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Black Swans, the Brain, and Philosophy as a Way of Life : Pierre Hadot and Nassim Taleb on Ancient Scepticism 1. A Philosophy for pig farmers The main Hellenistic schools of philosophy were the Platonists, Aristotelians, Stoics and Epicureans. Alongside these official schools - Marcus Aurelius established statesponsored chairs for them in 176 CE - were two other philosophical tendencies, Cynicism and Scepticism. I speak of tendencies rather than actual philosophical schools, because these groups had no fixed institutional premises like the Platonic Academy or the Epicurean Garden, but consisted in a group of largely itinerant teachers and their followers. In the case of the Cynics, they tended to live on the margins of society and scandalize the bourgeois (one thinks of Diogenes living in his barrel, or of Hipparchia and Crates, who lived on the streets and liked to copulate in public). In contrast, the Sceptics, although they led a philosophical life, did their best to follow the external rules of the society to which they belonged. Pyrrho of Elis (ca. 360-270 BCE), the founder of Scepticism, had accompanied Alexander the Great to India in his youth, but was said to have lived quietly with his sister for the rest of long life (he died at age 90), doing housework, selling pigs in the market place, and occasionally bathing piglets. Like Socrates, whom he admired, Pyrrho wrote nothing, but was still considered a philosopher because of his way of life. The Stoics, founded by Zeno around 300 BC, claimed that knowledge is possible ; Pyrrho and his followers denied this. All things, said Pyrrho, are equally indifferent (adiaphora), unstable (astathmta), and indecisive (anepikrita) ; which means we can have no certain knowledge of the true nature of things, but only of how they appear. The Sceptics called the Stoics dogmatists , and accused them of presumption or arrogance (oisis), and of precipitation (propeteia), or making up their minds too quickly. In order to avoid this mistake, the Sceptics practiced their characteristic exercise of withholding judgment (Greek epokh), which, they held, was the only way to achieve peace of mind or freedom from worry and bother (ataraxia). Defended by ancient philosophers such as Sextus Empiricus, refuted by Augustine (De civitate dei (11,26): "Even if I am mistaken, I exist"; a clear anticipation of Descartes' cogito), Scepticism was revived in the Middle Ages by Nicholas of Autrecourt (whose works were burned by papal order in 1347). By the

2 Renaissance, this tendency came to be linked with fideism (Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, Erasmus, Montaigne, Gassendi, Daniel Huet, and Pierre Bayle, to name but a few), leading, in one way or another, to its modern culmination in Hume. In his studied of ancient philosophy, Pierre Hadot has emphasized the therapeutic aspect of ancient Scepticism. He writes that the philosophy of Pyrrho [...] was a lived philosophy, and an exercise of transforming one's way of life" (WiAP 113). Like all Hellenistic philosophical schools, the Sceptics' goal was peace of mind or happiness, and happiness for the Sceptics consisted in independence, freedom, and autonomy (PhaWoL, 102). Most human beings, they argued, live in a state of unhappiness, consumed by regrets about the past and worries about the future. We spend our time trying to avoid what cannot be avoided and obtain what cannot be obtained, or at least not with any certainty1. Yet the Sceptics also agreed with the other Hellenistic schools that the source of our unhappiness is not so much things as our attitudes toward and judgments about things. As Hadot writes,
People can (...) be cured of their ills only if they are persuaded to change their value judgments (...) in order to change our value judgments, however, we must make a radical choice to change our entire way of thinking and way of being. This choice is the choice of philosophy, and it is thanks to it that we may obtain inner tranquility and peace of mind.

We've seen that the Sceptics believed we are troubled not by things - which cannot be known in themselves, since all we can know are appearances - but by our attitude toward things. They therefore tried to teach us to convince ourselves that no statement is intrinsically more valid or likely that its opposite, and that nothing is good or bad in itself. Sextus Empiricus (ca. 160-210 AD) states this clearly in his book Against the Mathematicians, XI, 140 :
....The person in distress [...] yearns to be rid of his distress. It will only be possible, then, to avoid this by making it obvious to the person in distress, owing to his avoidance of evil or his pursuit of good, that

An analysis that is remarkably close to that of some contemporary psychotherapists ; cf. W. D.

Morgan & S. T. Morgan, 2005, 74-75 : ...our relationship with present experience is defined by either wanting things to be different or wanting them to continue as they are. Because neither of these positions is tenable in an ever-changing field of experience, mental suffering becomes an integral part of our existential and psychological landscape. In this context, mental suffering can be understood as the low-grade, chronic stress and insecurity associated with futilely resisting our current experience, or attempting to make the impermanent permanent. It is the opposite of mindful awareness of the present moment with acceptance .

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nothing exists that is either good or evil by nature [...] and to teach this is, in fact, the peculiar task of Scepticism ; therefore it belongs to it to secure a happy life.

Of course, said the Sceptics, some things are going to affect us in life, regardless of our opinons : pleasure, pain, hunger and thirst. But even here, the Sceptics claimed their therapeutics can avoid increasing the pain of negative experiences by adding to them the judgment something bad is happening to me (Sextus, Adv. math., XI, 158). Pyrrho of Elis took this view to its extreme. He preached a state of complete indifference, allowing no difference between his attitudes to pleasure and pain, life and death. For Pyrrho, according to Pierre Hadot, our goal
[...] should be to seek stability in a state of perfect equilibrium with ourselves, in complete indifference, inner freedom, and impassiveness, a state he considered divine (PhaWoL, 112-113).

Yet there was nothing easy about achieving this state : it could be acquired only through years of unrelenting practice. It required, as Pierre Hadot writres, stripping off man completely, or liberating oneself entirely from the human point of view . This was in fact so difficult that even Pyrrho himself did not always succeed. Diogenes Laertius (IX, 66) tells us that one day Pyrrho was so frightened by an aggressive dog that he climbed up a tree to get away from it. When a bystander asked him what had become of his famous principle of indifference, Pyrrho replied : it is hard to completely strip oneself of man (hs khaleps ei holoskers ekdunai ton anthrpon). Jacques Brunschwig2 has pointed out the striking nature of this formula of stripping off man (ekdunai ton anthrpon) :
First of all, this superb reply shows the enormity of Pyrrho's ambitions. It is not a matter, as in Paul, merely of putting off the old man (apekdusamenoi ton palaion anthrpon) (Colossians 3:9) : the point is really to strip off man period, to deliver oneself from the most natural reactions and reflexes of the human animal, to make oneself superhuman, or inhuman.

Pierre Hadot situates this Sceptic view of the goal of philosophy within the context of other Greek and Hellenistic philosophies, all of which preached and practiced philosophy not as an academic discipline, but as a way of life :

In Philosophie Grecque, sous la dir. de M. Canto-Sperber, Paris 1997, 465. Cf. A.-J. Voelke 1993,

116, who speaks of une ascse tendant abolir les exigences de la nature humaine .

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Doesn't stripping off man mean that the philosopher completely transforms his vision of the universe, transcending the limited viewpoint of what is human, all-too-human, in order to elevate himself a superior point of view ? Such a perspective is in a way inhuman : it reveals the nudity of existence, beyond the partial oppositions and false values human beings add on to it, to attain a state of simplicity prior to all distinctions.

One may compare this account of a Sceptical spiritual exercise with the following description of a Stoic spiritual exercise :
We have here a complete reversal of our usual way of looking at things. We are to switch from our human vision of reality, in which our values depend on our passions, to a natural vision of things, which replaces each event wthin the perspective of universal nature (PhaWoL, 83).

It is interesting to note in passing how reminiscent this goal of attaining a state of simplicity prior to all distinctions 3 is to some currents of Oriental thought, particuarly Taoism. Pierre Hadot has pointed out the similarity between descriptions of Pyrrho's humble life as a pig farmer and Chuang Tzu's description of the life of his legendary master, the Taoist sage Lao-Tzu :
For three years he locked himself up, performing household tasks for his wife and serving food to the pigs as he would have served it to men ; he made himself indifferent to everything, and eliminated all ornamentation, in order to rediscover simplicity4.

Is it possible Pyrrho may have picked up some notions of Oriental thought, and more specifically Taoism, when he travelled with Alexander the Great and mingled with the Gymnosophists in India and the Magoi ? In any case, Hadot sees Scepticism as a typical instance of what, according to him, characterizes all ancient philosophy. Far from an abstract intellectual discipline discussed by professors in class or at conferences, ancient philosophy was first and foremost a way of life. Its goal was happiness, virtue, and peace of mind (all which terms are more or less interchangeable), and its method was a profound change in our way of perceiving the world, and hence in our way of existing. Instead of restricting our horizon to our phenomenal, individual self, and thinking the world revolves around us, we are to learn to see the world from a universal perspective, realizing that we are parts of a whole that vastly transcends our

On Pyrrho's affirmation that things are ultimately undifferentiated by their nature, cf. Aristocles ap.

Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 14, 18, 3, with the comments of J. Brunschwig 1997, 467.
4

P. Hadot WiAPh, 112, quoting Chuang Tzu, The Complete Work, VII, in the French translation by

Liou Kia Hway and B. Grypas, Philosophes taoistes, Paris 1980, 141.

5 individuality. Yet this change is far from easy : it requires the dedicated, long-term practice of what Hadot has called spiritual exercises. 2. Black Swans and Scepticism The Philosophy of Nassim Nicholas Taleb One of the most interest books I've read recently which, while not about Scepticism, embodies and preaches a Sceptical world view, is Nassim Nicholas Taleb's bestseller The Black Swan : the Impact of the Highly Improbable (Penguin 2007). Taleb, an economist and securities trader by profession, sets out to show the power of the unexpected in contemporary life, particularly in economics. The most important factors in history are what he calls Black Swans5 , that is, extraordinary events that are unpredictable by their very nature, but have a tremendous impact on economic, social and cultural events. Yet since they cannot, by definition, be foreseen, neither can future developments as a whole, either in finance or in any other field. Taleb espouses Sceptism as the only philosophy adequate to the contemporary world, because the quantity of what we do not know always vastly outweighs what we do or can know. Pointing to the falsity and/or inanity of almost all economic or political predictions, Taleb preaches an epistemic humility that leads us to withhold judgment. What he appreciates in such Sceptics as Sextus Empiricus is their anti-dogmatism : they doubted theories and causality and relied on past experience in their treatment , relying on seemingly purposeless trial and error (p. 46), a methodology Taleb sees as ideal for dealing with Black Swans, that is, minimizing exposure to negative ones and taking advantage of positive ones. He is particularly fond of Sextus Empiricus' tale of the painter Apelles6, who, while painting a picture of a galloping horse, had trouble depicting the foam from the horse's mouth. After several failed attempts, he became enraged and threw the sponge he had been using to clean his brushes at the painting. The sponge struck the picture of the horse and, of course, left behind a perfect depiction of the foam from its mouth. Taleb uses this anecdote to embody the importance of the positive accident : the ancient Empiricists, he writes (p. 203-204) advocated open-mindedness in order to let luck play a role. Most medical and scientific discoveries,

Black Swans are chacterized by their rarity, extreme impact and retrospective (though not prospective)

plausibility.
6

Taleb defines an Apelles-style strategy as A strategy of seeking gains by collecting positive

accidents from maximizing exposure to good Black Swans (p. 307).

6 according to Taleb, come about by accident, in that they are discovered accidentally by researchers who started out looking for something entirely different7 . The moral of Apelles' story is that that we should maximize serendipity . Taleb is also aware that the philosophy of Sceptics like Sextus had a therapeutic aspect as well : they were, he writes,
after some form of intellectual therapy resulting from the suspension of disbelief. Do you face the possibility of an adverse event ? Don't worry. Who knows, it may turn out to be good for you. Doubting the consequences of an outcome will allow you to remain imperturbable. The Pyrrhonian skeptics were docile citizens who taught themselves to systematically doubt everything, and thus attain a level of serenity.

Despite his admiration for Sextus Empiricus and ancient Scepticism, however, Taleb is not buying this therapeutic aspect of his favorite philosophy. Discussing Bertrand Russell's proposal that
For the learning of every virtue there is an appropriate discipline, and for the learning of suspended judgment the best discipline is philosophy,

Taleb disagrees. He does not, he writes,

believe in the track record of advice-giving philosophy in helping us deal with the problem ; nor do I believe that virtues can be easily taught ; nor do I urge people to avoid making a judgment. Why ? because we have to deal with humans as humans. We cannot teach people to withold judgment ; judgments are embedded in the way we view objects. I do not see a tree ; I see a pleasant or an ugly tree. It is not possible without great, paralyzing effort to strip these small values we attach to matters. Likewise, it is not possible to hold a situation in one's head without some element of bias. (...) I'd rather degrade us humans to a level certainly above other known animals but not quite on a par with the ideal Olympian man who can absorb philosophical statements and act accordingly. Indeed, if philosophy were that effective, the self-help section of the local bookstore would be of some use in 8 consoling souls experiencing pain - but it isn't. We forget to philosophize when under strain (p. 202) .

If Taleb is right, then Pierre Hadot's view that ancient spiritual exercises may, after suitable updating and modification, be applicable in a useful way to modern life, would be placed in serious doubt. Let's examine Taleb's position, and his arguments for it, more closely.

7 8

This is the theme of Taleb's enjoyable chap. 11, How to look for bird poop . Taleb had touched on the same themes earlier, esp. pp. 64-65. There, he insists that withholding

judgment takes considerable effort . Theorizing is innate within us : usually unconscious, it is largely anatomical, part of our biology, so fighting it requires fighting one's own self. So the ancient skeptics' precepts to withhold judgment go against our nature .

7 His overall view seems to be that Sceptic therapy - and in particular, the exercise of withholding judgment - does not work because it is too hard : adding value judgments to our perceptions is so deeply ingrained in us that restraining this tendency would paralyze us9 . In general, only an Olympian man can actually put ancient philosophical advice into practice : ordinary folks like you and I cannot. Taleb backs up his view with a number of arguments. 1. The main argument is that we cannot perceive without bias, and that (consequently) we cannot teach people to withhold judgment. Taleb presents his arguments for point (1) elsewhere in his work (pp. 64-69). They are based largely on findings in cognitive science and neurology, which show, he claims, that our practice of interpretation, or adding value judgments to our raw perceptions, is largely unconscious and completely natural. It follows that to nip it in the bud would require us to remain in a constant state of alert, and this, Taleb maintains, causes fatigue. This propensity to impose meaning on the world is held to come from the left hemisphere or the brain (dominant in right-handed people), and to increase with high concentrations of dopamine. Other considerations have to do with the theory of information. Given that information is costly to obtain, to store, and to retrieve, it needs to be compressed. This is done by finding patterns and rules in the information we need to store, because we need to reduce the dimension of matters so that they can get into our heads (p. 69). We cannot, therefore, practice Sceptic therapeutics on an ongoing basis because to do so would be to go against our nature (p. 64), which would exhaust and paralyse us. 2. Another argument is based on history : historically, it is the case the philosophical advice has not been very helpful. 3. Taleb denies that virtues can be easily taught . 4. Finally, Taleb uses a contrary-to-fact syllogism to prove his point : If philosophy were useful, then self-help books would be useful in consoling sufferers. But they're not ; therefore philosophy is not useful. Let's try our hand at a brief evaluation of these arguments. 1. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that Taleb is right and that our propensity to add interpretations and value-judgments to our perceptions is deeply ingrained in us, and even

Elsewhere, Taleb emphasizes that the following the Sceptics' precepts is not so much paralyzing as

exhausting : Try to be a true skeptic with respect to your interpretations and you will be worn out in no time (p. 65). Such an effort is also, Taleb claims, humiliating ( ibid.).

8 based, to some degree, on the physiology of the brain. It would indeed seem to follow from this that efforts to resist such a natural impulse would be taxing. Taleb appears to believe the matter is settled at this point : he seems to be making use of an unstated premise to the effect that if something is difficult, then fuhgeddaboutit . He does not seem to consider the possibility (a) that fundamental changes in our psychological and even physiological makeup may be possible, and (b) that such transformations might have results so beneficial that they may justify the efforts, however tiring they may be, required to bring them about. We will return to this point a at some length in a few moments. 2. Has philosophical advice been useful or useless historically, that is, does it have a good or a poor track record ? Surely a lengthy, careful investigation would be required to determine this point, and even it might not be conclusive, since we lack much of the requisite evidence. Ideally, one would like to be able to identify every piece of philosophical advice ever given, and then check to see whether or not it was followed, and to what extent. This being impossible, of course, the temptation is to fall back on the anecdotal : the stereotyped view is of the ineffectual philosophical counsellor, say, for instance, Seneca the Younger, tutoring the evil dictator, such as Nero, who laughs at the feeble intellectual's advice. Perhaps Taleb is thinking along the following lines : history is so full of evil and the vile deeds of rulers that *even if* some, most, or all of these evil personages had received helpful philosophical advice at some point, all this advice clearly remained ineffectual. If this reconstruction of Taleb's line of thought is correct - and we must attempt some such reconstruction, since he himself does not make his reasoning explicit in the passage under discussion - then it bears a striking resemblance to what Taleb has identified as the narrative fallacy10 :
We like stories, we like to summarize, and we like to simplify, i.e., to reduce the dimension of matters [...] the narrative fallacy (It is actually a fraud, but, to be more polite, I will call it a fallacy). The fallacy is associated with our vulnerability to overinterpretation and our predilection for compact stories over raw truths. It severely distorts our mental representations of the world... (p. 63)

Elsewhere11 , Taleb emphasizes the concept of silent evidence . Basically, it boils down to the fact that when we try to assign causes to a phenomenon, especially historical, we tend to pay attention only to the evidence that confirms our analysis, while ignoring potential evidence that might disconfirm it. In the present case, history tells us of many cases in which rulers acted badly, so that if philosophers had advised them to act virtuously, they obviously

10 11

See Taleb, chap. 6. See Taleb, chap. 8 : Giacomo Casanova's unfailing luck : the problem of silent evidence .

9 ignored that advice. Yet how can we know how many cases there have been in which a ruler, or other person in authority, actually did behave less badly than he or she otherwise would have, as a result of receiving philosophical advice, or of reading such advice, or perhaps simply as a result of following the examples of philosophers in the past ? History books tend to be more reticient with examples of the latter kind of phenomenon. In short, the historical track record may not be a particularly good test of whether or not philosophical advice has been effective throughout the centuries. As Taleb stresses, such historical records are ineherently subject to bias : we can use them to prove just about whatever we please. Taleb seems to be a victim, not only of what he decribes as the distorsion of silent evidence (p. 50), but of the error of confirmation , in which we focus on preselected items of the seen and generalize from it to the unseen (ibid). 3. Taleb's third point is a good example of the rhetorical technique of the straw man : nobody, and certainly not Russell, whom he is attempting to refute, has claimed that teaching virtue is easy. Russell was concerned with whether or not it is possible : but Taleb has nothing to say on this point. 4. Finally, Taleb's contrary-to-fact syllogism is interesting as an example of his rhetorical techniques. Let's look at it more closely :
If philosophy were useful, then self-help books would be useful in consoling sufferers. But they're not ; therefore philosophy is not useful.

What's interesting first of all is the quiet, not to say sneaky, identification of philosophy with self-help books. Let's stop by the self-help section of our local bookstore. Are all the titles there philosophical ? Surely not, no matter how broad a definition of philosophy we accept. The vast majority of then, to the degree that they belong to any real discipline (other than charlatanism) would be psychology, with a fair amount of religion thrown in (various varieties of Christianity, a dash of Buddhism, perhaps a few pinches of neopaganism). Fine, then, let's restrict ourselves to those that could conceivably be called philosophical (perhaps 10% or, let's be generous, 20%). Are they all identical in quality, or are some of them better than others ? Surely the latter is more likely to be the case. Let's assume we could agree upon some measure of quality, and restrict our enquiry to the good self-help books : by now, we will have reduced our sample to well below 5% of all the available self-help books. Since his dismissal of philosophical self-help books is

10 quantified universally, Taleb has to claim that none of these self-help books is now or ever has been of any use in consoling any reader afflicted with grief. Elsewhere in his book12 , Taleb has written eloquently of negative empiricism : the idea, derived from Popper, that it is very much more difficult to prove a universal proposition than it is to disprove it. If, to take Taleb's favorite example, I claim all swans are white , I can observe 100,000 white swans in a row, and still not *prove* my proposition, for the 100,001st swan might perfectly well be black (or pink with purple polka-dots, for that matter). In contrast, one single observation of a black or purple swan is enough to disprove the proposition all swans are white . This should have made Taleb more cautious. If it could be shown that one single book that happened to have been shelved in the self-help section of a bookstore - and nothing prevents the authors of such books from including one of Taleb's heroes, say, Cicero or Montaigne then Taleb's assertion that the self-help section is of no use in consoling those experiencing pain would be shot down in flames. I suggest that it is virtually inconceivable that no sufferer has ever been helped by any book shelved in a bookstore's self-help section ; therefore Taleb's claim is false. But it is also irrelevant : I do not care, in the context of the present discussion, whether or not books in self-help sections can help people in need ; I care about whether philosophy can help such people. But philosophy is not the same as self-help. If we throw out Taleb's self-help red herring and concentrate on philosophy, it is clearly the case that not all philosophy, or philosophy books, are created equal as far as their potential for consolation, or the moral, intellectual and spiritual transfromation of their readers is concerned. Of philosophy books, most - especially in the English-speaking world, where Analytic philosophy rules the roost - do not have the slightest intention of consoling or otherwise transforming their readers. Of the small number that do, some do it well, and others - no doubt the majority - do it less well. What I want to argue here, pace Taleb, is that a certain kind of philosophy and philosophy book, when done well, may indeed help to carry out a positive transformation on the reader. Indeed, I want to argue that this was the whole point of Taleb's favorite ancient philosophy Scepticism. If one were to grade Taleb on the arguments he produces in this paragraph we've been studying, it would be hard to give him better than a C. Most seem weak or irrelevant, with the
12

See Taleb, ch. 5, Confirmation Shmonfirmation , and esp. pp. 56 ff.

11 exception of (1). If it really is the case that the tendency to add judgments to our experiences is ingrained in our nature - hard-wired, to use the term popular with cognitive scientists - does that not, as Taleb believes, make the Sceptic therapeutic exercise of withholding judgment impossible ? This question deserves our close attention, for it goes straight to the heart of the question of whether the spiritual exercises practiced by ancient philosophers are or are not relevant to life in the twenty-first century. In the words of Pierre Hadot13,
is modern man still able to understand the texts of Antiquity, and live according to them ? Has there been a definitive break between the contemporary world and ancient tradition ?

3. Spiritual exercises, Mindfulness, and the Brain It is hard to argue with Taleb's contention that a number of categories, modes of thought, attitudes, biases and prejudices are indeed hard-wired into our cognitive apparatus. Researchers speak of the way the cerebral cortex, the outer bark of the brain, processes expectations by way of the cortical memory. They have identified six layers of cortical columns, or vertical piles of brain cells, equipped with input and output fibers that enable a bidirectional flow of information within the column. When I look at a flower, the visual data enters the lower levels (6 and 5), gradually ascending the columns until I perceive the object as a flower. This takes place in the left cortex. Now since we already know what flowers are like from our prior experience, this cortical top-down processing sends an expectational bias down to alter our incoming perceptions, by means of what the cognitivist scientists Jeffrey Hawkins and Sharon Blakeslee (2004) have called invariant representations 14. These topdown invariant representations have given us a definite evolutionary advantage over the millennia : they allow us to quickly assess our environment and prepare to respond with the corresponding action. If we had to stop and carefully analyse every aspect of the raw sensory experience presented by a hungry tiger crouching in the bushes before concluding that's a tiger , we would presumably have ended up as his lunch more often than not. Yet these invariant representations also have their drawbacks : since they lessen the density of

13

Hadot, PhaWoL, Postscript (interview with M. Chase), p. 278. This interview dates from the Spring

of 1992.
14

Invariant representations are the cortical top-down biasing of incoming bottom-up information

through the lens of prior experience, as these neural imprints from memory push down from the top layers of the cortical columns (D. J. Siegel 2007, 334).

12 information from our environment, they act as filters, tending to make us expect and therefore perceive that with which we are already familiar, rather than what is new and unprecedented. These invariant representations are part of what some researchers call top-down influences, which have been defined as intrinsic sources of contextual modulation of neural processing15. Researchers such as Andreas Engel use this term to refer
to the fact that many aspects of cognition and behaviour are not stimulus driven in a reflex-like manner, but are to a large degree based on expectations derived from previous experience, and on generalized knowledge stored in the architecture of cortical and subcortical networks16.

In other words, much of how we think is determined not solely by the external objects we perceive, but, to an important extent, by our expectations : that is, our biases or prejudices. In the case of other human beings, the brain also works with what Louis Cozzolino, following the anthropologist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby, speaks of as implicit memory schemas : automatically activtaed before we are conscious of the people with whom we are about to interact, these implicit social memories of attachment shape our conscious experience of others by activating rapid and automatic evaluations hundreds of milliseconds before our perception of others reaches consciousness17. According to what Engel and colleagues describe as the dynamicist idea of topdown ,
large-scale dynamics can have a predominant influence on local neuronal behaviour by enslaving local processing elements18.

In other words, when I am presented with an object, the neurons that fire - and hence, the sense presentation I experience - are influenced, caused , or even enslaved not so much by the external object as by the dynamic firing patterns of entire networks of the billions of neurons in my brain. These networks have been formed through memory, experiences and expectations, and are stored largely in the the prefrontal and parietal cortex. Such bias signals
prime stimulus-evoked responses, thereby permitting rapid selection among multiple events or inputs19.
15 16 17 18

A. K. Engel et al., 2001, 704 A. K. Engel et al., 2001, 705. L. Cozzolino 2006, 141. Ibid.

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This top-down invariant representational flow, I presume, is at least part20 of what Taleb means when he speaks of our hard-wired tendency to add value judgments to all our perceptions, and which he seems to believe either that we cannot stop or alter it, or else that to do so would be so exhausting it would paralyse us. But are such top-down influences really impossible, or prohibitively difficult, to change ? Not all researchers seem to think so. Indeed, whereas the ruling paradigm in cognitive studies has long been to think of the brain as more-or-less passive computer-like apparatus, whose (only?) job is to reproduce external reality as accurately as possible, research over the last decade or so has begun to see the brain as actively participating in the construction of our representation of reality. At the same time, the last ten years or so has witnessed the emergence of a new field : neuroplasticity, or the way in which experience can actually transform the structure and function of the brain. There can be no question of going through all the literature on neuroplasticity in the time remaining to me. What I'd like to do is briefly discuss some findings from recent studies of certain types of meditation on the brain's structure and function, particularly the type known as Mindfulness Meditation (MM) or Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction or MBSR, a practice now used by some 300 health centers in America. Based on Buddhist techniques, MBSR can be described as selecting the present moment and making it salient, while suppressing the mind's usual jumble of reactive thoughts and feelings 21. Mindfulness has also been defined as in its most general sense [...] about waking up from a life on automatic, and being sensitive to novelty in our everyday experiences 22. In the words of Jon KabatZinn, who founded this clinical therapeutic technique in 1979, An operational working definition of mindfulness is : the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the the unfolding of experience moment by moment 23. It is, as another author has said, a practice that makes it easier to attend to the

19 20 21 22 23

Engel et al., 709. Other parts might include sensory schemas, as discussed for instance by W. H. Calvin 1990, 114-115. W. Gallagher 2009, 159. D.J. Siegel 2007, 9-10. J. Kabat-Zinn 2003,

14 reality of the moment rather than your judgments about it 24. Once again, we recall Sextus Empiricus' advice that we not make negative experiences worse by adding the judgment something bad is happening to me . Some interesting recent experiments have focused on what we might call the neuroplastcic effects of MBSR and MBSR-type practices. Thus, in their studies of long-term meditators, Lazar and colleagues (2005) noted increased thickness of the middle prefrontal and right insular areas of the brain. Among the functions carried out in the middle prefrontal regions are what psychologists refer to as response flexibility, which D. J. Siegel (2007, 42) defines as the capacity to pause before action [...] such a process requires the assessment of ongoing stimuli, the delay of reaction, selection from a variety of possible options, and the initiation of action . This ability, he writes, enables the avoidance of premature cognitive commitments (ibid., 234). The similarity to ancient Sceptic concerns about avoiding precipitation and presumption in our judgments leaps to the eye. Another function of the middle prefrontal area is the modulation of fear, which it carries out by releasing the inhibitory neurotransmitter gamma amino butyric acid (GABA) onto the lower limbic areas mediating fear, such as the the amygdala (ibid., 43). This reduction of fear and regulation of other intense emotions seems to be increased by a subject's labelling and classifying fearinducing phenomena, a process which keeps limbic firing in a balanced state (ibid., 225). In MBSR treatment of chronic pain, patients learn to reduce their symptoms by differentiating between the physical physiological sensations and their thoughts and feelings about them, which may turn out not to be particularly accurate or important 25. Clearly, this is extremely close to the view which the Sceptics shared with other Hellenistic philosophies : what causes us distress is not so much things themselves as our opinions about things. In other recent studies, Davidson and colleagues (2003, 2004) have noted increased activation of the left prefrontal cortex in mindfulness practicioners. Behavioral correlates of such structural changes include improved regulation of emotions, and a shift from tendencies to withdrawal to tendencies to approach new phenomena in a positive way. This openness to novelty correlates with the experience in which The ordinary somehow seems to become extraordinary as each moment becomes unique unto itself [...] .

24 25

W. Gallagher 2009, 198. Ibid., 195.

15 These and other recent studies26 seem to suggest, therefore, that mindfulness promotes neural plasticity, or the brain's ability to transfrorm itself. More specifically, in the words of Daniel J. Siegel,
...mental activities, such as purposely paying attention to the present moment, actually stimulate the brain to become active in specific ways that then promote growth in those regions27.

The claim advanced by Taleb, therefore, to the effect that we are hard-wired to impose judgments upon our perceptions, and that to attempt to do otherwise would be contrary to nature, exhausting, and paralyzing , does not seem to hold water. Some at least of our inborn cognitive tendencies can, according to some researchers in the physiology of the brain, be identified and then modified and even dissolved through a number of practices such as mindfulness-based meditation. According to Siegel, mindfulness or MBSR allows us to shut down the top-down invariant representaional flow (p. 106), thus letting us experience the full informational density of our sensory experience. We recall that the regions of the brain that seem to be activated and even increased in size by MBSR include the side and middle prefrontal regions. Siegel argues (144) that when the awareness that characterizes the side prefrontal region is combined with the metacognitive flexibility, self-observation, and bodily regulation of the middleprefrontal region, then we have the opportunity to actually disengage automatic clusters of firing patterns . The top-down invariant representations that prejudice our perception, can therefore, it is claimed, be identified and even neutralized through such techniques as MBSR. We have seen that the ancient Sceptic emphasis on avoiding presumption and precipitation seems to have a parallel in the response flexibility supposed to be brought about by MBSR techniques. There are a number of other resemblances between the goals and benefits claimed for such techniques as MBSR, on the one hand, and those of ancient spiritual exercises, on the other ; resemblances which are all the more striking in that the authors of the MBSR studies I have consulted seem never to have heard of Pierre Hadot or of spiritual exercises. One such study (Baer et al. 2006) identified five main components in mindfulness :

26

Several of which show that mindfulness meditation has a positive effect on such stress-related

illnesses as psoriasis, depression and anxiety disorder. It may also have the effect of increasing activity of the immune system. For surveys see R. A. Baer 2003 ; S. Lazar 2005a.
27

D. J. Siegel 2007, 32.

16

1. nonreactivity to inner experience 2. observing/noticing/attending to sensations, perceptions, thoughts, feelings ; 3. acting with awarenss/not on automatic pilot/concentration/nondistraction ; 4. describing/labeling with words 5. being nonjudgmental of experience All of these have parallels in ancient accounts of spiritual exercises. 1. Nonreactivity to inner experience corresponds to apatheia or passionlessness, which the Greeks and Romans sought to achieve through such exercises as self-mastery (enkrateia), indifference to indifferent things, and therapies of the passions (PhaWoL, 84). Already important in Stoicism, Philo and Porphyry (for whom it was the result of detachment from the body), apatheia became particularly fundamental in the Christian tradition, where it was associated with the cutting off of self-will, as for instance in Dorotheus of Gaza ; cf. Hadot, PhaWoL, 136-137. Thus, Evagrius of Pontus could describe the Kingdom of Heaven as apatheia of the soul along with the knowledge of existing things (Praktikos 2). 2. Observing/noticing/attending to sensations, perceptions, thoughts, feelings is also an important elements of ancient spiritual exercises, where it appears as what Hadot has called the examination of the conscience. It often corresponds to prosokh or attention to oneself, which we will examine in just a moment. Examining the conscience was an important element in the teachings of the Pythagoreans, Epicureans, Stoics, and in Galen (PhaWoL 134), as well as in the Christian tradition ; the best surviving example of it is probably Plutarch's treatise How one may be sure one is making progress in virtue (Moralia 75A-86A). It entails the frequent examination one's thoughts and intentions, always being on the lookout for any motive for action other than the will to do good (PhaWoL, 130), and in an attempt to discern signs of spiritual progress and/or backsliding. Thus, the Stoic Epiceteus (III, 10, 3), quoting the Pythagorean Golden Verses, advises his readers to examine their conscience every evening28 :
Never let slumber approach thy wearied eyelids, Ere thrice you review what this day you did : Wherein have I sinned ? What did I do ? What duty is neglected ? All, from the first to the last, review, and if you have erred grieve in your spirit, rejoicing for all that was good.
28

Vv. 40-44. Translation by. K. S. Guthrie, The Pythagorean Sourcebook, Phanes Press 1987, 164.

17

Similarly, Basil of Caesarea insisted that we must keep watch over our heart with all vigilance (In illud attende, p. 243 Wagner, cited at PhaWoL, 132). For Origen, the soul must examine all its feelings and actions, judging, among other things, whether or not it has completely suppressed the passions of anger, sadness, fear and the love of glory (ibid. 134). Dorotheus of Gaza went so far as to suggest we should examine our conscience once every six hours. The desert father Antony recommended that his monks take written notes of the actions and motions of their souls (ibid. 135) :
Let each one of us note and record our actions and the stirrings of our souls as though we were going to give an account of them to each other [...] Let this record replace the eyes of our fellow ascetics29.

In Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, this examination of the conscience is often linked to the spiritual exercise of imagining that one will soon die, and of feeling gratitude for all the positive things life has brought to us. It included keeping a written record of one's intellectual and emotional reactions throughout the day, as well as the analysis of dreams. 3. Acting with awarenss/not on automatic pilot/concentration/nondistraction corresponds to the Greco-Roman spiritual exercise of prosokh, or attention. As the central, constitutive exercise of Stocism, prosokh consists in continuous awareness and vigilance, enabling the philosopher to be fully aware of what he is doing at each moment (PhaWoL 84). Attention can also be defined as constant concentration on the present moment, which we must experience as if it were both the first moment we ever experienced, and the last. We are to wake up with the idea that we might not make it until the evening. This attention to the present, at the expense of the past and the future, which do not depend on us, gives us access to cosmic consciousness, reminding us of the infinite value of every instant, and allowing us to switch perspectives and view each situation, not from the viewpoint of individual, egocentric interests, but from the perspective of the universal law of the cosmos (PhaWoL 85). In the thought of Marcus Aurelius, this exercise of attention is linked to what Pierre Hadot has called the triple discipline of control over one's thought, acceptance of the divine will, and purification of our intentions with regard to others. It entails both presence to God

29

Athanasius, Life of Antony, PG 26, 924B. Cf. Rabbow, Seelenfhrung 344 ff. for self-observation in

Plutarch (De ira cohibenda 464BC) ; Epictetus (written notations : II, 18, 12 ff.). and Seneca, among others. See also Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 28.

18 and to oneself, and presupposes attentive meditation on the rules of life, or precepts that were to be applied to each particular moment and circumstance of life. For the Stoics, the most important of these rules was the distinction between what does and does not depend on us : we are to concentrate on the former class of events and disregard the latter, considering them as indifferent . We have already glimpsed the link between prosoch and examination of the conscience ; but attention also implies self-mastery or the triumph of reason over the passions, which cause the dispersion and distraction of the soul. 4. describing/labeling one's experience with words might be seen to correspond to the spiritual exercise of physical definition, which is best described by Marcus Aurelius (Meditations, III, 11, cf. Hadot, IC 104) :
One must always make a definition or description of the object which is presented in an representation, so as to see it in itself, as it is in its essence, in its nakedness30, in its totality, and in all its details. One must say to oneself the name that is peculiar to it, as well as the names of the parts that go to make it up, and into which it will be resolved.

By imagining a gourmet meal as the corpse of a fish a bird or a pig (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, VI, 13), or sex as the rubbing together of pieces of gut, followed by the spasmodic emission of a viscous fluid , we can see things as they really are, separate from the value-judgments we usually add to them. As Hadot writes,
We can call this kind of definition physical , since it frees our representations from every kind of subjective and anthropomorphic consideration, as well as from every relation to the human view.

This, of course, is precisely what the Sceptics were getting at when they demanded that we strip off man , and what Taleb claimed is either impossible or else prohibitively difficult. Finally, the fifth aspect of mindfulness, being nonjudgmental of experience, seems to correspond simply to another aspect of the previous exercise. As we saw, the goal of physical definitions was to obtain an objective representation, or account of the way things really are, quite apart from the affects and value-judgments in which we usually wrap them up. The goal of such an exercise, says Marcus Aurelius, is to strip things naked (VI, 13, 2 ; III, 11, 1 ; remember stripping off man ). In the words of Pierre Hadot (IC 165), Marcus goal is to denounce false values, and to see things in their naked, physical reality . This, Hadot
30

Gumnon. One is reminded of Pyrrho's remark about stripping off humanity ; here, it the human

value-judgments, biases, and prejudices that are to be stripped off.

19 reminds us, is the goal of the discipline of desire, a spiritual exercise intended to remedy our natural or default situation qua human beings. In this pre-philosphical state, we take our biases and prejudices to be accurate refections of reality, rather than what they are : mere reflections of our (relative and changeable) likes and dislikes. We tend to think only of our first impressions - Yuk ! or Yummy ! That's awful ! or Oh, how beautiful ! without stopping to resituate the object or phenomenon in question within its context, that is, with regard to the function it fulfills in relation to the Cosmos and Nature. The person who has learned to carry out this exercise, writes Marcus Aurelius
will derive no less pleasure from contemplating the actual gaping jaws of wild beasts than he does from all the imitations made of them by painters and sculptors. His pure eyes will be able to see a kind of flourishing maturity in the fcaes of old men and women, as well as a kind of lovable charm in children. Many such cases will occur, and it is not just anyone who can derive pleasure from them. Instead, only that person who has become truly familiar with Nature and her works will do so (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations III, 2, cf. Hadot, IC 168-169).

The resemblances between ancient spiritual exercises and modern techniques of mindfulness meditation are, I think, rather striking. In both, attention to present experience is the fundamental attitude, enabling us to identify and eliminate our usually unconscious tendencies to view reality through the distorting lens of our egocentric, individual interests. To be sure, the multiple correspondences we have seen between these two sets of techniques does not prove they are both correct or genuinely efficacious. I do find it significant, however, that two similar techniques for self-transformation and the increase of human well-being could have arisen, in complete mutual independence, at such different historical periods. If it is true that the beneficial effects of mindfulness meditation are, to an increasing extent, being confirmed and to a certain extent explained by neurological and clinical psychological studies, some of which show that that such exercises can actually modify the wiring and even structure and function of the brain, this lends credence to the noton that the ancient Greeks and Romans may well have been on to something when they recommended spiritual exercises, even though they did not come close to having what we would consider a correct understanding of the neurological mechanisms behind them. In his Letters to Lucilius (64, 6, cf. Hadot, PhaWol 257), Seneca wrote :
As for me, I usually spend a great deal of time in the contemplation of wisdom. I look at it with the same stupefaction with which, on other occasions, I look at the world ; the world that I quite often feel as though I were seeing it for the first time (tamquam spectator novus).

20 This experiencing the world with new eyes is a transformative experience. When it happens, instead of being bored, blas and indifferent to the world that surrounds is - in other words, taking it for granted - we are dazzled by its improbable beauty, like someone who had spent his entire life on the plains of North Dakota seeing the Rockies or the Big Sur for the first time. Lucretius (De rerum natura, 2, 1023-1039, cf. Hadot, PhaWol, 258) was also familiar with this experience :
First of all, the bright, clear color of the sky, and all it holds within it, the stars that wander here and there, and the moon and the radiance of the sun with its brilliant light ; all these, if now they had been seen for the first time by mortals, if, unexpectedly, they were in a moment placed before their eyes, what story could be told more marvelous than these things, or that the nations would less dare to believe beforehand ? Nothing, I believe, so worthy of wonder would such a sight have been. Yet think how no one now, wearied with surfeit of seeing, deigns to look up at the shining quarters of the sky !

This ability at the world with new eyes is precisely the goal of mindfulness-based meditation as well. According to Daniel J. Siegel, when we are able, through the practice of mindfulness, to shut down our invariant representations, the ordinary becomes extraordinary (D. J. Siegel 2007, 106)31. When we reconquer the ability to free ourselves from our default state of automatic pilot, we can see the world as it is, without the distorting prejudices, biases, and expectations that are derived from our memories, our cultures and our societies. True, as Taleb claims, we usually do not see a tree, we see a pleasant or an ugly tree . Unlike Taleb, however, both ancient spiritual exercises and mindfulness-based meditation claim that we can indeed learn to see just a tree, as it is in itself, not distorted by our likes and dislikes, prejudices and preferences. They also claim that such learning, as it changes our perception, can change our way of being, and even the structure and function of our brains. All this would probably not satisfy Taleb as far as the applicability of ancient Sceptical spiritual exercises is concerned. He might repeat, in reply, that he is writing for people as they are today, not for the ideal Olympian man who can absorb philosophical statements and act

31

Cf. ibid., pp. 254-255 : the active dissolution of top-down invariant representations can be seen as a

neural process that dismantles cortical enslavement of incoming informational streams. Instead of being constrained by this prior learning, mindfulness involves a sense of freshness and fullness [...] reflective thinking and both forms of mindfulness may actually be seen to expand our sense of subjective time. This would be achieved by increasing the density of bits of information that are now seen with beginner's eyes and taken in afresh, because each moment is it its own context .

21 accordingly (Black Swan, p. 202). Yet Taleb has not shown, I believe, that only Olympian men can change their lives by changing their way of looking at and being in the world. A growing body of evidence suggests that this may indeed be possible by dint of spiritual exercises, whether ancient, modern, or a combination of both. Such practices, however, do take time and hard work, and whether or not the busy securities traders and executives Taleb is presumably writing for would be willing to invest such time and effort in their own selftransformation is, of course, a whole other can of worms. Michael Chase Centre Jean Ppin Villejuif-Paris

22 Bibliography Baer, Ruth A., Mindfulness Training as a Clinical Intervention : A Conceptual and Empirical Review, Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice 10.2, summer 2003, 125-143 Calvin, William H., The cerebral symphony. Seashore reflections on the structure of consciousness, New York : Bantam Books, 1990. Cozzolino, Louis, The Neuroscience of human relationships. Attachment and the developing social brain, New York-London : Norton, 2006. Davidson, Richard J., & Antoine Lutz, Buddha's Brain : Neuoplasticity and Meditation, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, January 2008, 171-174 Engel, Andreas K., Fries, Pascal, & Wolf Singer, Dynamic predications : oscillations and synchrony in top-down processing, Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2, 2001, 704-716. Gallagher, Winifred, Rapt : attention and the focused life, New York : Penguin, 2009 Hadot, Pierre Philosophy as a Way of Life. Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, edited with an Introduction by Arnold I. Davidson, translated by Michael Chase, Oxford/Cambridge, Mass. : Basil Blackwell, 1995 (PhaWoL) ____ , The Inner Citadel, translated by Michael Chase, Harvard University Press, 1998 (IC) ____ , What is Ancient Philosophy?, translated by Michael Chase, Harvard University Press, 2002, XII-362 p. index (WiAP) Kabat-Zinn, Jon, Mindfulness-Based Interventions in Context : Past, Present, and Future, Clinical Psychology : Science and Practice, 10.2 (2003), 144-156. Lazar, Sara W., Mindfulness Research , in C. K. Germer, R. D. Siegel, & P. R. Fulton, eds., Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, New York/London 2005, 220-238. Lazar, Sara W., et al., Meditation experience is associated with increased cortical thickness, Neuroreport 16.17 (2005), 1893-1897. Lutz, Antoine, Dunne, John D., & Richard J. Davidson, Meditation and the neuroscience of consciousness : an introduction , in P. D. Zelazo, M. Moscovich, & E. Thompson, eds., The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness, Cambridge 2007, 499-551. Morgan, William D., & Susan T. Morgan, Cultivating attention and empathy , in C. K. Germer, R. D. Siegel, & P. R. Fulton, eds., Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, New York/London 2005, 73-90. Siegel, Daniel J., The Mindful Brain. Reflection and attunement in the cultivation of well-being, New York-London : Norton, 2007

23 Voelke, Andr-Jean, La philosophie comme thrapie de l'me. tudes de philosophie hellnistique, Prface de Pierre Hadot, Fribourg/Paris 1993 (Vestigia 12)