I was recently listening to videos from a UC Berkeley conference on cognitive science and Buddhism.
See: https://youtu.be/rqWYeE2E07w
A transcript can be read here:
In the beginning lecture, Evan Thompson, a well known philosopher who draws on Indian thought, was defending the sautrantika Buddhist theory of svasaṃvedana on phenomenological grounds (apparently Western phenomenologists had similar ideas). The theory has been a long bone of contention among Buddhists; Madhyamikas and Theravadins seem to have argued against it, while Sautrantika and Yogacara argued for it and Sarvastivadins had a view somewhat in the middle.
The Sarvastivada Maha Vibhasa defines the theory as follows:
It is the nature (svabhava) of awareness (jñana) and so forth to apprehend, thus awareness can apprehend itself as well as others. This is like a lamp that can illuminate itself and others owing to its nature of luminosity.
They held that this was not possible, but that consciousness could perceive previous moments of consciousness. Wikipedia says:
However that does not mean the Sarvastivadins reject all theories of self cognition, they developed their own theory which argued that mind moments know themselves only reflexively in regards to the previous mind moments. As Zhihua Yao states, “in other words, the mind knows itself through a reflection of the past mind”
Evan Thompson, in the lecture linked above (from min 48 onwards), mainly focuses on the views of Buddhist philosopher Dignaga (he wrongly says he introduced the concept, but we can see it already in the Kathavatthu), who also defended the idea of a non-conceptual “internal awareness of mental consciousness.” According to Thompson the basics of this view is that “every cognition has a twofold appearance, its object and itself.” He ties this with cognitive science theories of meta-cognition and meta-awareness, the fact that I can know that I am knowing. He says Dignaga holds that without this reflexive awareness, it is impossible to explain meta-cognition. The argument is:
On the one hand, suppose that cognition consists
only of the object aspect. It follows that when I think about the visual cognition I had
yesterday of seeing the blue sky, the object aspect of the present memory (namely, the
past cognition) is the same as the object aspect of the past cognition (namely, the blue
sky). But this implies the absurd consequence that the two cognitions are
indistinguishable (they have the same object aspects and all there is to a cognition is its
object aspect). On the other hand, suppose that cognition consists only of its own aspect
(call this the subject aspect). It follows that they cannot be differentiated according to
their content (they have no differentiating content and are exactly similar in regards to
their subject aspects), so again we have the absurd consequence that they are
indistinguishable. If we suppose, however, that cognition is dual-aspected, and that the
object aspect of the present memory is the subject aspect of the past cognition, then the
two cognitions are distinguishable. Thus, in metacognition, one cognition takes another cognition
as its object, but under the apprehending aspect of that cognition. In this way,
the model of cognition as being dual-aspected is able to account for metacognition. Dignāga’s
thought is that when I metacognitively attend to one of my experiences I
attend to an aspect of its content but that aspect cannot be the object aspect—the aspect of
the apprehended; it must be the subject aspect—the aspect of the apprehending. J
Anyways, I was wondering if this model can be supported from the suttas, if there is anything in the suttas that support this theory or if there is anything at all in the suttas about meta-awareness, what Thompson calls “the reflexive and pre-conceptual feeling of being aware in being aware, or to use a phenomenological idiom, the feeling of being alive in being sentient.”
Or as Birgit Kellner defines it “an immediate, non-conceptual mode of awareness that provides access to how mental content (including feelings, etc.) presents
itself subjectively.”