The Inclusion Problem in the Philosophy of Mind: The Case of Advaita Vedanta and The Extended Mind Hypothesis

<strong>Centre for Philosophy School of Social Sciences</strong> a Talk on <strong>The Inclusion Problem in the Philosophy of Mind: The Case of Advaita Vedanta and The Extended Mind Hypothesis</strong> by <strong>Anand Jayprakash Vaidya &amp; Purushottama Bilimoria</strong> <strong>Date: 15 January, 2016</strong> Abstract : The term 'inclusion problem' refers to set of issues that one faces in teaching philosophy when one wants to include non-western sources in a discussion of contemporary views in analytic philosophy or phenomenological philosophy. Many philosophers in the US and in the UK have become increasingly aware of and interested in the inclusion problem. Their interest lies in learning how to include non-western sources into discussions. For example, one already finds lots of work on how to include Buddhism in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and ethics. In this paper we discuss the inclusion problem for the philosophy of mind, by turning to Indian philosophy, but not to Buddhism, rather we turn to Advaita Vedanta and show how it can engage the contemporary thesis known as the Extended Mind Hypothesis. The particular issue we discuss is as follows. In (1998), departing from the framework of Anglo-analytic philosophy and cognitive science, Andy Clark and David Chalmers articulated and defended, what has come to be known as, the extended mind hypothesis, EMH. They argued, against the backdrop of functionalism about the mind, and for the specific case of the mental state type belief, that it is possible for a person's mind to extend outside of the boundary of their body. Departing from the framework of Indo-Analytic comparative philosophy, we show that the Advaita Vedanta School of classical Indian philosophy, against the backdrop of a specific form of panpsychism, defended an account on which a person's conscious experience, during an act of perceptual knowledge, is located outside of the boundary of their body. Using the work of Adams and Maher (2012), on how to respond to Adams and Aizawa's (2001) coupling-constitution fallacy, we argue that the Advaita Vedanta account of mind, AVM, can be taken to generate, what we call, the mind extension hypothesis, MEH –the view that consciousness can extend outside of the body in perception. Recognizing the problematic nature of panpsychism as a metaphysical view about consciousness, and following work done by Itay Shani on the real combination problem, we argue that the Advaita Vedanta account of panpsychism, as a kind of cosmopsychism, as opposed to Galen Strawson's micropsychism, allows for a response to the so-called real combination problem proposed by Sam Coleman (2014). We close by presenting a set of questions and problems for the Advaita Vedanta account of mind extension by engaging the work of Bertrand Russell on perception and neutral monism. We present the potential for a debate between Russellian neutral monism + indirect perception vs. Vedanta cosmopsychism + direct perception.