What is a self?

[Media]

@Metaphor

What’s more, how would one linguistically express the physical pain experienced through one sense often involves the metaphorical transfer of a different sensory experience.

The underlying mechanism may be synesthesia? Maybe close proximity of neuron termination in the brain and cross talk between the functional areas?

[Martin]

@Metaphor

Take a look at Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By . It’s the classic statement on the conceptual theory of metaphor. I find that the theory is quite consistent with many Buddhist teachings (hence my user name on this forum ).

So how would you translate this theory to how the suttas describe vinnana ( sense-consciousness), vedana ( sensation/feeling ) and sanna ( perception )?

[Metaphor]

@Media

The underlying mechanism may be synesthesia? Maybe close proximity of neuron termination in the brain and cross talk between the functional areas?

Lakoff and Johnson are linguists by training, not neuroscience researchers (and I am a political scientist, which is even further away from neuroscience). But based on Lakoff and Johnson’s theory this would seem like a reasonable hypothesis.

[Metaphor]

@Martin

So how would you translate this theory to how the suttas describe vinnana ( sense-consciousness), vedana ( sensation/feeling ) and sanna ( perception )?

I think the main difference between Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual theory of metaphors and what the suttas describe is that in Lakoff and Johnson’s theory the transference of sensory experience to abstract ideas is embedded within socialized cultural expectations. That is to say, while many conceptual metaphors are universal and seemingly reflect innate human cognition (an example would be the conceptual metaphor “time is motion”), there are subtle differences in how time is expressed metaphorically as motion depending on internalized social and cultural practices. Hence, Westerners often express time as motion in terms of forward progress, while Aboriginal Australians express time as motion in terms of floating through space.

In Buddhist terms, sense-consciousness and sensation/feeling may create a cognitive connection to thoughts, but perception may include cultural practices and socially-ingrained expectations that are not explicitly specified in the suttas but perhaps could be inferred, or perhaps not. It sort of depends on whether one reads the suttas to imply that individuals draw on cultural expectations when they contemplate the relationship between impermanence and not-self. If the self that is being negated is imagined as wholly separate from its cultural context, this would seem to serve as a point of departure with Lakoff and Johnson’s theory.