1.1       Basic Element Analysis

Buddhist analyses of experience begin at the level of the most basic unit of conscious experience. They are techniques that access the architecture of experience through experience. Buddhism refers to the most basic elements of conscious experience as dharma or phenomena. Such phenomena are described as the ultimate realities or analytically irreducible units of experience. In basic element analysis, these ultimate realities are contrasted to the coherences of everyday life or conventional realities.

The process of breaking conscious reality into its basic elements is similar to Husserl’s attempt to discover the fundamental essences of intuition except that it is more successful in two ways. Firstly, it is rooted in the pragmatic approach of open-ended embodied reflection and so avoids being purely theoretical. It avoids the Idealist tendency to become disconnected from the world. Secondly, unlike cognitivism, by avoiding any ontological claim to the substantive existence of the basic elements basic element analysis avoids any appeal to the Realism that emerges from the reductionism of the analytic rationalists such as Leibniz, Russell and Wittgenstein (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, pp.117-118). The implications of this position become clear in the following question.

Surely this is an interesting case study – we have here a philosophical system, a reductive system, in which reductive basic elements are postulated as ultimate realities but in which those ultimate realities are not given ontological status in the usual sense. How can that be? Emergents, of course, do not have the status of ontological entities (substances). Might we have a system here in which the basic elements are themselves emergents? The question is all the more interesting because basic element analysis was not simply an abstract, theoretical exercise. It had both a descriptive and a pragmatic motivation (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, p.118).

In other words, if the basic elements of consciousness have no substantive ontological existence but are nonetheless the most basic units of conscious experience, what kind of entities are they? Given that we know that emergents such as those that form the basis of Minsky and Papert’s societies of mind model of cognition also have no substantive ontological status, it is plausible to propose that the basic units of experience are also emergents. On this basis, basic element analysis contributes to the enactive architecture of consciousness and is employed in the forthcoming research analysis.