8It is interesting to compare the mechanisms described above with a central idea in Buddhist philosophy: the twelve-link chain, which has served as a central inspiration for this flowchart. (A related approach is proposed by Grabovac et al. (2011).) The Buddha elaborated his idea of desire as the origin of suffering by building a sequential causal model, which can be seen as an instance of his more general ideas on “causality” resumed under the heading of dependent co-arising/origination (Mahasi, 1999; Anlayo, 2003). While different variants exist, I consider here the version with twelve items. Some of the items in his chain correspond clearly to concepts we have seen in this book, while other do not. The chain begins by three items which are difficult to interpret, and seem to be metaphysical speculation about how the ignorance of the true nature of reality creates consciousness and this creates the world. In the text above, I provided some more scientific interpretations of “ignorance” in terms of limitations of information-processing, and our ignorance of those limitations and their implications. After those initial three items, the middle part of the Buddha’s chain goes as follows: 4) “Name-and-form”. This basically means the world, including our internal world of memories and consciousness. 5) “Six-fold sense bases”. This is when the sensory organs receive input from the outer world, or memories or wandering thoughts enter the mind (which is in Buddhism considered a sixth sense). 6) “Contact”. This I interpret as perceptual processing leading to object recognition, where the brain processes information and interprets the incoming stimulus in terms of a given category (“That’s a dog”). 7) “Feeling” (vedan) means computation and perception of the valence of the sensory stimulus: Is it good or bad, do I like it or not? 8) “Craving (or thirst, or desire)” is the same as desire in our terminology, as always including aversion. You may want the object you has seen, or you may want to get rid of it. A number of goals are considered at this stage. 9) “Attachment (or clinging)”. I proposed at the end of Chapter 7 to interpret this as forming an intention, i.e. committing to a certain plan and a goal, and planning for it. (In Buddhist literature, the interpretation of “attachment” is actually highly variable, and in my view rather muddled: often, the distinction between desire and attachment is only a matter of degree. It is sometimes pointed out that an alternative translation of the word in question (updna) is “fuel”, which might give an alternative interpretation as being related to the learning process in the next steps.) 10–11) “Becoming and birth” are the next two steps which are a bit more difficult to interpret, and have traditionally been interpreted in more metaphysical terms. I suggest interpreting them as referring to the learning process which creates various associations in the mind, including creating habits out of one’s actions. Thus, whatever the agent does leads to “birth” of new action tendencies and associations. 12) “Old age and death” is the final result of the above causal chain, and can be interpreted as simply “suffering”.
We see that steps 4–9 here directly correspond to the first boxes in our flowchart (from box #0 to box # 5). The boxes #6–#8 following that, including actual planning, plan execution, and error computation may be missing in the Buddhist chain, or they could be seen as being included in its steps 10-11. The steps 10–11 in the Buddhist chain are, in my tentative interpretation, specifically related to the ensuing learning process, shown by the horizontal green arrow in the flowchart. Step 12 is a poetic description of suffering in the red box #9 at the top right-hand corner in the flowchart. In any case, the two models share the crucial idea of how sensory input leads to desire, which via attachment (clinging/intention) leads to suffering, and how this suffering somehow perpetuates itself by a learning process.