How Can Our Behaviour Be Conditioned If There Is No ‘Us’?

Another tedious and laborious exploration of what has been called ‘radical non-duality’.

Dave’s four worldviews, 1951-date. My current beliefs are resting on a crag stretching out from worldview III towards worldview IV, but there is no bridging the chasm between them. 

One of the things I love about science is how every discovery raises a host of new questions and shows us how little we really know. And sadly, the sciences, perhaps because of their attempts at rigour, tend to attract a ton of people who just desperately aspire to know the truth about everything (a yearning for control, perhaps), and so elide and ignore facts that contradict their theories and opinions. The dogmatism of many scientists is both disheartening and annoying.

Unlike most scientists, I find delight in uncertainty, in ambiguity, in surprise, and even in that most uncomfortable of intellectual states, cognitive dissonance.

In previous articles I’ve written that I behave most often as if one set of things were true, while intuitively ‘feeling’ and intellectually ‘knowing’ that a very different set of things is true. So, for example, I am (at least for now) thoroughly convinced that we have no free will, and that all our behaviours are entirely biologically and culturally conditioned, given the circumstances of the moment. But still I frequently get enraged and distressed by others’ behaviour, and ‘blame’ them for it, even though I ‘know’ they have no choice in what they do. I might as well get angry at the wind and the rain. I (whatever that pronoun means) make sense of the world ‘as if’ I have free will.

One of the issues with our behaviour being entirely conditioned and us having no free will, is that it presupposes that there is someone or something that can be conditioned and can hence have free will in the first place. It’s not hard to argue that if we have no free will, then there cannot be any such thing as a self to have it. And vice versa. So if it’s not the ‘self’ that is conditioned, what is it?

My tentative answer has been that two things are conditioned in parallel: (i) ‘our’ bodies, or rather all the creatures that seemingly comprise them, whose conditioning determines our behaviours, and (ii) ‘our’ brain’s model of reality, including its invention and conception of the illusory ‘self’ in the centre of that model, whose conditioning determines our beliefs and worldview. And it would seem to follow that much of our suffering comes from hopelessly attempting to reconcile, justify, and rationalize these behaviours and beliefs as controllably ‘ours’, when they are purely conditioned. We have no say in them at all.

But I recognize that I’m on a very thin and wobbly crag with this answer, perched between the irreconcilable worldviews III and IV in the graphic above. They can’t both be right. Worldview III is somewhat useful, and defensible, with a lot of recent scientific evidence supporting it.

Worldview IV goes much further, however, asserting that there is no such thing as time (it’s just another mental construct, part of the brain’s mental model of reality, a categorization scheme for trying to make sense of things). Worse, since there’s no time, there’s no causality, and without ‘real’ time and causality, nothing can ‘condition’ anything else. The question of what, in the absence of a real ‘self’, is conditioned, thus becomes moot, since there cannot be ‘conditioning’.

There’s a certain elegance to this argument, which is eminently simple and totally internally consistent, and it has been made, very articulately, by a lot of people who assert that at some point what I call worldview IV just suddenly became obvious — their sense of ‘self’ and separation just disappeared, being seen as having always been illusory, as an enormous psychosomatic misunderstanding. They say it is obvious that there is nothing ‘real’, no time, no continuity, no causality, no ‘one’ and nothing separate from everything. These are bright people from many different cultures and backgrounds. This is not a theory or opinion they are espousing — they re just describing what’s obvious, what’s just seen ‘there’. You cannot explain the astonishing consistency and internal logic of what they’re saying as being some kind of collective delusion, cult, mental breakdown, or conspiracy. They have no axe to grind, no script to follow, no common background. They are not scientists, philosophers, or skilled orators. You couldn’t make up what they are saying. And while it’s completely unprovable, it’s also irrefutable.

And to me, for whatever reason, it makes enormous intellectual sense (it explains so much that no ‘theories’ or ‘philosophies’ can explain). And somehow it also has, for me, enormous intuitive appeal. It just feels right. It resonates with what have been called ‘glimpses’ where this was seen, and obvious, that have seemingly occurred throughout my life.

So I’ve asked several of them how they would answer the question that’s the title of this article. How can conditioned behaviour occur or exist when there is no time, no causality, no continuity, no ‘one’, and no thing separate? When there is no ‘room’ for anything to condition anything else, and no separate thing or ‘person’ to be conditioned?

Of course, having obsessed about this for nearly a decade now, I knew the answer already: Conditioning only appears to occur; it’s a story, made up by the apparent brain to try to make sense of everything, fit it into its model of reality. And the person behaving or believing things in accordance with that apparent conditioning is likewise just an appearance. It’s all just a show, a play of light. For no reason, and without purpose.

Trying to make sense of this — trying to bridge worldviews III and IV — is impossible. The underpinnings of both worldviews are recursive — they depend on the acceptance of certain incompatible assumptions. To accept worldview III (hard enough if you’ve spent your life accepting the orthodoxy of worldviews I or II), you have to accept certain foundational assumptions or beliefs about the nature of reality that are fundamental to that worldview and incompatible with any of the other three worldviews. And likewise for worldview IV. Sitting on the crag at the edge of worldview III, looking curiously across the chasm at worldview IV, is an uncomfortable and untenable place to be.

But I find it enchanting, joyful and endlessly fascinating. And I don’t have any expectations that I will be moving from here during the remains of my apparent life. Worldview IV would have it that the incompatibility of that worldview with the other three doesn’t matter, and doesn’t change anything. And worldview III would likely assert that while worldview IV might indeed be ‘valid’, it’s completely useless (it explains nothing that would help us to understand the world better, or make more sense of it), so there’s really no harm believing it, any more than it would be harmful (or useful) to believe in the existence of faeries. No one’s pushing me in either direction. It’s like an astonishing puzzle that I cannot hope to ever solve, but still find intriguing.

Perhaps our conditioning is real, and time and continuity and causality are real, in which case ‘we’ are mere observers, witnesses along for the ride, dogs barking at the actors on the stage and getting caught up in what is seemingly going on.

Perhaps what we perceive and conceive of as conditioning is just furious pattern-making in apparent brains, like seeing faces in the clouds, and it’s all just appearances without substance, meaning or consequence. All just a story. A dream.

In either case, there is nothing to be done.

And no one to do anything, anyway.