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https://medium.com/@subhashkak1/indian-foundations-of-modern-science-72259046700f
Indian Foundations of Modern Science
Subhash Kak
Author, scientist.
Jul 24
Scholars see India and Greece as the two principal birthplaces of
science. School textbooks tell us about Pythagoras, Aristotle, Euclid,
Archimedes, and Ptolemy, geometry of the Vedic altars, the invention of
zero in India, Yoga psychology, and Indian technology of steel-making
that went into the manufacture of the best swords. But if you take the
trouble of reading scholarly books, articles and encyclopedias, you will
find that in many ways the early Indian contributions are the more
impressive for they include a deep theory of mind, Pāṇini’s astonishing
Sanskrit grammar, binary numbers of Piṅgala, music theory,
combinatorics, algebra, earliest astronomy, and the physics of Kaṇāda
with its laws of motion.
Of these, Kaṇāda is the least known. He may not have presented his ideas
as mathematical equations, but he attempted something that no physicist
to date has dared to do: he advanced a system that includes space, time,
matter, as well as observers. He also postulated four types of atoms,
two with mass (like proton and electron) and two without (like neutrino
and photon), and the idea of invariance. A thousand or more years after
Kaṇāda, Āryabhaṭa postulated that earth rotated and advanced the basic
idea of relativity of motion.
And then there is India’s imaginative literature, which includes the
Epics, the Purāṇas and the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha (perhaps the greatest novel
ever written), that speaks of time travel, airplanes, exoplanets (that
is many solar-like systems), cloning of embryos, sex change,
communication over distances, and weapons that can destroy everything.
Some nationalists take these statements to mean the literal scientific
truth, which claim is ridiculed by their political opponents who then
use this broad brush to tar all Indian science.
There are also anomalous statements in Indian texts whose origin is not
understood. Just to mention a few: the correct speed of light, the
correct distance to the sun, cosmological cycles that broadly correspond
to the numbers accepted currently, the fact that the sun and the moon
are approximately 108 times their respective diameters from the earth,
the correct number of species on earth (about 8.4 million), and so on.
Historians either ignore them or say that they are extraordinary
coincidences. We will come to these anomalies later in the essay.
To return to the history of mainstream science, the discovery of
infinite series and calculus by Newton and Leibniz heralded the
Scientific Revolution that was to change the world. But new research has
shown that over two centuries prior the Kerala School of Mathematics had
already developed calculus and some historians suggest that this and
advanced astronomical knowledge from Kerala went abroad via the Jesuits
and provided the spark for its further development in Europe. Other
historians discount the transmission of this knowledge to Europe.
There is more agreement about the many achievements of Indian medical
sciences. For example, the Royal Australia College of Surgeons in
Melbourne, Australia has a prominent display of a statue of Suśruta (600
BCE) with the caption “Father of Surgery”. The ancient Ayurveda texts
include the notion of germs and inoculation and also postulate mind-body
connection, which has become an important area of contemporary research.
Indian medicine was strongly empirical; it used Nature (which is
governed by Ṛta) as guide, and it was informed by a sense of skepticism.
In the West the notion of skepticism is usually credited to the Scottish
philosopher of science, David Hume, but scholars have been puzzled by
the commonality between his ideas and the earlier Indian ones. Recently,
it was shown that Hume almost certainly learnt Indian ideas from Jesuits
when he was at the Royal College of La Flèche in France.
There are also indirect ways that Indian ideas led to scientific
advance. Mendeleev was inspired by the two-dimensional structure of the
Sanskrit alphabet to propose a similar two-dimensional structure of
chemical elements. Erwin Schrödinger, a founder of quantum theory,
credited ideas in the Upanishads for the key notion of superposition
that was to bring about the quantum revolution in physics that changed
chemistry, biology, and technology.
I now briefly touch upon Indian influence on linguistics, logic,
philosophy of physics, and theory of mind.
Linguistics, algorithms and society
Pāṇini’s work (4th or 5th century BCE) showed the way to the development
of modern linguistics through the efforts of scholars such as Franz
Bopp, Ferdinand de Saussure, Leonard Bloomfield, and Roman Jakobson.
Bopp was a pioneering scholar of the comparative grammars of Sanskrit
and other Indo-European languages. Ferdinand de Saussure in his most
influential work, Course in General Linguistics (Cours de linguistique
générale), that was published posthumously (1916), took the idea of the
use of formal rules of Sanskrit grammar and applied them to general
linguistic phenomena.
The structure of Pāṇini‘s grammar contains a meta-language, meta-rules,
and other technical devices that make this system effectively equivalent
to the most powerful computing machine. Although it didn’t directly
contribute to the development of computer languages, it influenced
linguistics and mathematical logic that, in turn, gave birth to computer
science.
The works of Pāṇini and Bharata Muni also presage the modern field of
semiotics which is the study of signs and symbols as a significant
component of communications. Their template may be applied to sociology,
anthropology and other humanistic disciplines for all social systems
come with their grammar.
The search for universal laws of grammar underlying the diversity of
languages is ultimately an exploration of the very nature of the human
mind. But the Indian texts remind that the other side to this grammar is
the idea that a formal system cannot describe reality completely since
it leaves out the self.
Modern logic
That Indian thought was central to the development of machine theory is
asserted by Mary Boole — the wife of George Boole, inventor of modern
logic — who herself was a leading science writer in the nineteenth
century. She claimed that George Everest, who lived for a long time in
India and whose name was eventually applied to the world’s highest peak,
was the intermediary of the Indian ideas and they influenced not only
her husband but the other two leading scientists in the attempt to
mechanize thought: Augustus de Morgan and Charles Babbage. She says in
her essay on Indian Thought and Western Science in the Nineteenth
Century (1901): “Think what must have been the effect of the intense
Hinduizing of three such men as Babbage, De Morgan, and George Boole on
the mathematical atmosphere of 1830–65.” She further speculates that
these ideas influenced the development of vector analysis and modern
mathematics.
Much prior to this, Mohsin Fani’s Dabistani-i Madhahib (17th Century)
claimed that Kallisthenes, who was in Alexander’s party, took logic
texts from India and the beginning of the Greek tradition of logic must
be seen in this material. In Indian logic, minds are not empty slates;
the very constitution of the mind provides some knowledge of the nature
of the world. The four pramāṇas through which correct knowledge is
acquired are direct perception, inference, analogy, and verbal testimony.
Physics with observers
Indian physics, which goes back to the Vaiśeṣika Sūtras (c. 500 BCE),
does not appear to have directly influenced the discovery of physical
laws in Europe. But Indian ideas that place the observer at center
prefigure the conceptual foundations of modern physics, and this is
acknowledged by the greatest physicists of the twentieth century.
In the West, the universe was seen as a machine going back to Aristotle
and the Greeks who saw the physical world consisting of four kinds of
elements of earth, water, fire, and air. This model continued in
Newton’s clockwork model of the solar system. Indian thought, in
contrast, has a fifth element, ākāśa, which is the medium for inner
light and consciousness. With the rise of relativity theory and quantum
mechanics, the observer could no longer be ignored. In one sense, the
journey of science is the discovery of self and consciousness.
It is one of those obscure footnotes to the history of physics that
Nikola Tesla, who was very famous in the 1890s, was asked by Swami
Vivekananda to find an equation connecting mass and energy. We know that
Tesla didn’t quite succeed at this but he was to work on various models
of wireless transfer of energy for the remainder of his career.
Cosmology and evolution
The Ṛgveda speaks of the universe being infinite in size. The evolution
of the universe is according to cosmic law. Since it cannot arise out of
nothing, the universe must be infinitely old. Since it must evolve,
there are cycles of chaos and order or creation and destruction. The
world is also taken to be infinitely old. Beyond the solar system, other
similar systems were postulated, which appear to have been confirmed
with the modern discovery of exoplanets.
The Sāṅkhya system describes evolution at cosmic and individual levels.
It views reality as being constituted of puruṣa, consciousness that is
all-pervasive, and prakṛti, which is the phenomenal world. Prakṛti is
composed of three different strands (guṇas or characteristics) of
sattva, rajas, and tamas, which are transparency, activity, and
inactivity, respectively.
Evolution begins by puruṣa and prakṛti creating mahat (Nature in its
dynamic aspect). From mahat evolves buddhi (intelligence) and manas
(mind). Buddhi and manas in the large scale are Nature’s intelligence
and mind. From buddhi come individualized ego consciousness (ahaṅkāra)
and the five tanmātras (subtle elements) of sound, touch, sight, taste,
smell. From the manas evolve the five senses (hearing, touching, seeing,
tasting, smelling), the five organs of action (with which to speak,
grasp, move, procreate, evacuate), and the five gross elements (ākāśa,
air, fire, water, earth).
The evolution in Sāṅkhya is an ecological process determined completely
by Nature. It differs from modern evolution theory in that it
presupposes a universal consciousness. In reality, modern evolution also
assigns intelligence to Nature in its drive to select certain forms over
others as well as in the evolution of intelligence itself.
The description of evolution of life is given in many texts such as the
Mahābhārata. I present a quote from the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha on it:
“I
remember that once upon a time there was nothing on this earth,
neither trees and plants, nor even mountains. For a period of eleven
thousand [great] years the earth was covered by lava. In those days
there was neither day nor night below the polar region: for in the rest
of the earth neither the sun nor the moon shone. Only one half of the
polar region was illumined. [Later] apart from the polar region the rest
of the earth was covered with water. And then for a very long time the
whole earth was covered with forests, except the polar region. Then
there arose great mountains, but without any human inhabitants. For a
period of ten thousand years the earth was covered with the corpses of
the asuras.” [YV 6.1]
The reverse sequence, of the end of the world, is also described in
various texts. First, the sun expands in size incinerating everything on
the earth (quite similar to modern accounts of the aging sun becoming a
red giant). The specific sequence mentioned is that the fireball of the
sun transforms the Pṛthivī atoms into Āpas atoms, which then together
change into Tejas atoms and further into Vāyu atoms, and finally to
sound energy that is an attribute of space, and so on (Mahābhārata,
Śānti Parva Section 233). In our modern language, it means that as
temperatures become high, matter breaks down becoming a sea of elements,
then the protons break down into electrons, further into photons, and
finally into neutrinos, and on to acoustic energy of space. At the end
of this cycle the world is absorbed into Consciousness.
Vivekananda was aware of this sequence which is why he asked Tesla to
find the specific equation for transformation between mass and energy.
Mind and Yoga
We are in the midst of a worldwide Yoga revolution. For many, it is
about health and well-being but that is only a portal that leads to the
understanding of the self and its relationship with the body.
Although the roots of Yoga lie in the Vedas, most read Patañjali’s
Yoga-sūtra for a systematic exposition of the nature of the mind. The
text is logical and it questions the naïve understanding of the world.
According to it, there is a single reality and the multiplicity we see
in it is a consequence of the projections of our different minds.
Therefore to obtain knowledge one must experience reality in its most
directness.
The Vedic texts claim to be ātmavidyā, “science of self” or
“consciousness science” and they also provide a framework to decode its
narrative, establishing its central concern with consciousness.
In the Vedic view, reality is unitary at the deepest level since
otherwise there would be chaos. Since language is linear, whereas the
unfolding of the universe takes place in a multitude of dimensions,
language is limited in its ability to describe reality. Because of this
limitation, reality can only be experienced and never described fully.
All descriptions of the universe lead to logical paradox.
Knowledge is of two kinds: the higher or unified and the lower or dual.
The higher knowledge concerns the perceiving subject (consciousness),
whereas the lower knowledge concerns objects. The higher knowledge can
be arrived at through intuition and meditation on the paradoxes of the
outer world. The lower knowledge is analytical and it represents
standard sciences with its many branches. There is a complementarity
between the higher and the lower, for each is necessary to define the
other, and it mirrors the one between mind and body.
The future of science
I have gone through a random list of topics to show that Indian ideas
and contributions have shaped science in fundamental ways. I hope to
show now that they remain equally central to its future growth.
We first note that in spite of its unprecedented success and prestige,
science is facing major crises. The first of these crises is that of
physics for it has found no evidence for dark matter and dark energy
that together are believed to constitute 95% of the observable universe,
with another 4.5% being intergalactic dust that doesn’t influence
theory. How can we claim that we are near understanding reality if our
theories are validated by only 0.5% of the observable universe?
The second crisis is that neuroscientists have failed to find a neural
correlate of consciousness. If there is no neural correlate, then does
consciousness reside in a dimension that is different from our familiar
space-time continuum? And how do mind and body interact with each other?
The third crisis is that there is no clear answer to the question if
machines will become conscious. The fourth crisis is related to the
implications of biomedical advances such as cloning on our notions of self.
It becomes clear that the three crises are actually interrelated when it
is realized that consciousness is also an issue at the very foundations
of physics. These questions also relate to the problem of free will.
Researchers are divided on whether conscious machines will ever exist.
Most computer scientists believe that consciousness is computable and
that it will emerge in machines as technology develops. Bu there are
others who say there’re things about human behavior that cannot be
computed by a machine. Thus creativity and the sense of freedom people
possess appear to be more than just an application of logic or calculations.
Quantum views
Quantum theory, which is the deepest theory of physics, provides another
perspective. According to its orthodox Copenhagen Interpretation,
consciousness and the physical world are complementary aspects of the
same reality. Since it takes consciousness as a given and no attempt is
made to derive it from physics, the Copenhagen Interpretation may be
called the “big-C” view of consciousness, where it is a thing that
exists by itself — although it requires brains to become real. This view
was popular with the pioneers of quantum theory such as Niels Bohr,
Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger.
The opposing view is that consciousness emerges from biology, just as
biology itself emerges from chemistry which, in turn, emerges from
physics. We call this less expansive concept of consciousness
“little-C.” It agrees with the neuroscientists’ view that the processes
of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain.
Philosophers of science believe that these modern quantum physics views
of consciousness have parallels in ancient philosophy. Big-C is like the
theory of mind in Vedanta — in which consciousness is the fundamental
basis of reality and at the experienced level it complements the
physical universe. The pioneers of quantum theory were aware of this
linkage with Vedanta.
Little-C, in contrast, is quite similar to what many take to be standard
Buddhism. The Buddha chose not to address the question of the nature of
consciousness until the end of his life, and many of his followers
believe that mind and consciousness arise out of emptiness or
nothingness. Yet in the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa-sūtra, the Buddha
acknowledges a transcendent category underlying constant change which is
quite similar to the conception of Vedanta.
Big-C, anomalies, and scientific discovery
Scientists question if consciousness is a computational process. More
restrictively, scholars argue that the creative moment is not at the end
of a deliberate computation. For instance, dreams or visions are
supposed to have inspired Elias Howe‘s 1845 design of the modern sewing
machine and August Kekulé’s discovery of the structure of benzene in
1862, and these may be considered to be examples of the anomalous
workings of the mind.
A dramatic piece of evidence in favor of big-C consciousness existing
all on its own is the life of self-taught mathematician Srinivasa
Ramanujan, who died in 1920 at the age of 32. His notebook, which was
lost and forgotten for about 50 years and published only in 1988,
contains several thousand formulas — without proof in different areas of
mathematics — that were well ahead of their time, and the methods by
which he found the formulas remain elusive. Ramanujan himself claimed
that the formulas were revealed to him by Goddess Nāmagiri while he was
asleep. The idea of big-C provides an explanation for the anomalous
scientific results from old Indian texts that were mentioned at the
beginning of the essay.
The concept of big-C consciousness raises the questions of how it is
related to matter, and how matter and mind mutually influence each
other. Consciousness alone cannot make physical changes to the world,
but perhaps it can change the probabilities in the evolution of quantum
processes. The act of observation can freeze and even influence atoms’
movements, as has been demonstrated in the laboratory. This may very
well be an explanation of how matter and mind interact.
With cognitive machines replacing humans at most tasks, the question of
what selfhood means will become more central to our lives. It appears to
me that the only way to find fulfilment in life will be through wisdom
of ātmavidyā. Vedic science will bring humanity full circle back to the
source of all experience, which is consciousness. It will also reveal
unknown ways mind and body interact and this will have major
implications for medicine.
Indian sciences are universal and they have within them the power to
inspire people to find their true potential and find meaning in life, as
also having the potential to facilitate the next advances in both
physical and biological sciences.
Historians may quibble about whether a certain equation should be called
Baudhāyana’s Theorem or Pythagoras Theorem, but in the larger scheme
names do not matter. The direction of science is the more important
thing and it is clear that the mystery of consciousness will be one of
its major concerns.
Indian Foundations of Modern Science
Subhash Kak
Author, scientist.
Jul 24
Scholars see India and Greece as the two principal birthplaces of
science. School textbooks tell us about Pythagoras, Aristotle, Euclid,
Archimedes, and Ptolemy, geometry of the Vedic altars, the invention of
zero in India, Yoga psychology, and Indian technology of steel-making
that went into the manufacture of the best swords. But if you take the
trouble of reading scholarly books, articles and encyclopedias, you will
find that in many ways the early Indian contributions are the more
impressive for they include a deep theory of mind, Pāṇini’s astonishing
Sanskrit grammar, binary numbers of Piṅgala, music theory,
combinatorics, algebra, earliest astronomy, and the physics of Kaṇāda
with its laws of motion.
Of these, Kaṇāda is the least known. He may not have presented his ideas
as mathematical equations, but he attempted something that no physicist
to date has dared to do: he advanced a system that includes space, time,
matter, as well as observers. He also postulated four types of atoms,
two with mass (like proton and electron) and two without (like neutrino
and photon), and the idea of invariance. A thousand or more years after
Kaṇāda, Āryabhaṭa postulated that earth rotated and advanced the basic
idea of relativity of motion.
And then there is India’s imaginative literature, which includes the
Epics, the Purāṇas and the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha (perhaps the greatest novel
ever written), that speaks of time travel, airplanes, exoplanets (that
is many solar-like systems), cloning of embryos, sex change,
communication over distances, and weapons that can destroy everything.
Some nationalists take these statements to mean the literal scientific
truth, which claim is ridiculed by their political opponents who then
use this broad brush to tar all Indian science.
There are also anomalous statements in Indian texts whose origin is not
understood. Just to mention a few: the correct speed of light, the
correct distance to the sun, cosmological cycles that broadly correspond
to the numbers accepted currently, the fact that the sun and the moon
are approximately 108 times their respective diameters from the earth,
the correct number of species on earth (about 8.4 million), and so on.
Historians either ignore them or say that they are extraordinary
coincidences. We will come to these anomalies later in the essay.
To return to the history of mainstream science, the discovery of
infinite series and calculus by Newton and Leibniz heralded the
Scientific Revolution that was to change the world. But new research has
shown that over two centuries prior the Kerala School of Mathematics had
already developed calculus and some historians suggest that this and
advanced astronomical knowledge from Kerala went abroad via the Jesuits
and provided the spark for its further development in Europe. Other
historians discount the transmission of this knowledge to Europe.
There is more agreement about the many achievements of Indian medical
sciences. For example, the Royal Australia College of Surgeons in
Melbourne, Australia has a prominent display of a statue of Suśruta (600
BCE) with the caption “Father of Surgery”. The ancient Ayurveda texts
include the notion of germs and inoculation and also postulate mind-body
connection, which has become an important area of contemporary research.
Indian medicine was strongly empirical; it used Nature (which is
governed by Ṛta) as guide, and it was informed by a sense of skepticism.
In the West the notion of skepticism is usually credited to the Scottish
philosopher of science, David Hume, but scholars have been puzzled by
the commonality between his ideas and the earlier Indian ones. Recently,
it was shown that Hume almost certainly learnt Indian ideas from Jesuits
when he was at the Royal College of La Flèche in France.
There are also indirect ways that Indian ideas led to scientific
advance. Mendeleev was inspired by the two-dimensional structure of the
Sanskrit alphabet to propose a similar two-dimensional structure of
chemical elements. Erwin Schrödinger, a founder of quantum theory,
credited ideas in the Upanishads for the key notion of superposition
that was to bring about the quantum revolution in physics that changed
chemistry, biology, and technology.
I now briefly touch upon Indian influence on linguistics, logic,
philosophy of physics, and theory of mind.
Linguistics, algorithms and society
Pāṇini’s work (4th or 5th century BCE) showed the way to the development
of modern linguistics through the efforts of scholars such as Franz
Bopp, Ferdinand de Saussure, Leonard Bloomfield, and Roman Jakobson.
Bopp was a pioneering scholar of the comparative grammars of Sanskrit
and other Indo-European languages. Ferdinand de Saussure in his most
influential work, Course in General Linguistics (Cours de linguistique
générale), that was published posthumously (1916), took the idea of the
use of formal rules of Sanskrit grammar and applied them to general
linguistic phenomena.
The structure of Pāṇini‘s grammar contains a meta-language, meta-rules,
and other technical devices that make this system effectively equivalent
to the most powerful computing machine. Although it didn’t directly
contribute to the development of computer languages, it influenced
linguistics and mathematical logic that, in turn, gave birth to computer
science.
The works of Pāṇini and Bharata Muni also presage the modern field of
semiotics which is the study of signs and symbols as a significant
component of communications. Their template may be applied to sociology,
anthropology and other humanistic disciplines for all social systems
come with their grammar.
The search for universal laws of grammar underlying the diversity of
languages is ultimately an exploration of the very nature of the human
mind. But the Indian texts remind that the other side to this grammar is
the idea that a formal system cannot describe reality completely since
it leaves out the self.
Modern logic
That Indian thought was central to the development of machine theory is
asserted by Mary Boole — the wife of George Boole, inventor of modern
logic — who herself was a leading science writer in the nineteenth
century. She claimed that George Everest, who lived for a long time in
India and whose name was eventually applied to the world’s highest peak,
was the intermediary of the Indian ideas and they influenced not only
her husband but the other two leading scientists in the attempt to
mechanize thought: Augustus de Morgan and Charles Babbage. She says in
her essay on Indian Thought and Western Science in the Nineteenth
Century (1901): “Think what must have been the effect of the intense
Hinduizing of three such men as Babbage, De Morgan, and George Boole on
the mathematical atmosphere of 1830–65.” She further speculates that
these ideas influenced the development of vector analysis and modern
mathematics.
Much prior to this, Mohsin Fani’s Dabistani-i Madhahib (17th Century)
claimed that Kallisthenes, who was in Alexander’s party, took logic
texts from India and the beginning of the Greek tradition of logic must
be seen in this material. In Indian logic, minds are not empty slates;
the very constitution of the mind provides some knowledge of the nature
of the world. The four pramāṇas through which correct knowledge is
acquired are direct perception, inference, analogy, and verbal testimony.
Physics with observers
Indian physics, which goes back to the Vaiśeṣika Sūtras (c. 500 BCE),
does not appear to have directly influenced the discovery of physical
laws in Europe. But Indian ideas that place the observer at center
prefigure the conceptual foundations of modern physics, and this is
acknowledged by the greatest physicists of the twentieth century.
In the West, the universe was seen as a machine going back to Aristotle
and the Greeks who saw the physical world consisting of four kinds of
elements of earth, water, fire, and air. This model continued in
Newton’s clockwork model of the solar system. Indian thought, in
contrast, has a fifth element, ākāśa, which is the medium for inner
light and consciousness. With the rise of relativity theory and quantum
mechanics, the observer could no longer be ignored. In one sense, the
journey of science is the discovery of self and consciousness.
It is one of those obscure footnotes to the history of physics that
Nikola Tesla, who was very famous in the 1890s, was asked by Swami
Vivekananda to find an equation connecting mass and energy. We know that
Tesla didn’t quite succeed at this but he was to work on various models
of wireless transfer of energy for the remainder of his career.
Cosmology and evolution
The Ṛgveda speaks of the universe being infinite in size. The evolution
of the universe is according to cosmic law. Since it cannot arise out of
nothing, the universe must be infinitely old. Since it must evolve,
there are cycles of chaos and order or creation and destruction. The
world is also taken to be infinitely old. Beyond the solar system, other
similar systems were postulated, which appear to have been confirmed
with the modern discovery of exoplanets.
The Sāṅkhya system describes evolution at cosmic and individual levels.
It views reality as being constituted of puruṣa, consciousness that is
all-pervasive, and prakṛti, which is the phenomenal world. Prakṛti is
composed of three different strands (guṇas or characteristics) of
sattva, rajas, and tamas, which are transparency, activity, and
inactivity, respectively.
Evolution begins by puruṣa and prakṛti creating mahat (Nature in its
dynamic aspect). From mahat evolves buddhi (intelligence) and manas
(mind). Buddhi and manas in the large scale are Nature’s intelligence
and mind. From buddhi come individualized ego consciousness (ahaṅkāra)
and the five tanmātras (subtle elements) of sound, touch, sight, taste,
smell. From the manas evolve the five senses (hearing, touching, seeing,
tasting, smelling), the five organs of action (with which to speak,
grasp, move, procreate, evacuate), and the five gross elements (ākāśa,
air, fire, water, earth).
The evolution in Sāṅkhya is an ecological process determined completely
by Nature. It differs from modern evolution theory in that it
presupposes a universal consciousness. In reality, modern evolution also
assigns intelligence to Nature in its drive to select certain forms over
others as well as in the evolution of intelligence itself.
The description of evolution of life is given in many texts such as the
Mahābhārata. I present a quote from the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha on it:
“I
remember that once upon a time there was nothing on this earth,
neither trees and plants, nor even mountains. For a period of eleven
thousand [great] years the earth was covered by lava. In those days
there was neither day nor night below the polar region: for in the rest
of the earth neither the sun nor the moon shone. Only one half of the
polar region was illumined. [Later] apart from the polar region the rest
of the earth was covered with water. And then for a very long time the
whole earth was covered with forests, except the polar region. Then
there arose great mountains, but without any human inhabitants. For a
period of ten thousand years the earth was covered with the corpses of
the asuras.” [YV 6.1]
The reverse sequence, of the end of the world, is also described in
various texts. First, the sun expands in size incinerating everything on
the earth (quite similar to modern accounts of the aging sun becoming a
red giant). The specific sequence mentioned is that the fireball of the
sun transforms the Pṛthivī atoms into Āpas atoms, which then together
change into Tejas atoms and further into Vāyu atoms, and finally to
sound energy that is an attribute of space, and so on (Mahābhārata,
Śānti Parva Section 233). In our modern language, it means that as
temperatures become high, matter breaks down becoming a sea of elements,
then the protons break down into electrons, further into photons, and
finally into neutrinos, and on to acoustic energy of space. At the end
of this cycle the world is absorbed into Consciousness.
Vivekananda was aware of this sequence which is why he asked Tesla to
find the specific equation for transformation between mass and energy.
Mind and Yoga
We are in the midst of a worldwide Yoga revolution. For many, it is
about health and well-being but that is only a portal that leads to the
understanding of the self and its relationship with the body.
Although the roots of Yoga lie in the Vedas, most read Patañjali’s
Yoga-sūtra for a systematic exposition of the nature of the mind. The
text is logical and it questions the naïve understanding of the world.
According to it, there is a single reality and the multiplicity we see
in it is a consequence of the projections of our different minds.
Therefore to obtain knowledge one must experience reality in its most
directness.
The Vedic texts claim to be ātmavidyā, “science of self” or
“consciousness science” and they also provide a framework to decode its
narrative, establishing its central concern with consciousness.
In the Vedic view, reality is unitary at the deepest level since
otherwise there would be chaos. Since language is linear, whereas the
unfolding of the universe takes place in a multitude of dimensions,
language is limited in its ability to describe reality. Because of this
limitation, reality can only be experienced and never described fully.
All descriptions of the universe lead to logical paradox.
Knowledge is of two kinds: the higher or unified and the lower or dual.
The higher knowledge concerns the perceiving subject (consciousness),
whereas the lower knowledge concerns objects. The higher knowledge can
be arrived at through intuition and meditation on the paradoxes of the
outer world. The lower knowledge is analytical and it represents
standard sciences with its many branches. There is a complementarity
between the higher and the lower, for each is necessary to define the
other, and it mirrors the one between mind and body.
The future of science
I have gone through a random list of topics to show that Indian ideas
and contributions have shaped science in fundamental ways. I hope to
show now that they remain equally central to its future growth.
We first note that in spite of its unprecedented success and prestige,
science is facing major crises. The first of these crises is that of
physics for it has found no evidence for dark matter and dark energy
that together are believed to constitute 95% of the observable universe,
with another 4.5% being intergalactic dust that doesn’t influence
theory. How can we claim that we are near understanding reality if our
theories are validated by only 0.5% of the observable universe?
The second crisis is that neuroscientists have failed to find a neural
correlate of consciousness. If there is no neural correlate, then does
consciousness reside in a dimension that is different from our familiar
space-time continuum? And how do mind and body interact with each other?
The third crisis is that there is no clear answer to the question if
machines will become conscious. The fourth crisis is related to the
implications of biomedical advances such as cloning on our notions of self.
It becomes clear that the three crises are actually interrelated when it
is realized that consciousness is also an issue at the very foundations
of physics. These questions also relate to the problem of free will.
Researchers are divided on whether conscious machines will ever exist.
Most computer scientists believe that consciousness is computable and
that it will emerge in machines as technology develops. Bu there are
others who say there’re things about human behavior that cannot be
computed by a machine. Thus creativity and the sense of freedom people
possess appear to be more than just an application of logic or calculations.
Quantum views
Quantum theory, which is the deepest theory of physics, provides another
perspective. According to its orthodox Copenhagen Interpretation,
consciousness and the physical world are complementary aspects of the
same reality. Since it takes consciousness as a given and no attempt is
made to derive it from physics, the Copenhagen Interpretation may be
called the “big-C” view of consciousness, where it is a thing that
exists by itself — although it requires brains to become real. This view
was popular with the pioneers of quantum theory such as Niels Bohr,
Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger.
The opposing view is that consciousness emerges from biology, just as
biology itself emerges from chemistry which, in turn, emerges from
physics. We call this less expansive concept of consciousness
“little-C.” It agrees with the neuroscientists’ view that the processes
of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain.
Philosophers of science believe that these modern quantum physics views
of consciousness have parallels in ancient philosophy. Big-C is like the
theory of mind in Vedanta — in which consciousness is the fundamental
basis of reality and at the experienced level it complements the
physical universe. The pioneers of quantum theory were aware of this
linkage with Vedanta.
Little-C, in contrast, is quite similar to what many take to be standard
Buddhism. The Buddha chose not to address the question of the nature of
consciousness until the end of his life, and many of his followers
believe that mind and consciousness arise out of emptiness or
nothingness. Yet in the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa-sūtra, the Buddha
acknowledges a transcendent category underlying constant change which is
quite similar to the conception of Vedanta.
Big-C, anomalies, and scientific discovery
Scientists question if consciousness is a computational process. More
restrictively, scholars argue that the creative moment is not at the end
of a deliberate computation. For instance, dreams or visions are
supposed to have inspired Elias Howe‘s 1845 design of the modern sewing
machine and August Kekulé’s discovery of the structure of benzene in
1862, and these may be considered to be examples of the anomalous
workings of the mind.
A dramatic piece of evidence in favor of big-C consciousness existing
all on its own is the life of self-taught mathematician Srinivasa
Ramanujan, who died in 1920 at the age of 32. His notebook, which was
lost and forgotten for about 50 years and published only in 1988,
contains several thousand formulas — without proof in different areas of
mathematics — that were well ahead of their time, and the methods by
which he found the formulas remain elusive. Ramanujan himself claimed
that the formulas were revealed to him by Goddess Nāmagiri while he was
asleep. The idea of big-C provides an explanation for the anomalous
scientific results from old Indian texts that were mentioned at the
beginning of the essay.
The concept of big-C consciousness raises the questions of how it is
related to matter, and how matter and mind mutually influence each
other. Consciousness alone cannot make physical changes to the world,
but perhaps it can change the probabilities in the evolution of quantum
processes. The act of observation can freeze and even influence atoms’
movements, as has been demonstrated in the laboratory. This may very
well be an explanation of how matter and mind interact.
With cognitive machines replacing humans at most tasks, the question of
what selfhood means will become more central to our lives. It appears to
me that the only way to find fulfilment in life will be through wisdom
of ātmavidyā. Vedic science will bring humanity full circle back to the
source of all experience, which is consciousness. It will also reveal
unknown ways mind and body interact and this will have major
implications for medicine.
Indian sciences are universal and they have within them the power to
inspire people to find their true potential and find meaning in life, as
also having the potential to facilitate the next advances in both
physical and biological sciences.
Historians may quibble about whether a certain equation should be called
Baudhāyana’s Theorem or Pythagoras Theorem, but in the larger scheme
names do not matter. The direction of science is the more important
thing and it is clear that the mystery of consciousness will be one of
its major concerns.