ARGUMENTS (2) 297Hume takes persons to be, at a time, merely bundles of states. He takes
introspection to reveal this, whereas the Buddhist tradition agrees with
Hume’s doctrine while taking his description of introspection to be true
only of meditative and enlightenment experiences. These experiences have
been, on the Buddhist view, purified from mistaken notions and, from the
Jain view, rendered evidentially worthless by importation of Buddhist
assumptions and made unnatural and non-representative of reliable human
experience.
It is tempting to offer this explanation of the differences. Each
perspective offers its reports of what experience teaches on report forms
constructed in their own shops, substantival forms from the Jain shop and
non-substantival forms from the Buddhist shop. What makes this possible
regarding introspective experience and the dispute at hand is a variety of
things we have noted already – the dispute is not a dispute about
introspectively accessible properties or states, and it is a dispute inherently
involving contrary philosophical theses. The Buddhist tradition is
unwilling to rest the case on appeal to introspective or sensory experience
because it thinks that this would refute its own position. It thus appeals to
experiences that occur in meditative and enlightenment contexts of the
right sort – e.g., not of the Jain sort. This involves a move not unlike the
Advaita appeal to moksha experience as trumping others, unless Hume is
right about introspective experience after all.
The problem with both the appeal-to-experience of the substantivalists
and of the non-substantivalists is this: it marks out the dispute on ground
that cannot offer evidence regarding it. The problem is not merely that
there is no neutral way of describing introspective experience to which one
can appeal for evidence that is of any use – though that is true. The
problem is that the sorts of properties or states, experience of which would
be evidence, are not accessible to introspective experience. Being a
substance and being a bundle of states are not more properties or features
that are introspectively accessible than are being indestructible or being
destructible; both sorts of features differ in that regard from being fatigued
or worried or elated.
If appeal to introspectibly accessible features are relevant to the dispute,
as of course they are, they are relevant by virtue of their connection to
competing theories of the self or person. The dispute then switches to the
competing theories themselves – to the internal consistency, the coherence,
the explanatory power, and so on, of substantival versus non-substantival
theories of persons. But that is a different matter from appeal to
introspective, meditative, or enlightenment experience as evidence for
religious belief. It is a matter of which theory – substantivalist or non-
substantivalist – can explain memory, responsibility, self-consciousness,
and the like.^36 It is not a matter of direct experiential evidence.