
The existence of a subject to whom experiences happen, and who is the agent of cognition, seems to be self-evident. When I plan for my future, whether for a minute or a decade hence, I think about this future as something that will happen to me, not merely to an experiencing subject who happens to share my body and my memories. If I expect something unpleasant to occur in my future, I fear. If I anticipate pleasures, I experience excitement. Similarly, guilt and pride only make sense if I am the same person who carried out my past actions.
The self is closely bound up with this idea of the continuity of consciousness in time. Even though we often imagine time as a sequence of nows like frames of a movie, it does not really make sense to treat each “now” as if it were severed from its adjacent…
