90 Patrick M. Whitehead
This World – Body – Mind understanding of perception maintains that
the mind belongs to its own special ontological category. The precise
interconnection between world and mind is still uncertain. It is something
that philosophers have begun calling the hard problem (Chalmers, 1996).
The belief that the human mind belongs to its own special category is a
remnant of the Biblical body-soul division of Catholicism—a religious
belief system popular in Europe during the 17th century when Modern
Science was in its infancy. The belief is that the body is finite and of the
world, while the soul is of an altogether separate and infinite spiritual
world and, consequently, belongs to its own special category. The
metaphysical leap from one category to the next, that is, the hard problem,
is only necessary when the two are believed to be fundamentally separate.
But Catholicism is not the only rendering of human experience available.
A metaphysical framework that does not begin with the division of
mind from body would evolve a very different psychology of sensation –
perception. Indeed, it would be unnecessary to use a mysterious hyphen of
separation; it would just be a nondualist psychology of perception, such as
those described by American professor of Buddhist philosophy David Loy
(1988). He writes,
Therefore [a nondualist psychology of perception] has sometimes
been described by denying (as Buddhism does) that there is a subject
perceiving and sometimes by denying (as Vedānta does) that there is an
external, objective world which is perceived. In such perception there is
no longer any distinction between internal (mind) and external (world), or
between consciousness and its object. (p. 40)A psychology of perception developed upon the nondualist
metaphysical frameworks of, among others, Buddhism or Vedānta would
look very different from the psychology of sensation and perception we
have today. To begin with, it wouldn’t need to divide the process in two.