A very brief summary of Vedanta

Happy Thanksgiving weekend every one! I want to thank Bill Rosar for giving me opportunity to participate in the discussions on this blog.  I found references to Hindu philosophy and computers (in particular to chess playing programs and calculators) in some posts in this blog and found that interesting because in my articles which propose that the "phenomenal information" (PI) in our brains consists of superluminal matter, I use ideas from Vedanta and arguments why and how chess playing programs and calculators are "fundamentally" different from living beings. 

To introduce myself briefly, I am a consciousness researcher with background in mathematical physics and computer science.  As we all know, after having developed various artificial intelligent programs and superfast computers which perform many intelligent tasks better and faster than human beings and perhaps some of which humans are not even able to do, some computer scientists started claiming that they are very close to building a conscious computer.  Being born as a Hindu, I could not believe that. My philosophy tells me that not only matter is not conscious but PI is also not conscious; while matter is perceivable by the physical senses, PI is not directly accessible to senses and physical measuring devices. The latter statement agrees with our experience as well as science; how PI is created in the brain became the "hard problem" of Chalmers because of the inaccessibility. 

Brief summary of Vedanta’s characterization of Consciousness, mind, body, and their relations:

There exists Universal Consciousness (briefly called Consciousness with Big C in front hereafter), which is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent.

• Every living being is associated with its own soul (Jiva) which is a bit of that infinite Consciousness, who draws to itself the senses and the mind that are part of Nature (Bhagavad Gita Chapter 15, verse 7). Being part of the eternal Consciousness, the soul is eternal also and survives the death of the physical body. 
• Nature (called Prakriti in Sanskrit) is dumb. Although it seems to carry on many processes all by itself, it does not "know" what it is doing and needs initiation.  Consciousness gives that initiation of its own will; it is free will. It can look into one subject or two subjects or more subjects at the same time or look into none; It can initiate Prakriti to do things or not initiate. Nobody can tell Consciousness to do anything. It is above all rules and logic. 
• The Self (Atma) is Consciousness seated in the hearts of all beings (Bhagavad Gita chapter 10, verse 20).  Kenopanishad (Swami, 1920) says that the mind and senses are able to perform their respective functions willed and initiated by Consciousness and without It, the senses and the mind cannot function.  
• The mind is an accumulation of thoughts or information. It consists of a memory of experiences, desires, aversion, emotions, etc. (chitta), ability to think (manas), intellect (buddhi) which includes the ability to make decisions based on memory, and the sense of ‘I’ or ego (ahankara). The mind is subtle unlike the body but it is also part of Nature, in other words, it is not conscious but as dumb as lifeless matter. 
• The five elements are the earth, water, fire, air and the space. The five senses are hearing, touching, seeing, tasting and smelling; objects of the senses are sound, touch, form and colour, taste and smell.
• Bhagavadgita describes the distinctions between the body mind complex and the one who ‘knows’ them (shetrajna).  The Field (shetra) consists of the body, the senses and sense objects, the body's environment (Nature), and the mind.
• All contents of the Field, namely, the body, its environment, and the mind are part of Nature and therefore inert (Bhagavad Gita, 7:4).
• The knower of the Field (shetrajna) is Consciousness Himself and His infinitesimal projection, jiva who assumed this function within this body.

As to the interaction of the body and the mind, in the chapter called Karma Yoga, Gita says that the senses influence the body, and manas and chitta influence the senses; buddhi influences the manas and chitta, and jiva influences buddhi, which is in its turn, influenced by  jiva.

All schools of Indian philosophy emphasize the distinction between what we usually perceive in living beings and call consciousness, and Consciousness itself. The difference is that the former is fragmented. An individual’s consciousness exists only in wakeful and dreaming sleep states and knows only one thing at a time, and in general one individual does not know the conscious experience of another whereas Consciousness knows everything everywhere all the time.
  

Vedanta and computer analogy
The above descriptions of Consciousness, mind, and body, suggest the following analogy:

• A living being is similar to a computer whose hardware is the physical body. The body is made up of matter. The living being has an accumulation of experiences, desires, etc. i.e., an accumulation of information in a memory which we call the mind in this paper. The mind is like a computer memory containing data and programs.
• Just like a computer's hardware and software do not know what they are doing, their own existence, and the meaning of their memory contents, both the body and the mind of a living being also do not “really know” anything but there is a certain Consciousness (apart from the mind mentioned above) that "knows". Consciousness is like the computer operator, as it were, and the one who "really knows" everything that is going on in the living being’s life.

Similar to the computer software, the mind being an instrument, cannot act as an agent all by itself and needs initiation from an external agent, which is often, a desire/purpose (thoughts), or sensory inputs; the soul being a part of the omnipotent Consciousness can also intervene just like a computer operator can intervene in the operations of the computer.  Mind and body act on each other according to Vedanta.

One may ask, “If the mind is not conscious, how is it that we have conscious experiences in our lives?” The answer is that “appearance of consciousness” (called Chidabhasa in Sanskrit) happens because of the underlying Consciousness which produces a reflection in the mind, the memory of the living being.  The next post illustrates the answer.

The Geometry of the Visual Field

Hannes Ole Matthiessen, a philosopher from Fribourg, Switzerland http://unifri.academia.edu/HannesOleMatthiessen recently organized a conference where Reid scholars, phenomenologists, and psychologists discussed questions concerning the geometry of visual space http://philosophie.ch/events/single.php?action=date&eventid=1114&month=10&year=2013

 

He is currently planning to publish the papers held on the conference in some kind of joint publication, preferably a reasonably good journal special issue, and there is still room for a couple of more authors. Since the interdisciplinary character of the conference shall be preserved in the publication, both philosophical and empirical papers are welcome. Please contact Hannes at Hannes.Matthiessen@unifr.ch

The Localization of the Mind

Confusing two systems of spatial relationships, one physical, the other perceptual, has long contributed to insoluble paradoxes and puzzles in the philosophy of mind and perception. In this monograph I start with Eddington’s famous example of the “two writing tables” and explain how we must distinguish between “two heads,” the one we know from perceiving our own and those around us, the other the physical head as studied by neuroscience. Their properties are quite different. The perceptual head is composed of sensations (qualia) whereas the physical head is composed of biological matter only. http://www.academia.edu/4042688/The_Localization_of_the_Mind

The Māya Theory of (Visual) Perception

A visit recently to the Center for Brain and Cognition at UCSD by an Indian medical student has prompted me to advance a rather skeptical theory at which I have only hinted previously. It is surprising how sometimes in the course of informal conversation even a profound idea can take shape, and that was the case the other evening when Rama and some of us in the lab were actually joking about the absurd predicament that I described below under my posting "Summation," viz. that the causal theory of perception leads to empirical evidence that does not support it, but actually contradicts it.

As I have intimated previously it is not necessarily the case that classical "action-by-contact" ("billiard ball") causality is wrong, but that the causal theory of perception is wrong by invoking it, the locus classicus being The Analysis of Matter by Lord Russell. This state of affairs may/may not be related to putative non-local causality ("non-locality") in Quantum Mechanics, which it has been claimed by theoretical physics implies "action at a distance" at the quantum level, and though a number of theorists have speculated that consciousness may have a quantum mechanical basis. I say "may/may not" because the rejection of the causal theory of perception is not because it is contradicted by anything stemming from Q.M., but by the disparity between brain structure/events and the structure of visual objects, a topic of much previous discussion here already, but something that was noted by John Smythies already over half a century ago in his Analysis of Perception.

Just as Fred Hoyle thought the universe was a "put up job," much the same might be said for the (visual) world--and perhaps for a similar reason: Highly unlikely relationships between physical constants in the case of the universe, and so-called perceptual constancies in the case of the visual world. The geometrical structure of objects in visual space is usually explained in terms of a perspective projection resulting from the geometrical optics of the eyes. It is often depicted as being something like an artist using perspective to simulate depth and distance on a flat surface. But whereas the artist can compare what he sees of the world with his perspective drawing or painting, we as perceivers cannot do that with the whole of our visual world with the physical world, so the analogy does not really hold.

Perhaps it is the case that as much as departing from "veridical" perception, visual illusions and the study of them may may actually lead to understanding perception and the visual world as māya, a Sanscrit word usually translated as "illusion" but also as "projection." How apt in the case of visual perception! Could it be that it is the nature of perception to foster a belief in an objective external world, but that such a world always remains for each of us only a belief? When one doubts the existence of an external world beyond the senses, one is a skeptic or phenomenalist, but when one doubts the existence of God, one is only an atheist. Yet both involve belief or disbelief in something beyond the senses. On the one hand, "seeing is believing," yet on the other, one "doubts their senses."

The "put up job" in the case of perception may just be predictability and repeatability in the perceptual world--as it happens, the hallmarks of scientific empiricism. But how can one know a priori that this guarantees knowledge of reality, if reality is only a belief? The argument is circular. This may be the "naive faith" which Whitehead wrote science never questions.

Agentship of the Soul (per the Brahma Sutra)

Rama, who daily receives voluminous correspondence from all of the world, recently brought to my attention something sent to him by an independent scholar in India concerning the nature of the soul as explained in the Brahma Sutra, which has been the subject of considerable exegesis in India as well, such as that by Adi Shankara (788-820 A.D.), who has been called the "St. Thomas Aquinas of Indian thought."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adi_Shankara

I was particularly struck by the analogy used therein likening the soul to a carpenter and agentship to that carpenter using his tools, as it brought to mind some of the argumentation on the nature of the soul from Augustine and Aquinas that David McGraw reviewed relative to Descartes last November (see his posting "Mind and Body, Medieval and Modern: Augustine and Thomas Aquinas Versus Descartes") that we discussed some months ago. I would be interested in discussing how this might be applied to the position of the (central) ego Smythies describes vis-a-vis the "observer" of visual space. This is a link to some of the summary/commentary:
http://www.swami-krishnananda.org/bs_2/bs_2-3-15.html
More exegesis/argumentation has been published in this volume:
http://books.google.com/books?id=0wvuAAAAIAAJ&q=%22just+as+this+soul,+independent+though+it+is+as+regards%22&dq=%22just+as+this+soul,+independent+though+it+is+as+regards%22&cd=1
I have a Xerox of the relevant pages that I could supply.

Summation

It is ironic that the last comment on the blog was one I made three months ago now (6/12/11) in response to the first posting on the blog a year ago by Bob French, "Apparent Distortions in Photography and the Geometry of Visual Space." Bob did not respond to my comment but did visit UCSD and gave a fine presentation to the members of the Center for Brain and Cognition on the geometry of visual space July 27th (which, alas, was under attended).

We seem to be left with three theoretical contretemps:

(1) a geometry of visual space that either changes or is under determined by empirical data

(2) a theory of perception (the "causal theory") that cannot be reconciled with the topological and metric attributes of visual space as related to any part of the visual system, whether peripherally in the eyes, or centrally in the brain

(3) dualism provides no solution to the requirements of geometrical congruence as I stated in my 1985 paper "Visual Space as Physical Geometry"
http://ucsd.academia.edu/WilliamRosar/Papers/794894/Visual_Space_as_Physical_Geometry


Though this forum has provided an unusually rich exchange of both traditional and novel ideas, like many blogs it seems to have run its course, perhaps not so much because the contributors have nothing more to offer, but because I don't think most were willing to really question fundamental assumptions, instead holding to theories based on metaphysical or abstract ideas, even when challenged or contradicted by logic, observation, and experimental findings. Ultimately that results in an impasse, and discussion ceases--and philosophy and science are the worse for it.

Hopefully one of you or someone new will throw down the gauntlet and restart the dialog...

-Bill Rosar