Vaiśeṣika Prāṇa in Extended Cognition — Epoche B2
The Notebook Is an Instrument, Not a Knower A question the parity principle leaves open Andy Clark and David Chalmers ask us to compare two people going to a museum [1] . Inga remembers that it is on 53rd Street and walks there. Otto, whose memory has been damaged, consults a notebook he always carries, reads the same address, and walks there too. Their claim, in The Extended Mind (1998), is that Otto's notebook is not merely a tool he uses to recover a belief but part of the machinery in which the belief is stored, so that Otto believed the museum was on 53rd Street before he opened the book. The argument for this rests on a rule of method: If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (so we claim) part of the cognitive process. The rule is meant to strip away a prejudice about location. What it cannot do, and what this essay is about, is settle a prior question: whether the thing under discussion is a part of a cognitive process or an instrument by which a cognitive process is carried out. That distinction is not a technicality. Every cognitive episode has instruments; nobody counts them all as parts of the mind. The classical Indian school of Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika worked out an explicit inventory for exactly this purpose, and its treatment of the sense organs is the closest thing in the philosophical literature to a considered answer to Clark and Chalmers's question. My claim is that the answer goes against them: the notebook falls on the instrument side of a line they never draw, and the reason it does is not that it lies outside the skin. The inventory Vaiśeṣika sorts everything knowable into categories ( padārtha ). The first three are substance, quality and motion. Substances number nine, and two of them matter here: the self ( ātman ) and the internal organ ( manas ). Cognition ( jñāna ) is not a substance at all. It is a quality, and like every quality it must inhere in some substance, which is called its locus ( āśraya ). The locus of a cognition is the self. This is a piece of category theory rather than a piece of mysticism: cognitions are the sort of item that must belong to something, in the way that a colour must be the colour of something. Alongside the locus stand the instruments. In the Nyāya analysis of knowing, four items are distinguished in every case of knowledge: the knower, the instrument, the object, and the resulting cognition. The sense organs are instruments. So is the internal organ, which the school takes to be atomic in size, and which therefore lets only one cognition through at a time — their explanation of why attention is serial. The point of the inventory is that these are different jobs. Being the thing that does the knowing and being the thing by means of which the knowing is done are not two locations for one role. Why the senses are instruments The school does not simply assert this. The Nyāyasūtra opens its treatment of the self by arguing that the self must be distinct from the sense organs, because one and the same object is apprehended by sight and by touch (Nyāyasūtra 3.1.1). I see a jug and I feel a jug and I judge that this is the thing I saw. No single sense performs that judgement, since each is confined to its own kind of quality; and the judgement is not the sum of two cognitions lying side by side, because a sum of that kind has no one to whom both belong. Uddyotakara, in the Nyāyavārttika , presses the point against opponents who would replace the self with a series of momentary cognitions: a series can contain the earlier cognition and the later one, but recognising the second as of the same object as the first requires that both be someone's. Whatever one thinks of the conclusion, notice the shape of the argument. It does not appeal to location, to substance, or to introspection. It appeals to a functional fact — cross-modal identification happens — and infers that the item doing it cannot be any of the instruments through which the information arrived. That is a functionalist argument for a limit on functionalist extension. What the vital breath is doing here It is tempting to look in this tradition for a bridging substance that couples mind to world, and the vital breath ( prāṇa ) is usually where people look. The texts do not support that role. Praśastapāda's compendium of the categories classifies the vital breath under the substance air [2] , as a motion occurring within the body; it is physiology, not metaphysics of mind. Its philosophical work lies elsewhere. The Vaiśeṣikasūtra's list of the marks from which the existence of a self is inferred includes inhalation and exhalation, the closing and opening of the eyes, and the maintenance of life, alongside pleasure, pain, desire, aversion and effort (Vaiśeṣikasūtra 3.2.4). Breath appears on that list as evidence . It is one of the observable regularities of a living body from which one argues back to a subject. A tradition that treats bodily process as a premise in an inference to a knower is not a tradition that treats bodily process as a part of the knower. Otto, sorted Run Otto through the inventory. The address is the object. The notebook is what he consults in order to get at the object — an instrument, exactly as his spectacles are, and exactly as his eyes are. The cognition that the museum is on 53rd Street is a quality, and it has a locus, and the locus is Otto. Nothing in Clark and Chalmers's paper distinguishes the second and third of these. Their supplementary conditions do not do it either: they say the notebook counts because it is reliably available, readily accessible, and automatically endorsed on retrieval. Each of those is satisfied by a healthy person's eyes, and nobody proposes that the eyes are part of the mind rather than instruments of it. Conditions that a paradigm instrument passes cannot be th