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Peter D. Hershock, "Consciousness Mattering: A Buddhist Synthesis" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

March 23, 2025·1 hr 54 min·15 clips

Jessica Zhu opens the conversation and identifies herself as an assistant professor of religion at USC Dornsife. She welcomes Peter to talk about consciousness through a Buddhist lens. Zhu frames the interview around a relational ontology and asks what Buddhist thought adds to contemporary theorizing about consciousness. Peter begins with emptiness and interdependence together. He says that nothing has an eternal self nature. Everything arises interdependently and relationally. On that view, the world is not just hard to know. Its ambiguity is ontological. Peter contrasts the sensing and the sensed. He also reaches for the distinction between matter and what matters. Human beings keep making differentiations. Some are functional and coherent. Others are incoherent and create trouble and suffering. He uses the example of friends and enemies to make the point concrete. Those categories are not simply found in the world. They are made through judgment and evaluation. Once they harden, they can become entrenched. Then the people being separated may no longer cohere in a way that each can recognize. At that point, he says, incoherence can tip toward decoherence. The interview stays patient and explanatory rather than compressed. Zhu keeps returning to the core claim with short, focused prompts. Peter gets space to develop the argument fully. Near the end, the discussion turns toward what this way of thinking means for being human. It also gestures toward contemporary AI and the future of human evolution. The episode closes by pointing toward a collective imagination of other possible human futures.

As heard by us

A patient Buddhist case for consciousness as relational.

The episode treats consciousness through a Buddhist frame of emptiness and interdependence. It argues that reality is ambiguous in an ontological sense, not just because people know too little, and that labels like friend and enemy are made by people rather than found waiting in…

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You want consciousness, Buddhism, and philosophy treated as one careful argument.

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