Seeker - Blog

The search for a conscious AI is a fad

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 09:08:19 +0530

Introduction

In the movie Her (2013), Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore Twombly, a lonely writer who is on the verge of separating from his wife Catherine, played by Rooney Mara. To cope with his loneliness, he purchases an OS (Artificially Intelligent Operating system), which is designed to adapt based on user interactions. He's fascinated by the new software, which is named Samantha, and starts conversing with it. Initially, the conversations start on an innocuous note, but eventually they bond over discussions about life and love. Gradually, he develops feelings for Samantha and starts treating her like a human. For Theodore, Samantha is as good as a "person" capable of loving and offering emotional comfort. A decade later, with AI companions floating around, the market is ripe for Samanthas, because it appears that the world is full of theodores.

A few decades ago, the proposition that machines might think and feel belonged to science fiction, but now it's a mainstream idea, espoused by many engineers, philosophers, and scientists.

Here's what Ilya Sutskever, one of the co-founders and Chief Scientist of OpenAI, tweeted

"it may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious."

If you’ve ever wondered why some of the smartest people in the world believe that AI could become conscious or is already, you aren't alone. Some call for AI rights and protection. At the outset, such beliefs can seem inexplicable. But in my view, it's important to examine the reasons for such considerations. Only then would it be possible to contest or support that line of thinking and that's my goal with this article.

As the title indicates, I contest that view. I take the view that the search for a conscious AI is a fad.

In order to buttress my view, I realize it's important to flip the pages of history and trace the development of this thought (That machines can think or feel).

So, in my article, I intend to do the following.

1. Contextualize this thought by charting out its history

2. Briefly discuss popular theories that offer credence to such thinking.

3. Share my view on why it's a fad.

Without further ado, let me begin.

A little bit of history

a. A journey through the Ancient & Medieval world

Time travel to most parts of the ancient or medieval world and the belief was that the world was divided into 2 realms. The superlunar realm - everything above the moon consisting of stars & heavens - and the sublunar realm - everything below the moon consisting of earth, humans, animals & plants. The gods resided in the superlunar world but also controlled forces in the sublunar realm, like thunder, lightning, and floods.

As part of this rubric of thinking, humans - across different cultures - believed in the idea of an immaterial soul (not made up of biological matter) made in the image of god (Particularly a christian view) as the animating principle of consciousness and life. While I've given the Christian example, most of the other cultures, be it the ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Vedic people, Greeks etc have had the conception of an immaterial soul that was different from the biological substrate (bones, tissues, nerves etc). Sure, there were other concurrent strands of thought, but this was the dominant thinking. This thinking is reflected in the philosophical doctrine of Vitalism which was popular in the medieval times.

here's a definition of Vitalism,

"There are many opinions about what vitalism actually is. In general, it is the doctrine that life originates in a vital principle, distinct from chemical and other forces. It is a belief that there is a vital force operating in the living organism and that this cannot be reduced or explained simply by physical or chemical factors."

In a nutshell, the dominant thinking until the middle ages was that god was the architect of both the external world - thunder, floods, lightning, nature in general - and the inner world - thoughts, feelings, emotions, with the animating principle life as the source for this inner world.

b. Scientific revolution, Enlightenment, & Empiricism

However, the advent of modern science, kick started by the Scientific Revolution, fundamentally transformed our thinking about the external world. It paved the way for a more evidence-based, naturalistic understanding of it. Advances in astronomy, physics, chemistry, and geology offered a completely naturalistic explanation of the external world. What was once explained in terms of god was now explained with mathematical laws.

Advances in the sciences influenced philosophy, giving birth to the age of enlightenment, which celebrated reason and empirical thought. Historians refer to this period as the "Age of Enlightenment" to highlight the contrast between a perceived "ignorant" past and a future driven by reason. In this period, knowledge was parameterized, which meant that for something to be regarded as knowledge, it had to pass through the filters of reason, logic, and experimental observations. In a way, the new paradigm killed the necessity for a god and a soul and necessitated everything to be explained mechanistically in terms of scientific theories and mathematical equations. [This is what I meant by 'knowledge was parameterized.' There was now just ONE way to understand the entire gamut of reality, through equations. If you want just one takeaway from this section, it's this one.]

But there was a catch.

The rigorous scientific framework applied to understand the external world did not seem to readily lend itself to unpack the workings of the inner world. The world of feelings, thoughts, and emotions. While one could mathematically describe the laws of motion or the behavior of electricity, describing human behavior mathematically seemed elusive. So, mind sciences (Psychology) was always regarded as a 'soft-science.

But scientists did not give up. Over the years, they came up with many theories and models to explain the human mind and behavior. It's beyond the scope of the article to cover those but some of the key ideas were structuralism, psychoanalysis, associationism, and behaviorism.

I’d like to touch upon behaviorism briefly - the precursor to today’s computational models - to set the stage and illustrate the scientific climate in the mind sciences before the advent of theoretical models that underpin AI.

c. Understanding human behavior: Behaviorism & its limitations

Behaviorism states that human behavior is a response to environmental stimuli. Developed and popularized by scientists like Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner, it holds that all behaviors are learned through conditioned interaction with the environment. Which simply means that you could condition animals or humans to manifest certain behaviors (like salivating) based on environmental stimuli (bell sound).

Pavlov's dog experiment is a must read to understand classical conditioning.

While it had a scientific approach to studying behavior (observation, testing, replication), behaviorism treated the human mind like a black box and focused entirely on external stimuli. It also did not explain cognition, memory, language, and other higher order functions. Chomsky, amongst others, criticized behaviorism for being too simplistic and believed that it did not capture the workings of the human mind and behavior.

While mind-scientists grappled with behaviorism, a new technology emerged. Computers. As computers transformed sciences, humans started seeing an interesting parallel between computers and the mind. Computers worked based on rules, representations, symbol manipulation, and feedback loops. What if the human mind also worked in the same way? This simple assumption paved the way for the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM) - one that gave birth to Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science.

Models that under gird Artificial Intelligence

a. Computational theory of mind

Warren McCulloh and Walter Pitts were a pair of Cybernetics that pioneered neural networks in the 1940s, and it's they who came up with the "Computational Theory of Mind". They were the first ones to suggest that the human mind functioned, at the neural level, much like a Turing machine. Both manipulated symbols, utilized feedback loops, had mental models etc. Essentially, they argued that human thought was just computation.

Quoting from Wikipedia.

"The computational theory of mind holds that the human mind is a computational system that is realized (i.e., physically implemented) by neural activity in the brain. The theory can be elaborated in many ways and varies largely based on how the term computation is understood. Computation is commonly understood in terms of Turing machines which manipulate symbols according to a rule, in combination with the internal state of the machine. The critical aspect of such a computational model is that we can abstract away from particular physical details of the machine that is implementing the computation. For example, the appropriate computation could be implemented either by silicon chips or biological neural networks, so long as there is a series of outputs based on manipulations of inputs and internal states, performed according to a rule. CTM therefore holds that the mind is not simply analogous to a computer program, but that it is literally a computational system."

They drew parallels between how a computer worked and humans worked. I'll break it down the way I understand it.

Assume you want to add two numbers: 4 + 5. What do you do? You refer to certain concepts, representations, rules. For instance, you need to be aware of the concept of numbers. You need to follow the rule that when adding, you need to combine. You need to manipulate symbols (i.e mentally transform representations).

Computers do just that. Representations in computers are just binary patterns. So, it represents the numbers 4 (0100) or 5 (0101) in binary form. Then, rules are encoded in the software w.r.t what addition means. Symbol manipulation is transformation of bit patterns (actual job).

This does not work only for numbers or other mathematical concepts. It can be applied to language as well where everything is broken into a series of tokens and operated on by mathematical rules and statistical patterns.

b. Information Theory

McCulloh and Pitts' work coincided with Claude Shannon's information theory which is the mathematical study of the quantification, storage, and communication of information. In common usage, we intuitively treat information as something that carries meaning. That's because we use language to communicate information, and

language consists of both syntax (rules and relationships) and semantics (meanings).

For instance, when I say, "I had breakfast".

a. There are rules that govern that statement, where "I" denotes the subject; "had" -the verb; and "breakfast" - the object.

b. There are relationships that govern the structure. Ex: Verb must be placed after the subject etc

Meaning arises from the interplay between rules, structure, & shared conventions

As long as we agree what "I", "had", "breakfast" mean (Individually and in relation to each other in a sentence), we can infer that the subject consumed a morning meal at some point in time and this information carries meaning.

But Shannon’s revolutionary idea was to strip meaning out of information entirely.

What matters is only the structure, the symbols, and the probabilities with which they appear. Therefore, information became purely mathematical devoid of meaning. In a way, he redefined information to exclude the need for a conscious subject.

Listen to it directly from the horse's mouth.

c. Marriage between Computational & Information theory

For this section, I am quoting from

"God, Human, Animal, Machine" written by Meghan O' Gieblyn

[Page 14, 15]

"Taken together, this early work in cybernetics had an odd circularity to it. Shannon removed the thinking mind from the concept of information. Meanwhile, McCulloch applied the logic of information processing to the mind itself. This resulted in a model of mind in which thought could be accounted for in purely abstract, mathematical terms, and opened up the possibility that computers could execute mental functions. If thinking was just information processing, computers could be said to "learn", "reason", and "understand" - words that were, at least in the beginning, put in quotation marks to denote them as metaphors. But as cybernetics evolved and computational analogy was applied across a more expansive variety of biological and artificial systems, the limits of the metaphor began to dissolve, such that it became increasingly difficult to tell the difference between matter and form, medium and message, metaphor and reality."

This is exactly how the belief that AI could become conscious started taking hold.

In other words, from the scientific revolution to modern computational theories, humans were gradually described in mechanistic terms (remember the death of god and soul), reducing us to mere machines so that machines could, in turn, be elevated to the level of humans.

Search for a Conscious AI is a fad.

I have 2 reasons to think it's a fad, with the second reason being the most important one. However, it's useful to understand my first reason as well.

a. It's just syntactic

First, I'd like to admit upfront that it's impossible to make objective proclamations about AI consciousness. Forget about AI, I cannot prove that the one reading my article is a conscious being and not a bot, because, as Thomas Nagel mentioned in his essay "what is it like to be a bat," consciousness is experienced from a first-person perspective, and that's why Turing-test was the benchmark to ascertain machine intelligence. So, I fully recognize that the question will always be an open-ended one.

Yet I have reasons to believe that AI isn't or cannot become conscious. Forget about consciousness, I argue AI doesn't 'understand' or 'reason' in the true sense of the word.

We can understand this with a thought experiment called the Chinese room - proposed by the philosopher John Searle.

A quick summary of the argument.

Searle asks us to imagine a person who doesn’t understand Chinese sitting in a room with an instruction manual in English, explaining how to manipulate Chinese symbols. Through the slot in the door, he receives questions in Chinese. Now, he does not understand what the question means, yet he's able to respond with the help of an instruction manual. From the outside, it appears as though the person knows Chinese, yet in reality, he's just following rules.

Searle argues that this thought experiment highlights that a computer program that simulates human understanding of language, such as a chatbot, does not truly understand the meaning of the language it is processing, and it's only following a set of rules.

Note: I am sure most of the AI models don't work only based on simple rules and show much more complex "behavior." They "learn" from patterns, “apply” statistical probabilities, and "self-correct." Agreed. But at its core, it is all math - linear algebra, calculus, probability etc and manipulation of these concepts.

But are these accompanied by any first person experience? When an AI predicts customer churn or a revenue dip, is it going to fear being fired?

Stockfish chess engine has defeated Magnus Carlsen. But did it care when the game got long. Did it experience the fear of losing, or the jubilation of defeating the greatest chess player of all time? We don't know. But it's reasonable to assume it didn't.

7 could be your favorite number. Perhaps because it's your daughter's birthday or your wedding anniversary day etc. The context or the semantics is what makes us humans, and it's logical to assume AI does not have it, because it is designed to preclude the semantics.

b. It's just the latest metaphor

Metaphors are popular in language usage. In science and technology, it serves to break down complex ideas into relatable concepts. Reading the history of science informs me that we have used metaphors to make sense of ourselves and the world around us and this metaphor depended on the technology of the day. Going by this line of thinking, the 'mind-computer' metaphor is just the latest metaphor.

Here are a few examples from history.

Clocks: Post the scientific revolution, the entire universe was compared to a giant clock to underscore that it worked in predictable ways based on the classical laws of physics. The clockwork universe became a popular metaphor at the time. In line with the idea, the metaphor was applied to biological functions as well. In “Treatise on Man”, René Descartes wrote:

“These functions (including passion, memory, and imagination) follow from the mere arrangement of the machine’s organs every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the arrangement of its counter-weights and wheels”

Telegraphs: With the invention of telegraphs, the brain was compared to telegraphs.

"Thirty years later, Ramon y Cajal used the telegraph network to explain the structure and function of a single neuron: The nerve cell consists of an apparatus for the reception of currents, as seen in the dendritic expansions and the cell body, an apparatus for transmission, represented by the prolonged axis cylinder, and an apparatus for division or distribution, represented by the nerve terminal arborisation. (Cajal, 1894). Cajal even used wiring as a way of explaining what was happening in the as yet unnamed synapse: current must be transmitted from one cell to another by way of contiguity or contact, as in the splicing of two telegraph wires”

Freud compared the brain to a steam engine while Descartes compared it to Hydraulics. In his essay, "Brain Metaphor and Brain theory", John G. Daugman vision scientist traces the history of different metaphors used to describe mind and body.

Back in my college days, I was good at Table Tennis. While my friends played with professional paddles that cost thousands of rupees, I played with a cheap one that was available in my local college store. I intuitively knew they had far superior ones, but never for a second did I confuse it with a tennis racket. But that is exactly what we are doing with AI. Confusing it with a tennis racket. Of course, AI systems are far superior than clocks or telegraphs, but it's still a machine. It's merely the latest technology in the long litany of technologies that the mind has been compared to.

Conclusion

When I set out to write the article, I did not really know where to start and what direction to take. I was tempted to reduce the length of this article by half without delving into the history and contemporary theories on Artificial Intelligence. But eventually, I decided to chart out the history of the development of this thought, because I deeply believe it's important to place every idea, theory or a scientific model in context.

The fall of medieval models, the rise of modern science, the Enlightenment, and concomitant intellectual movements were crucial for the development of this thought, because they changed our conception of knowledge and formalized the methods for acquiring it. Experimental science became the touchstone for acquiring knowledge. While it helped in unraveling the workings of the external world, it posed challenges in unraveling the inner world.

However, the computers (new technology) were revolutionary and with its rise, we saw our image reflected in them. With the advent of computational models (CTM, IT), the inner world, which remained a black box hitherto finally lent itself for scrutiny as these models provided a mathematical framework to study the mind, thus facilitating the birth of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science.

The spectacular success of these models in creating complex technologies has now led many of us to mistake (in my view) the metaphor for reality. Is the human mind just an information processing system? Is thought nothing but computation? Does consciousness not require a biological substrate?

The proponents of AI consciousness will shout out a big YES. But we have the benefit of learning from history and a reading of the history of science, mind science particularly, illustrates how the human mind was compared to various technologies of the day.

Given our history, I wouldn’t be surprised if, 300 years from now, the mind is compared to some new technology of the day that contains an entirely different conceptual framework, with its proponents insisting they have finally found the true explanation for how the mind works or what consciousness is.

And for this very reason, I think that the search for a conscious AI is a fad.

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A philosophical discussion on Morality: 3 different approaches and their shortcomings

Mon, 22 Jul 2024 22:17:12 +0530

Morals are stupendously complicated, because they are not clear-cut facts. Instead, they are value judgements. It's hard to explain morality, because it takes you into a regress. Let's do this: assume you roughly define morality as principles about RIGHT and WRONG, or GOOD and EVIL. Now, how do you define or know what is RIGHT & WRONG, or GOOD & EVIL.

You might instantly argue that one knows this intuitively. After all, how many times have you heard your inner voice telling you to act morally during a predicament? Possibly hundreds or even thousands. So, you must be inclined to believe that you know what morality already is.

However, nothing is common sense, intuitive, or obvious for philosophy and my goal with this article is to engage in a philosophical discussion about morality.

Across millennia, religious seers, scientists, intellectuals, and secular philosophers amongst others have ruminated about morality and have contributed to the large corpus of moral philosophy. The central challenge in moral philosophy, as famously articulated by David Hume - Scottish philosopher and a leading luminary of the Enlightenment - is deducing an 'ought' from an 'is'. What 'IS' is a fact, but what 'ought' is a moral judgment and this has spawned numerous schools of thought studying morality.

In this article, I will explore 3 such schools of thought and highlight what I perceive as some of the glaring shortcomings of each. So, without further ado, let me begin.

1. Religious Morality

Religious morality is a system in which religious scriptures serve as the guide for determining what is RIGHT and WRONG.

People who derive their morals from scriptures are typically believers and followers of major world religions. For them, their scriptures serve as the

toolkit for what is RIGHT and WRONG, because RIGHT and WRONG are associated with what is considered VIRTUE and SIN, based on the commandments of a deity or prophet (In Abrahamic context). In the Hindu context, scriptures serve as the basis for determining good or bad karma.

Christian apologetics is a particular area of interest for me. So, let me illustrate my point with an example. The idea that humans derive moral values from god is so strong amongst Christians that in fact the moral argument is presented as evidence of god's existence.

a. The moral argument

It goes like.
1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.

2. Objective moral values do exist.

3. Therefore, God exists.

The argument centers on the premise that in the absence of god, morals are merely subjective human judgements, and that it would not be possible, philosophically speaking, to objectively distinguish RIGHT from WRONG, GOOD from EVIL.

Yet, the argument goes, that we have an objective sense of RIGHT and WRONG. We all tend to consider certain things as objectively RIGHT and others as objectively WRONG, such as pedophilia or child sacrifice.

In the absence of god, the proponents argue, that any set of moral values one practices is arbitrary, because these rules are generated by humans as a consequence of our unique socio-cultural context, which implies they may not necessarily hold objectively true in all contexts. I have the strongest sympathy to this line of thinking.

I have further elaborated this idea under "Scientific morality." This line of thinking is however not bereft of counter arguments and criticisms. Below is one classic example.

b) Euthyphro's dilemma

Socrates was a great thinker and a philosopher and he posed the strongest challenge to religious morality (Although he challenged the religious morality of the Greeks). In a dialogue recorded by Plato, Socrates asks Euthyphro the following and their conversation on holiness and piety is now studied as Euthyphro's dilemma.

Is an action right because it is commanded by the gods, or do the gods command it because it is right?

Socrates' point was that if god commands something because it is RIGHT, then what makes something RIGHT is independent of god, and if one derives the notions of RIGHT and WRONG from god, then for god himself there's no distinction between RIGHT and WRONG. Which means good and bad are subject to god's whims and fancies.

In contemporary times, Bertrand Rusel, in his essay "Why I am not a Christian" gave the strongest counter argument to religious morality. While Christians have tried responding to Russell and his ilk's criticism, the floor is still open for debate.

Shortcomings:
Religious morality is not the same across different religionsand might even vary within different sects of the same religion. Christian morality might be guided by biblical and church doctrines, Islamic morality by Quran, Hadiths and Hindu morality by Bhagvad Geetha, Vedas, and Dharma Shastras. All these are different scriptures that make conflicting value judgements. To give a simple example, In Abrahamic faiths, idol worship is considered a sin, whereas it is a central practice in Hinduism.

Adherents of Abrahamic religions often address the challenge of religious multiplicity by asserting that their faith is the one true faith. However, I disagree with this claim, as I believe the question of which religion is true isn't a matter of objective truth in the same way as a mathematical equation. It's not a proposition that can be definitively proven true or false, like asking if 2 + 2 equals 5.

2. Scientific morality

In his famous Ted Talk 14 years ago, Sam Harris - one of the four horsemen of atheism - argued that science could answer moral questions. Common knowledge dictates that science does not concern itself with human judgments, which is the very definition of doing science. However, with his persuasive speech, Sam Harris almost convinced the audience about science's ability to answer moral questions. I call this the scientific morality.

Sam's primary motivation is to disentangle moral judgments such as RIGHT and WRONG from the fetters of religion.

To set the context, when we say a certain human action is RIGHT or WRONG, we are making judgments based on certain underlying axioms. The question is, what is the nature of these axioms? Let's take an example

Consider the act of stealing. We generally agree that stealing is wrong. But let's take a step back and ask two questions before making that judgment

Why is stealing wrong?
Is it possible to factually prove that stealing is wrong?

For the first question, if your argument is that we as a society mutually agreed that stealing is wrong, then you are not talking about morality anymore—you are discussing legality.

Ask yourself, if the majority decided tomorrow that stealing was right, would that make the act of stealing right? If you feel no, then there is much more to making those moral judgments. Would you then agree that what constitutes a moral value or judgment transcends what a particular society merely
agrees or disagrees on?

Regarding the second question, whether we can prove it factually, I say no. It's not possible. Think about this: what are facts? Facts are something real. There are trees, animals, and birds in the world. These are facts. Facts don't change based on our feelings or opinions.

In this context, let's say person A stole a 1000 rupees from person B. This is a fact as it conveys something real. But when you say such an act is "wrong," then you are making a "moral" judgment about a fact. Where is the pathway from fact to values? (Remember David Hume's Is-ought problem?). Further to my discussion earlier, the answer is not in what a society collectively agrees, if one wants to make an objective case for morality.

Traditionally, religions have provided the foundations for morality in all societies. But Harris intends to dissociate morality from religion and instead ground it in science.

How is he doing it?

For him, well-being is good and suffering is bad. Anything that leads to well-being is morally good, while anything that causes suffering is morally bad. These are his underlying axioms. How does he intend to scientifically measure well-being or suffering? By measuring conscious experience.

His explanation goes like this: We are conscious (alive) creatures and, we are capable of having certain experiences. These experiences can be scientifically measured (this is the important point to his claim) because our brain is involved in our experiences, and his argument is that with progress in technology, we shall be able to correlate brain states with experiences.

To simplify it, consider a table with two columns, labeled good experience and bad experience. Now, populate all the brain states in those two columns. With technology, we must be able to identify the brain states associated with good and bad experiences—that's his argument. A factual basis to determine right and wrong.

Shortcomings:

Even if we managed to hypothetically measure all the experiences, the categorization of what constitutes GOOD and BAD would still remain contextual. Meaning, you can only categorize the experience as good and bad, but there is no way to tell whether actions that led to such an experience is RIGHT or WRONG.

For example, throwing a convict in jail might lead to their suffering, but they might come out a better person as a result. This does not mean the act of convicting is a morally bad action. If your child is super naughty, you may try to discipline them with a rap on the knuckle. Now, being hit on the knuckle gives a bad experience, but doing such a thing can translate into something good for your child.

Therefore, what the brain may hypothetically convey is the nature of the experience, but not whether the action that led to the specific experience is good or bad, and there is no factual means to determine it. While I commend Harris for his valiant efforts, I feel his scientific morality lacks depth and is too reductionistic.

In my view, Scientific or secular morality cannot be conceived without further resorting to making a set of 'unscientific' axiomatic claims like "Every individual is inherently worthy of respect." or that "Human well-being is good" etc. The world we inhabit is deeply imbued with religious presuppositions, which the likes of Harris regard as a rational given.

3. Reciprocal altruism

In evolutionary biology, reciprocal altruism describes a behaviour in which an organism incurs a cost to its own fitness to increase another organism's fitness in the short term, with the expectation that the favor will be returned in the future.

In his seminal paper titled "The Evolution of Cooperation", Robert Trivers, one of the founding fathers of evolutionary biology explored the biological basis for cooperative behaviuor in animals, including humans. Trivers introduced the concept of reciprocal altruism, positing that individuals can increase their overall fitness by helping others, provided that the help is reciprocated in the future.

Some evolutionary biologists argue that human morality is fundamentally rooted in reciprocity.They suggest that moral behaviors evolved as key adaptations, forming the foundation of human social behaviour.

I am sure you'd have noticed the paradox. Evolutionary theory emphasizes survival of the fittest, which means reciprocal altrusim seems counterintuitive for an organism to act in ways that may reduce its own fitness. However, evolutionary biologists argue that human groups with individuals displaying moral behaviors fared better, enhanced their reproductive fitness, and passed on more genes than groups with selfish individuals and hence moral behaviors evolved to boost our survival chances.

Shortcomings

It occurs to me that our motivations to act morally goes beyond our own selfish interest. When you donate to a charity or help the needy across your street, I am sure it's not with the expectation to receive some kind of help in return in the future.

From an evolutionary standpoint, the beggar across the street has diminishing fitness because he's short in resources. How then does the expectation of reciprocity make any sense. Therefore, when someone donates to him, it's probably out of compassion and pity and not expectation of reciprocity.

I think most of us, when we act morally, do so believing that it's the RIGHT thing to do. Therefore, the evolutionary school of thought does not sufficiently explain our moral behaviors or factor in our motivations to act morally.

Putting it all together

Dostoyevsky once famously claimed that "If there's no god, all is permitted", encapsulating the religious point of view - in the absence of god it is not possible to distinguish RIGHT from WRONG without making certain axiomatic assumptions like "suffering is bad" etc. However, I discussed the shortcomings of this view. The challenge is in answering which god? Which set of injunctions?

I also discussed Sam's moral philosophy that can crudely be equated, in my view, with secular or humanist morality and underscored its limitations.

The explanation of moral behavior from an evolutionary standpoint is unconvincing too. If placing morality at the levitating feet of a deity seems problematic so is ensconcing it in human nature. If moral behaviors are merely adaptations that aided survival in the past (Individually or at a group level), then it's not possible to objectively argue that a certain act is RIGHT or WRONG for all times, because our landscapes have changed.

At the heart of my discussion is the premise that there are certain acts that are objectively GOOD and certain others that are objectively EVIL.

Perhaps this isn't the case. As Steven pinker put it.

" The scientific outlook has taught us that some part of our subjective experiences are products of our biological makeup, and have no objective counterpart in the world. The tastiness of fruit, the scariness of height, and the prettiness of flowers are features of our common nervous system. If our species had evolved in a different ecosystem, or if we'd missed a few genes, our reactions could have gone the other way.

Now, if the distinction between RIGHT and WRONG is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it anymore real? And if it's just a collective hallucination, how can we argue that evils like genocide or slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than distasteful to us."
- Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology, Harvard

Astika Darshanas a.k.a Indian knowledge Systems : A primer

Sun, 03 Mar 2024 20:03:12 +0530

Bharat has a very rich intellectual and spiritual tradition spanning more than 3000-5000 years. The intellectual, as well as the, spiritual corpus of the sub-continent is captured in the 4 Vedas.

What do the Vedas contain?
The Vedas contain the mystical/spiritual experiences of various Rishis. Most of these are in the form of mantras addressed to a deity or devata. The Veda also has a detailed description of rituals called Yajnas to attain. Apart from these, there are a large body of texts called the Upanishads most of which appear at the end of each Vedic recension (Of course there are exceptions) that discuss esoteric spiritual doctrines, like self-realization. Also discussed are a multitude of topics like morals/ethics for everyday living, Astronomy, Grammar, Ayurveda, Linguistics, Mathematics, Yoga and Spirituality. These spiritual ideas have been encapsulated into what is known as Darshanas.

Darshanas or knowledge systems
Many sages and thinkers had various views on what the Veda had to say in finality. As discussed above, these views over time started to crystallize into concrete systems of thought called “Darshanas”. The Sanskrit word Darshana literally means view or insight.

The Darshanas discuss various subjects, starting from physical sciences, logic, and philosophies of language, to theories of sound propagation etc. But mainly their focus is on alleviating or removing the pain of existence by applying epistemology, teleology, soteriology etc. In this article, I’ll be discussing those darshanas that rely on the 4 Vedas, or in other words, those that consider vedas as the pramana.

Note that the view Darshana is not same as the word Philosophy. “Philosophy” in the western tradition, is mainly intellectual and is done as an academic exercise, divorced from any spiritual underpinnings. It does not seem to concern itself with teleological problems, AKA in the Vedic tradition as attainment of Moksha or relief from existential problems. A darshana discusses existential problems and proposes solutions for the same. So, I will refrain from using the term “Philosophy” here.

There are 6 Astika Darshanas

Nyaya also called Anvikshiki or logic
Vaisheshika, the study of matter discusses physical phenomenon
Sankhya, enumeration or counting of various tattvas and through this separation of existence from matter, through intellectual enquiry alone.
Yoga, a practical application of Sankhya to attain kaivalya or
apavarga(Moksha)
Poorva Mimamsa, a hermeneutical system concerned with interpretation of Vedic statements, used for correct performance of Vedic rituals and to attain the fruits of those performances
Uttar Mimamsa, popularly known as Vedanta now, concerned with the relation of the Jivatma and paramatma and how can apavarga or Moksha be attained

All these 6 Darshanas are based on the authority of the Veda and hence called “Astika” as they accept the statements of the Veda like the existence of the Atma, Dharma etc. Note Astika does not mean the acceptance of a god as commonly understood. Some Darshanas do not accept a god or just barely mention his existence. This article is just a primer or an introduction to each Darshana and does not go into detail of each. That would need a separate article of its own. Neither is the concept of pramanas introduced here. It will be done in detail in another article. Each darshana is now being discussed. Note that it is difficult to historically attribute one person as the founder of a darshana and the sutras and commentaries are attempts to codify/systematize thoughts crystallized over centuries.

Nyaya
Codifiers/pioneers/commentators
Sage Gautama wrote the Nyaya Sutras, and his school can be called prachina or ancient school of Nyaya. Rishi Vatsyayana wrote a commentary for the same. Gangesha Upadhyaya and Raghunath Shiromani later developed what is called Navya Nyaya which is in vogue now. Tatvachintamani was composed by Gangesha which discussed Navya Nyaya principles. Annam Bhatta was another person who wrote the work called Tarka sangraha, which fuses Nyaya and Vaisheshika discussed below.

Core tenets

The Nyaya system (Literally meaning “Rules” or “Justice”) concerns itself with epistemology or what is called “Pramana” and logic, called syllogism in the west. Sage Gautama in the Nyaya sutras discusses the 16 categories called “Padaartha”. These sutras are called “Praachina Nyaya” or ancient Nyaya, which is different from Navya Nyaya in vogue at present. Naiyayikas (People who follow the Nyaya Darshana) hold that human suffering is due to the mistakes/defects produced by actions with the “wrong knowledge”. According to them, moksha is the gaining of the right knowledge thus being able to avoid pain in the future. Thus, this theory is based on realism.

Nyaya has contributed the “Five-part syllogism” as to how does one arrive at an inference, that involves

Pratijna, the statement to be proved
Hetu, the reason
Udaharana another similar example to the Pratijna
Upanaya reaffirmation
Nigamana or conclusion

All this to be discussed in detail later. Note the Dvaita Vedanta school is heavily reliant on the Navya Nyaya or “New school of Nyaya”

Vaisheshika
Codifiers/pioneers/commentators
Rishi Kanaata Kashyapa wrote the Vaisheshika sutras. One Shankar Mishra wrote a commentary for this

Core tenets
The Vaisheshika darshana is a naturalistic system. Vaisheshika accepts 7 categories of substances unlike Nyaya. The Vaisheshikas propose that the physical universe is reducible to the paramanu, the smallest atom. The entire universe is built up by a combination of various atoms. Worldly experiences arise from the spatial arrangement of atoms, their number etc. Many interesting phenomena like gravity, the absorption of water by plant stems etc are taken up for discussion. The Vaisheshikas propose that Moksha can be attained by a complete understanding of the worldly experience. The Vaisheshika sutras even advocate following the meditative practices of the “Yogachaara” school of Buddhism for Moksha.

In the 13th century after the CE Nyaya and Vaisheshika fused into a single school called Navya Nyaya resulting in the classical Nyaya darshana. This was the accomplishment of one Gangesha Upadhyaya of Mithila desha, though his book Tattvachintamani. Navya-Nyāya developed a sophisticated language and conceptual scheme that allowed it to raise, analyze, and solve problems in logic and epistemology.

Sankhya

Codifiers/pioneers/commentators

Sage Kapila was supposed to be the founder of this system and has written the Kapila Sankhya sutras. Ishvara Krishna composed a Vartika or a word-by-word commentary.

Core tenets

This darshana views reality composed of 2 independent principles

Prakriti, nature or matter, including the human mind
Purusha is the witnessing conscious entity. It is independent of matter and above the experience of the senses or the mind

When prakriti is in an unmanifested state, the 3 gunas Satva, Rajas and Tamas are in equilibrium. But due to some reason if prakriti comes into contact with purusha, mayhem starts and prakriti manifests into 23 tatvas.

1. Intellect
2. Ego
3. Mind
4. The five sensory capacities known as ears, skin, eyes, tongue and nose
5. The five action capacities known as hasta, pada, bak, anus, and upastha
6. The 5 subtle tanmatras, which are the seeds for the gross elements like space, earth, fire, water, air etc

Thus all human experiences can be considered as the interaction between prakriti and purusha. Ignorance of the Purusha that it is unattached with matter is the cause for suffering. Moksha consists of understanding that the purusha is independent of prakriti.

Sage Kapila is supposed to have composed the Sankhya sutras and Ishvara Krishna supposed to have composed a Karika for this.

Note that there are both theistic and atheistic schools of Sankhya. Generally, the Sankhya Sutras and Karika do not accept a god but accept mature individuals who attain to the level of gods. The Bhagavata purana teaches a theistic version of Sankhya adding “Ishvara” or God to the 23 evolutes of prakriti. Note that advaita and Vishistadvaita vedantas owe their existence to the sankhya darshanas as they accept many aspects of material creation. Advaita especially relies on sankya for the ideas of Avidya, gunas and the idea that moksha can be attained with intellectual enquiry alone.

Yoga

Codifiers/pioneers/commentators

Rishi Patanjali wrote the Patanjali Yoga sutras, for which, Rishi Badarayana wrote a commentary. There are other acharyas like Adinatha, the founder of the Hatha yoga school who wrote the Hatha Yoga pradeepaka.

Core tenets

This is one of the most presently popular darshanas especially in the west. Note there are different schools of Yoga like the Shaivite school, schools from various Agamas etc. But specifically, when Yoga is meant as a darshana, it is based on the yoga sutras of Patanjali. This is also popularly known as the Ashtanga yoga school, or the yoga of 8 limbs. The theoretical frame for the yoga sutra is Sankhya and the definition of moksha in yoga is the same as in Sankhya. The eight limbs are

1. Yama 2. Niyama 3. Asana 4. Pranayama 5. Pratyahara 6. Dharana 7. Dhyana 8. Samadhi

The 1st two limbs mostly prescribe the ethical and moral purity one needs to follow like, non-covetousness, control of senses, charity etc. Patanjali accepts an Ishvara, and he is characterized by his syllable “OM”. Ishvara pranidhana or dedication to Ishvara is one of the steps mentioned as part of Niyama. Note that Patanjali though mentions an Ishvara, he never mentions him as the bestowing moksha.

The 3rd step is the most popular one, again especially in the West where Yogahas become synonymous with Asana. Various complex poses are taught in the west, which are not mentioned by Patanjali. They are found in the Hata Yoga pradeepaka or the Geeranda Samhita, basically Hata yoga texts, which again are purificatory texts to make the aspirant fit for Ashatanga yoga. Patanjali only prescribes “Sukhasana” or just a comfortable pose for meditation.

The 4th step is pranayama which involves breath control.
The 5th step involves withdrawal of the senses.
The 6th step sublimating the mind such that it can contemplate steadily on the goal, without breaking. Just as when oil is poured the oil flows steadily without a break.

The 7th step is focusing the mind on the purusha. The last step is when the mind has ceased its vacillations and the Purusha alone shines forth, separated from Prakriti. This is the state of Moksha or apavarga or Kaivalya. At this stage the sadhaka is freed from the cares of worldly existence.

Note Patanjali Yoga sutras also discusses about various yoga siddhis or powers to be attained but those are distractions to the main goal.

Poorva Mimamsa

Codifiers/pioneers/commentators

The main pioneer for this school is Rishi Jaimini, the disciple of Rishi Vyaasa. He composed the Poorva Mimamsa sutra. Shabara Swamin, Kumarila, Bhatta and Prabhakara have written commentaries for the Poorva Mimamsa sutras.

Core tenets

This darshana is a hermeneutical school that concerns itself with the correct performance of various rites prescribed in the Veda to attain various fruits like heaven, progeny, wealth. Rishis Jaimini is the pioneer of this school, having composed the Poorva Mimamsa sutras. Among the four human purushartas or goals, this darshana concerns itself with a deeper enquiry of dharma. This school postulates that through Dharma one can attain higher regions of experience thus reducing the pain of earthly existence.

This darshan has developed sophisticated rules based on grammar and logic along with its own rules for sentence interpretation. Mimamsa is especially concerned with correct sentence formation. Whereas grammar or Vyakarana is concerned with the origin of words.

Note that Jaimini does not care much to discuss about moksha in the poorva mimamsa sutras or does not postulate the need for a God to disburse the fruits of vedic karma to their performers.

According to this school Moksha is an extreme state of absence of pain. Moksha can happen only when the individual soul has zeroed down its karmic balance. Thus, one should continue to perform his mandated Vedic rite without expecting fruits to keep sin at bay and avoid performing karma with desire. Thus, when the resultant karmic balance is zero, one attains moksha, a state where one is not born again.

After Jaimini and in the medieval times, many theistic schools of Poorva mimamsa came into being. Like Vedant deshikas “Seshvara mimamsa” etc. This school has a sophisticated language theory. This has resulted in this school being used in artificial intelligence. One such application is the usage of the tenets of this darshana to teach unmanned cars ethics, using what is called deontic logic. For more info, check here.

Uttara Mimamsa or Vedanta
Codifiers/pioneers/commentators

Sage Badarayana composed the Brahma sutras. Shankara codified the Advaita school, Ramanuja the Vishishtadvaita school and Madhvacharya the Dvaita school. All the 3 acharyas wrote commentaries on the Brahma sutras, Geetha, and some Upanishads.

Core tenets
This is also a very popular darshana in modern times, especially advaita Vedanta. This darshana mainly talks about Moksha based on the Upanishads, Brahma sutra and the Bhagavat Geetha called prasthana trayam. There are 3 main schools of Vedanta.

A) Advaita:

The most famous proponent of this darshana is Shankaracharya. He wrote a commentary from an Advaitic perspective for the Brahma sutras, Upanishads and the Geetha. Note that advaita existed even before Shankara. For example, it is evident from the Vaakypadiya text from Bartruhari the celebrated grammarian that, even Vaiyakaranas or grammarians followed advaita with some differences from the Shankara school. This school considers the Jivatman(Individual self) and the paramatman(Supreme self) to be one. Moksha is the realization by the Jiva that it is not limited and is not different from the paramatma in terms of consciousness. As per the Shankara school, worldly experiences happen due to the misidentification of the individual self with the body. Moksha can be attained now in this life by realizing that one is not the body but the eternal atman.

On losing one’s identity with the body one enters a state of tranquillity. Advaita can be theistic or atheistic as moksha is not dependant on an Ishvare. Shankar prefers a theistic approach, where the grace of God is needed to realize one’s own self as the “parabrahman”. Texts like the Yoga Vasishta explicitly state that such a realization is one’s own effort

B) Vishistadvaita

Ramanuja was the main proponent of this school and wrote commentaries for the Brahma sutra, Geetha and the Upanishads from a Vishitadvait perspective. But through the compositions of the Azhwars or vaishnavite saints, called Divya prabhandam, the school existed earlier than Ramanuja. This school is a theistic school of Vedanta as it posits that Ishvara can only bestow moksha. According to this darshana, the Jiva is an amsha of the paramatma, just like small sparks are an amsha of the main fire source. This school of Vedanta prescribes sharanagati or surrendering to Ishvara and a lifelong service to him. After the present life is over, the devotee reaches vaikuntam and enjoys the bliss of the lord, still maintaining his distinct identity with Ishvara.

C) Dvaita

This too is a theistic school and presupposes a God that can give Moksha. The main acharya of this school is Madhvacharya who again wrote a commentary on the Prasthana trayam from a Dvaitic point of view. This school is heavily based on Nyaya. This school consider the Jiva and paramatma to be entirely different. It mainly teaches the differences between matter, individual Jivas and paramatma. Moksha according to this school can be attained with the grace of Hari and Krishna Bhakti. After the present life ends the devotee attains the abode of Ishvara and each devotee enjoys bliss in proportion to the capability of the Individual jivas, the separation between Jiva and Ishvara intact.

Note each school of Vedanta has different sub sects and the purpose of this article is not to discuss those.

Conclusion
As stated in the introduction, the purpose of this article is to give its reader a brief introduction to the various Indian knowledge systems or schools of thought. The fundamental difference between Indian and western knowledge systems is that western philosophy is academic while our knowledge systems are spiritual in nature and character. Therefore, if you belong to any particular school of thought, you are encouraged to embody its core tenets and principles.

A hypothetical mechanism for free will

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 22:02:09 +0530

Introduction

The free will debate and discussion is a never-ending one - much like any other truly philosophical question, there is no possibility of a “true answer” but rather only an exploration of hypotheses that seem logically sound.
This essay tries to explore a hypothesis that can explain the mechanism of free will with a meager set of assumptions.

It may seem strange and pointless speculation to propose a mechanism for free will , but this is a thought experiment which I believe has some value towards demystifying it.

Most discussions of free will are stuck at the binary debate of its existence, but to go beyond that, I think the next logical step is to speculate about the “hows” of it.
We have no direct way to understand how free will works, so the best we can do is to try to propose a plausible mechanism for it, which requires as few assumptions as possible. In doing so I believe we can achieve more clarity into the concept of free will itself.

Before going into the details of mechanism, I will attempt to answer what I think are some fundamental questions about free will - I don't claim this to be the absolute truth, but I think these answers are quite satisfactory.
These are essential in order for me to get to the actual mechanism proposed

How can we define free will?

To begin with, free will is certainly only possible under a causal framework - causation implies an ordering of events.
In the simplistic view, causation implies the passage of time, since time is a natural universal order that we perceive, however the term causation can be interpreted more generally as a directed edge of a graph where events are nodes, and edges are causal relationships, but for this particular discussion, we will not go into that view.

All of physics is mostly about discovering mathematical equations or models that describe the change of some measurable property across the passage of time.
Perceived time is the universal standard - according to Einstein, the laws of Physics are invariant for all observers. This means that for two observers, even if each sees the other's time as dilated or compressed (i.e. the other seems to live slower or faster), they will observe that their their own subjective time, whether perceived, or measured by any local scientific instrument, does not change.

Our memories (and any device we can build that remembers things, whether it’s a clay tablet or a hard disk) depend on the notion of entropy increasing with time.
All thermodynamic processes have a natural ordering, with events of lower entropy appearing before those with higher entropy. Every time you record one bit of memory, the entropy of the universe increases just by the physical process of recording it.
This means that time itself for us is defined by what we are capable of remembering - i.e. only lower entropy states.

In short, free will, as well as determinism depend on the idea of time and the fact that some events labeled as “the present” are caused by some other events which are labeled as “the past”

All causation we can know of is temporal causation, but Determinism can be defined timelessly - you could say that all possible events in the universe preexist, much like an entire song on a vinyl record, which only becomes a sequence of sounds when read spirally by the needle.

Free will however, cannot be defined timelessly - since events should not preexist in any sense, until the free willed being causes them.

Thus, free will can be described as a mechanism of temporal causation, but which has to be distinct from the following.

Deterministic natural laws i.e. Classical physics - for e.g. the almost perfectly predictable movements of the balls on a pool table.
Non-deterministic natural laws i.e. Classical chaos - for e.g. the almost perfectly unpredictable movements of the ocean, which are technically governed by the known laws of physics, but involve an almost infinite number of measurements of infinite precision such that prediction is impossible.
Un-caused events i.e. Quantum indeterminacy - for e.g. a particle in superposition collapses into one observed state, out of several possible ones - Quantum theory proves that no prior set of measurements of anything in the universe, could even theoretically predict this collapsed state.

Note that for brevity, in the rest of this essay, the term “random” will refer to true randomness a.k.a. Quantum indeterminacy - as there is no other conceivable mechanism for randomness

To this we could add a fourth mechanism - a free willed event - which can be described as:

A being must have intended an event
This intention must be recorded in their memory or elsewhere physically
No objective measurement of any variable done outside of the record (mental or physical) can predict that event
The event occurs

The 3rd point requires the same kind of “infinite number of variables of infinite precision” measurement that is needed to predict classical chaos, so it is empirically quite unprovable, but then again, we are in the realm of hypothetical inquiry, where empirical possibility is not considered, but only logical possibility is.

If we accept this definition, much like Quantum indeterminacy, free will affects matter from elsewhere, somewhere far outside the limits of objective measurability.
It does appear as if something immaterial, unmeasurable and intangible, is affecting something material and tangible, but this is how Quantum indeterminacy works too.

Quantum theory tells us that one of realism or locality is false.

Locality means that things literally have to be in contact for them to affect other things - even forces that act over a distance like gravity are mediated by something moving across space at a finite velocity, and transferring momentum. In fact an object in contact with another only pushes it by virtue of virtual photons travelling from the former to the latter, creating a repulsive force between the electrons of both objects' atoms. The very concept of physical contact is nothing but messages (aka force carrying particles) being sent at the speed of light between objects.
If locality is false, it would mean anything could possibly cause anything across spacetime which would be quite an absurd and inconceivable state of affairs
Realism says that things exist independently of observers
If realism is false then you can have things that affect reality are not within measurable reality - like quantum states...

The choice most sane physicists accept, is to abandon realism and retain locality - Quantum states are from outside our reality, they don't exist until they are measured

I think it’s not presumptuous to think of free will also as a mechanism that is not within our perceivable reality.

I have deliberately worded the above such that there is no assumption that the being in question initiates the event physically.
For example if I say “I’m going to get a bottle of water”, one would not normally expect the water to appear in front of me.

But should we assume this? I would say that we should not.
After all, if free will triggers the nervous system to make me walk and get the bottle, why should free will not be able to synthesize a bottle of water out of whatever common substrate the material world is made of?
This is something we will discuss in a follow-up post in more depth.

Another aspect is whether intentions need to be declared - I would argue that conscious intentions are remembered, and hence declared at least in the memory of the free willed agent. Actions that you do not remember intending to, are indistinguishable from unintentional ones.

To summarize:

Free will is a mechanism that allows a being to cause an event, with the unique property that the only measurable prior that links to the event, is the declared intention of the free willed being.

How can we distinguish freewill?

By its very nature, one can never prove if a certain being exhibits free-will or not - because whatever is observed in any experiment could just be a predetermined result. This is ideal for classical physics theories, because the basic axiom of Physics is that every event has a predetermined result.

This same thing also applies to randomness, and there exists a hypothesis called super-determinism which posits that everything including the results of quantum measurements are already fixed.

In the case of freewill, we cannot even distinguish free-will from randomness - because by definition, you can neither explain the cause of random behavior, nor of free willed behavior. The best we can do is to define a behavior that cannot be replicated by a standard Turing machine or an enhanced one which also has random number generation.
After we do that, we can hypothesize about what kind of mechanism is needed to allow that.

Our thought experiment takes the form of a simple test - let’s assume 3 distinctive beings taking this test, for illustrations sake:

A completely classical/deterministic computer running a program, that is robustly designed never to be affected by quantum random phenomena (as almost every modern computer is), but crucially, cannot also rely on anything but an algorithm to generate a random number (as almost every computer prior to the 1990s).
Such a computer/program falls within the limitation of a Turing machine and cannot produce truly unpredictable sequences of numbers.
The best they can do is “Pseudo Random Sequence Generation” which relies on some external “seed" value to work
A materialist model human being - defined as what contemporary science believes that the human brain/mind is - i.e. a fairly deterministic genetically programmed brain, that has adapted by learning algorithms, but also subject to random behavior due to the chaotic nature of chemical reactions in the brain

Our hero, a free willed human being - you know how this feels, you don’t need any external metaphysical system, or religious belief to instinctively know that you can make a free choice - to be able to “Pick a card, any card”

We need to assume that for free will to be even worth discussing, it should be able to produce better results in the test than the best possible versions of the other two.
Note that all the above characters are goal seeking agents.
If a free-willed being's behavior can be emulated by a computer, then it is superfluous.
If it can be emulated by a random process, it is unlikely to reach a goal at all.
Hence we suggest that if at all freewill exists, it cannot be emulated.

Here’s how the experiment would go

A random maze with multiple entries and exits is created
The agents are instructed to pass through the maze
Points are scored for the shortest path

In order to keep things simple - these agents will not have any visual input, but only tactile, so that at any given point they only know how many immediate walls surround them. We also obviously assume that they have a persistent memory - i.e. they can remember whatever steps they took.

Now let’s look at how well each agent can theoretically do:

The deterministic agent can use the simplest algorithm - keep continuously touching the left (or right) wall and move forward (remember this the next time you are in a maze).
The logic is that any path through a maze divides it into two, and doing the above makes you traverse across one of the halves.
There is no other algorithm to do better than this on average, if there are multiple entries and exits - by the nature of this algorithm, one always enters the leftmost entrance and always leaves at the leftmost exit. If you have no randomness, there is no way to explore any shorter path even if it exists.
The materialist model human can adopt this same nice strategy, but by definition, they are bound to deliberately or involuntarily incorporate some randomness when moving.
This leads to a couple of things:

Potentially reaching dead ends and backtracking, and/or traversing every part of the maze in the worst case scenario
Potentially stumbling onto a shorter path which the first agent cannot do.

The free willed human must do something (discussed later) that lets them beat the first two agents on average

We’d run these agents through multiple random mazes ad nauseam, and see which had the lowest average distance traversed.

The deterministic algorithm will certainly beat the second agent, because the mazes are random - it will hit the shortest path once in a while, but the second agent will commit errors due to randomness. Adding randomness doesn’t help the cause for the second agent - I would certainly love to hear from any expert, if there is a way to add randomness such that the second agent can have any advantage.

Now, what I intend to propose is that, under my hypothetical description of the mechanism of free will, the “free willed” agent will perform the bext, and I will attempt to explain how it could.

How can free will beat computation?

From what we know about computation, or just from plain reason, there seems to be no way to outdo the deterministic program (if you know a better algorithm, it still doesn't really change things), but is it somehow possible to make this program do better?

Definitely - for e.g. with some relaxation of rules:

We can allow vision - this allows agents to see dead ends from afar and avoid needless backtracking.
We can give a spotlight view - like a real-time circular diagram of the maze centered on the agent - this allows discarding many non-optimal choices.
If this spotlight was as big as the maze, the perfect path will be trivially computable.

We see a pattern here - more information available about the maze allows a better outcome, and complete information allows the optimal outcome.

Consider autonomy - this is the level of robustness that a goal seeking entity has in resisting external influences. Computers are especially autonomous - they are physically designed in a way to be insulated from physical failures, and (usually) programmed in a way that rogue inputs are rejected.

The highest level of autonomy is present perfect free will - in as much as nothing can prevent such a being from reaching its goal.
Autonomy is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for free will - after all there is nothing free about making a choice, if you can’t execute it due to external circumstances. Also, the highly autonomous computer can only make choices at the points in the code where the programmer set it up as some function of the input data, or some random variable - hence its autonomy is merely towards executing the code without straying.

Now, we will actually delve into speculation and hypothesizing, but before we go down that path, let me establish some axioms that are necessary for further elaboration of my hypothesis.

The near future is uncertain and not predetermined
There are several alternate possible futures whenever a decision is made

Now, the maze we used was a spatial one, but what if we consider causal existence to be structured as a temporal maze?
We do live trapped helplessly in the present, with very little foreknowledge of what will come to pass, with not even an option to pause and plan, unlike in a spatial maze.
Much like the overhead view of the maze that spreads across space allows better traversal, a view that spreads temporally allows better traversal across the timeline

This brings us to the essence of my hypothesis as a one liner:
Free will is a mechanism that allows a being to gather information across time from multiple possible futures

Disclaimer: From this point onward, the rhetoric is purely opinionated, biased to my personal view of the universe. It can be considered a hypothesis, but I present it without any obligatory what ifs

The soul is a temporal conduit

Consciousness/Awareness is the substratum of the multiverse, a consciousness that transcends all spaces and times.
The individual consciousness is an undivided, yet somehow divided part of it, much like a wave, or Tsunami, or trans-oceanic current in the water.

Let’s consider that a microcosmic being, much like the macrocosm, has awareness too, but somewhat limited.

This limitation extends to:

The immediate present for inanimate objects - these behave like a deterministic computer, using only the current state of the world as an input
The immediate present and experienced/recorded past for living things - trees and most animals have the genetically encoded view of the distant past and their memory and conditioned learning of the recent past - together this drives their behavior
The immediate present, recorded past, as well as the extrapolated future - computers and artificial intelligence which fine tune the above mechanism, and have a concept of a directed goal seeking, an extrapolated future model, with some degree of self monitoring, correcting and self-training mechanisms

The fourth category is the free willed being whose consciousness extends not only to the experienced/recorded past, but also beyond that, and extends not only to the predicted/extrapolated future, but also the actual future. Something that extends and exists across a temporal period, not necessarily constrained by the physical form that it is attached to. This consciousness could be termed the soul.

If I, as a being, have access to the true probability of possible futures, I have a power that transcends computation, as well as those who have a shorter view of the future.
This information lets me behave in a manner that overcomes the limits of deterministic rules, while also not falling prey to random speculation about outcomes.
If the information crosses a longer span of time, I literally have the ability to control the future I would like to be in.

Something like this is often exemplified in fiction - whether it is the protagonist of Groundhog day living the same day over and over, till he has complete mastery over the events, or Dr Strange living out a dozen million possible futures so he can direct events into the one future he desires, in Infinity war.

Free will is essentially a temporal limb, the height your head extends over the walls of the infinite temporal maze, metaphorically speaking

Concluding thoughts

What else does this hypothesis explain or imply?

The process of growth towards the supreme consciousness is nothing but extension of awareness over larger and larger extents. A temporal lengthening of the soul so to speak, leading to disassociation with things related to shorter finite spacetime boundaries - whether it is material objects, human life, the lineage and species you were born as, the very spacetime bubble you live in.
The culmination is to extend to the entirety of reality, the Vaishvaanara or Viraat who is individual yet free of identity, aware of everything else and yet of nothing, since there is nothing else

The concept of higher Gods (as per Sanaatana) are nothing but beings who evolved their consciousness to transcend the lifespan of physical universes like ours.
The term Dheerga Darshin used by our ancients to refer to evolved persons suggests they thought on similar lines.
There is nothing sacred about biology or organic life - biological life is just one medium where computation, self awareness, as well as this cross-temporal perception can be channeled. There is nothing to say that some configurations of metal or silicon could not do the same.
Unlike the contemporary notion of consciousness being an emergent phenomenon of matter, rather it is that matter is merely an emergent objective manifestation of consciousness, which seems to channel itself as identity, free will and life, when it has a certain structure.
Since a soul identifies with some vehicle of experience i.e. a body, its choices are naturally limited to expression via that medium - hence no human can choose to fly like a bird. Free will is on a spectrum, and action is limited to expression in its medium.
Brahma could create many universes at will, but still cannot make a human body disobey gravity, because Brahma’s choice of making a creation with Physics inbuilt, limits it to not allow a levitating human. This is what our ancients termed Rta
Each level of consciousness has its own medium of expression, through which the formless churns out forms and actions.
The ultimate will of the supreme consciousness is to manifest in myriad unlimited ways - this is not unlike Max Tegmark's theory that every possible mathematical model that can manifest as a universe, does manifest as a universe

I believe that this hypothesis does manage to define free will unambiguously in a behavioral sense (namely outdoing Turing machines) and also provides a reasonable mechanism for this - information scattering backwards in time is/was a mainstream Physics hypothesis (Kip Thorne was one proponent)

Even leaving out the other metaphysical speculation which is b(i)ased on my personal beliefs, I dare say this definition is a valuable one

In a future post, I will try to take this theory further to its logical consequences.

Science has not killed god - Grounding belief in philosophy, logic and experience

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 19:25:52 +0530

Introduction

I love science, and I think it's been the single most important driver of innovation, technology and human well-being. What historically propelled science was our curiosity to understand, not just the world we inhabited, but also the heavens that eluded us (metaphorically speaking). While we looked around and tried to explain material phenomena, we also constantly looked above and contemplated larger questions - "How did all this come about", "Why am I here?", "Is there any meaning at all to life." Science, Theology, and Philosophy went hand in hand, and in its earlier incarnation, Science was referred to as Natural philosophy.

However, the advent of modern science, kick started by the scientific revolution, revolutionized our understanding of the world. Many of the entrenched, theological views (for e.g. the geocentric model) fell along the wayside, to pave the way for a more scientific understanding of reality. Advances in astronomy, physics, chemistry, and geology, culminating in biology (with evolution) offered a completely naturalistic explanation of reality. Science became the best model to explain everything, and continues to remain so. Such advancements gave rise to the practice of, what many philosophers call Scientism - a term philosophers use to describe what they view as science worship.

Those who practice scientism believe that science is the only way to know reality. After all, scientists like Neil deGrasse Tyson and

Hawking have explicitly dismissed philosophy, and I don't even have to describe what their attitude might be towards theology.

Today, an average person with a scientific bent of mind might think. "Aha.. Science has indeed explained everything."

I mean, why would they not think that way? After all, we believe that we have a cohesive narrative about everything - The big bang, formation of earth, origins of life, Cambrian explosion, modern human migration, agricultural revolution, founding of Civilisation, industrial revolution, present day. With this opinion, the person might think of the larger questions I had mentioned earlier irrelevant, or assume science has already answered. As a consequence, they might scoff at philosophy and theology.

But like every model, science has its scope & limitations, and that's my reason for writing this article. My aim with this article is not to diss science, or to diminish its power in enabling us to understand reality (who am I to do that!), especially considering all that we have accomplished because of science. My goal is to attempt to put science into proper perspective, and in the process highlight certain key areas where the scope of science might be limited, particularly in relation to answering the larger questions about life.

Consequently, I'd like to argue that the idea of a metaphysical power being the source of everything is still relevant and worth contemplating. In my endeavor, I've tried my best not to appeal to theology, unjustified faith, or mindless belief. Rather, I've formulated my arguments by referring largely to philosophy, logic, and experience - Insofar as I understand these two disciplines. Before I set out to elaborate on my arguments, I'd like to begin by discussing modern science and how it's done.

How is modern science done?

Modern science is characterized by the scientific method. The scientific method involves following a set of practices.

1. Make an observation: You observe a pattern in the world.

2. Ask a question: Why does it behave that way?

3. Form a hypothesis: Make an educated guess that entails a testable prediction

4. Experiment: Conduct experiments to test your prediction. If a prediction turns out to be incorrect, refine the hypothesis, and if it turns out to be right, test more.

5. Test more: Subject your hypothesis to further rigorous testing, and if it still stands the scrutiny, generalize

6. Induction: Generalize and form a theory based on inductive reasoning.

The Scientific method and its central feature

The central feature behind this method is its ability to be falsified. According to Karl Popper, scientific theories are characterized by future predictions that can invalidate the theory. This feature, in Popper's eyes, distinguished science from pseudo-science. Here's Popper's account of why the theory of general relativity is science, whereas Freud's theory of psychoanalysis and marxists' theory of history are pseudo-science. In a nutshell, Newton's theory of gravity or Einstein's theory of general relativity made specific predictions, which if it did not agree with observations, could've been proven wrong, as with how Newton's theory of gravity was indeed proven to be an incorrect account of gravity. Whereas any behavioral phenomena could be retro-fitted into Freud's model of psychoanalysis. Popper thought this was a problem. Given Popper's observations, we can infer that scientific theories are subject to change.

Thomas Kuhn, a historian and philosopher of science, made similar observations about science. In his book philosophy of science, Samir Osaka discusses khun's views on science. In Khun's opinion - Paraphrasing from the book,
Many think that science progresses towards the truth in a linear fashion. They believe that incorrect ideas get replaced by newer, correct ones, thus later theories are objectively better than earlier ones, and hence, scientific knowledge accumulates over time.

But this is not how science works. Science is practiced based on an established paradigm - a set of axioms, assumptions, and methods embody a paradigm. A paradigm is accepted when its theory comports with a particular set of empirical observations (it holds true for a set of facts about the world). However, a paradigm will always have anomalies (a set of observational facts that it can’t explain). Over time, the anomalies accumulate and the paradigm becomes untenable. This gives rise to a new paradigm (Scientific revolution) that’s markedly different from the earlier one, which helps scientists explain all of the empirical facts from the earlier set and the new set.

The central point is, with new tools, new approaches, and new pieces of information, scientific theories are bound to change. So, they don’t necessarily offer true descriptions about reality, but they offer convenient explanations for our empirical observations! With this context, let me set out to make some arguments which have been historically made for the existence of a higher source of truth. While there are many more such powerful arguments, I have chosen the below - primarily because I believe they have good explanatory power.

1.The Kalam Cosmological Argument

Thomas Aquinas made 5 arguments to prove god's existence. The first four are collectively referred to as the cosmological arguments. However, I'd like to discuss its variant - The Kalam cosmological argument, which was propounded by Al-Ghazali - a twelfth century Muslim theologian and later explicated by Dr. William Lane Craig, who I profoundly admire.

Premise 1: Everything that begins to exist has a cause.

Objection

Quantum particles can come into existence from nothing.

Scientists like Lawrence Krauss maintain that quantum particles frequently pop in and out of existence from nothing.

Response 1

In his review of Lawrence Krauss's book, Here's what David Albert, B.S., Physics, Columbia College; Ph.D., Theoretical Physics, The Rockefeller University wrote.

"And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings — if you look at them right — amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing." - Review by David Albert

According to Hilbert, Krauss argues that quantum particles pop in and out of existence because of the fundamental physical laws that govern relativistic quantum field theories. However, Hilbert argues that does not constitute nothing.

"The fundamental physical laws that Krauss is talking about in “A Universe From Nothing” — the laws of relativistic quantum field theories — are no exception to this. The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields. And the fundamental laws of this theory take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of those fields are physically possible and which aren’t, and rules connecting the arrangements of those fields at later times to their arrangements at earlier times, and so on — and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story."

Response 2

Dr Craig tackles this problem in his own way and gives 3 reasons to support the 1st premise. To summarize his responses, Dr Craig argues that we have no good reasons to believe that something can come out of nothing and reckons such arguments an appeal to something worse than magic. So, Krauss and his proponents fail to establish how something can come out of nothing. In other words, they fail to provide a logical explanation for how something can come into existence without a cause.

Response 3

In order to show that something can come out of nothing, it's imperative to establish that something can be one of the consequences of nothing. But nothingness has no properties and hence it cannot yield any consequences. Therefore, it's not logically plausible for something to come out of nothing.

Premise 2: The universe began to exist (which means, it’s finite in time, size and space)

Objection 1

The universe always existed and will always exist.

Response 1

This implies that the universe had an infinite past. However, infinite regress of events, Craig argues, would lead to all kinds of absurdities, as he explains with this Hilbert hotel example. Here's another explanation for why infinite regress is logically not possible in the following.

Paraphrasing from the video:

If we had an actual infinite universe, then it would not be logically possible to reach the present. We reach the present by successive additions, one moment of time is added by another moment of time and then added by another moment of time. But if we have an infinite past, if we could go forever into the past, then there is no point we can begin to add moments in order to reach the present.

Assume you set out on a journey to your home, and your home was an infinite miles away. No matter how long you walked, you will never reach your home, as you'd still have to cover an infinite amount of distance. The same applies when you traverse the past. If the past is infinite, then no matter how much time has passed by, you will never reach the present moment, because it would take an infinite amount of time to come to the present. But we are in the present moment. So because of this we have to reject an actual infinite universe and the possibility of infinite regress.

Response 2

We know from our existing cosmological theory, which we refer to as the Big bang that the universe had a beginning. I think it'd be unnecessary to discuss the evidence for the Big bang in this article. So, I leave it at this.

Objection 2

Our universe is part of a multiverse - a cyclic set of events that cause the Big bang,the death and destruction of the universe, followed by another Big bang.

Response 1

Who created the multiverse? We discussed how infinite regress of events is not plausible. Therefore, there must have been a first cause.

Response 2

Why is there something at all and not nothing?

Objection 3

We need to take it as a brute fact that the universe exists.

This line of argument was propounded by Betrand Russell and Sean Carroll

Response:If we have to take it on faith that It's a brute fact that the universe exists, why not take it on faith that God created the universe?

Let me summarize the premise 1 and 2 of the Kalam Cosmological Argument.

Everything that begins to exist has a cause
The universe began to exist

Therefore, the universe has a cause for its existence. Now, let's discuss the nature of the cause. Let me make 2 more arguments.

1. A finite system (Universe) cannot cause itself into existence.

You don't see objects and things around you cause themselves into existence. Both living and nonliving things don't cause their own existence. The universe is made up of only living and nonliving things. Therefore, it's reasonable to argue that the universe could not have caused itself into existence.

2. No properties (Space & time) of a system (Universe) can cause the system to come into existence.

The CPU, RAM and ROM don't cause the computer to come into existence. Our hands and legs don't cause us to come into existence. The properties of both living and nonliving things don't cause the living and nonliving things to come into existence. Because the universe is made up of living and nonliving things, it's logical to argue that no properties of the universe could not have caused itself into existence.

Therefore, it follows that the universe had an external cause.

Since the universe is finite in space and time, and since it had an external cause, it's reasonable and justified to posit a single uncaused cause of the universe, Infinite in space and time.

2. Freewill

In this section of my piece, I purport to do the following

Explain why the debate about freewill is important
Articulate why it's inconsistent with science
To make an argument that freewill exists (Although it's inconsistent with science)
Argue that we derive freewill from a metaphysical source

Any discussion about freewill must begin with the definition of the term. While philosophers have debated its actual definition, I go with a simple and a relatable one. Freewill, in my view, is the capacity that enables conscious beings to make choices. It's the idea that we are presented with different choices, and that we can will to pursue any of the choices. Think about walking to the pantry to grab a cup of coffee. If you had freewill, it would imply that you willed to get up from your seat and walk to the pantry to drink the coffee. With the term freewill, I obviously don't intend to mean we are unconstrained in every way. We are certainly constrained by various environmental variables. But that's not how I am construing the term. For me, freewill is about having the capacity to make a choice, regardless of whether that choice enables one to achieve a desired outcome.

A) Why the debate about freewill is important

The idea that humans have freewill is essential to how the world functions. Our legal, political, and social systems are predicated on the idea that we have freewill. I mean, why send someone to prison, if they were already determined to commit a crime? "But hey, why is there a debate about freewill, isn't it obvious that we have one?" If you have this question, read on. The idea that we possess freewill might seem rudimentary to readers, but turns out that it's not.The idea of freewill is inconsistent with science.

B) Why the idea of Freewill is inconsistent with science.

Whenever I come across a science worshiper, I pose the question of whether they believe in freewill. Most - in my experience - have said yes, and have been perplexed completely at my retort that their view was untenable. Freewill does not make sense from a scientific standpoint. Let me explain,

Science teaches us that we are made up of matter at a fundamental level. Atom is a unit of matter that contains particles like quarks, leptons, electrons, etc. Now, these particles obey the physical laws. This means, all our actions, thoughts, decisions and everything are determined by the physical laws. And they have been determined - not now, but even before we were born, even before our species existed, even before any living things existed, even before our earth existed. In a nutshell, the totality of everything (I literally mean everything from the beginning to the end) is already determined at Big bang.

Robert Sapolsky, neuroscientist at Stanford, explains this idea in his new book Determined: Life without freewill. Here's his interview in which he discusses his new book. I have skimmed through his earlier book - Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst,

where he goes into comprehensive detail as to why we don't have freewill. Not just Sapolsky, but many other scientists who I admire, like Brian Greene, theoretical physicist and mathematician at Columbia university and Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard, maintain this position. Why do many scientists think this way?

Because since matter came into existence after the big bang, it's been governed by the laws of physics - At the macroscopic level, it's been governed by cause and effect or what we call the principle of causality and at the microscopic level, by quantum indeterminacy . So based on this view, every action, every thought, every decision that you take is contingent on an earlier cause, which itself is contingent on the earlier one - all the way till the Big bang.

However, freewill - by definition - requires you to break the causal chain.You cannot freely will to do something, if your actions are contingent on earlier causes. Hence freewill does not exist from a scientific point of view.

C) Argument for why freewill exists

The notion that we are a bag of particles obeying the laws of physics (by which we are determined or indeterminate) comes from the idea that we are made up only of matter. It also stems from a pompous view that anything that can't be understood or explained within a scientific context must be discarded or must be false. Let me first explain why science is not the only framework to make meaning about reality.

There are different ways to make meaning of the reality we experience.

1. Empirically: Observing, hypothesizing, experimenting and testing and generalizing. The scientific enterprise is built around this form.

2. Deductively (Via logic):

Premise 1: Josephs is a boy's school

Premise 2: Person X studies in Josephs

Conclusion: Therefore, it logically follows that Person X is a boy!

3. Mathematically: Mathematical statements like 1+1= 2 are logically necessary truths that are not contingent on the empirical world. In other words, mathematical statements like 1+1=2 don't depend on our existence or physical objects to be true.They would be true whether we existed or not, within the formal framework (here integer arithmetic) that they are part of.

4. Only intuitively (via first person experience): All your conscious experiences like - pleasure, pain, joy etc can only be learnt via experience. One can't conduct experiments to demonstrate, or mathematically offer proofs, or logically deduce the sweetness of sugar. Conscious experiences can only be known intuitively!

So, the point is - The scientific framework is not the only framework with which to understand reality. When you can't scientifically understand something that you deeply experience everyday, it's not prudent to dismiss it as a mere illusion, without entertaining the possibility that science may not be the right framework to understand that experience. It's unintelligent to assume science can explain everything or plainly discard other things as untrue, false and illusory when you can't explain it via science.

Now, coming to freewill. I don't think freewill is a consequence of physical processes (matter). I have reasons to believe that freewill exists, and it flows from the idea that we have a metaphysical Self, and this Self is imbued with freewill. Here's my argument for the self and how it gives us freewill.

Life and death - Argument 1 for Self

Let's assume for a moment that we are made up only of matter. Then technically, it must be possible to bring someone back to life. Why have we not managed to bring anyone back to life with all the advancements we have made in science? We refer to someone as a being, and a second after their death, we call them dead. What changed in that split-second. I am sure there was no considerable change in matter - In the sense, the heart may have stopped beating, oxygen supply to the brain might have got cut off, cells might starve with lack of oxygen, but the heart, brain and other matter particles are right there. They haven't perished, yet something seems to have left the body. It's become so fancy to compare humans and machines. If life and death are solely a consequence of physical processes, then we must ideally be able to fix humans and bring them back to life, much like how we fix a machine and make it work.

Reflection - Argument 2 for Self

Reflection is a capacity to contemplate about oneself - about one's actions, desires, motivations. It's the aboutness. I can think about my vacation. I can think about my piano performance. In other words, it's not merely standard awareness of the world, but an acute self-awareness of your situation in the world- the capacity to reflect on one's own mental states and make judgements. For instance, assume you are with your group of friends, and they crack a joke on you that makes you angry. You have the capacity to reflect on the situation and act in a particular way (moving away from that place). We are aware of our mere existence unrelated to any other objects. Any physical object or matter in general, does not have intentions. If you don't agree, try to strike a conversation with your study table.

Conscious experience - Argument 3 for Self

I have discussed this argument in detail under Consciousness.

Why can't the Self be an emergent property of matter, much like how water is an emergent property of H20? because, if it were an emergent property of matter, we must be able to measure it. If you call the idea of Self an illusion, then you need to contest my arguments and provide a reasonable explanation.

Believing in a Self seems more reasonable to me than believing that we are made up only of matter. To deny Self - in my opinion - is to deny one's existence and one's everyday experience of life. Since the Self is immaterial, it's not necessarily bound by physical laws, and because freewill is a property of self, it follows by necessity that freewill is not bound by physical laws, and our everyday experience stands as a testament.

However, the Self is characterized by its finitude and contingency, because

1. The Self does not contain within itself the ingredients needed to sustain all lives.

2. The Self is also limited to a particular conscious being, so it cannot be the reason for freewill of all conscious beings.

3. The Self is not a necessary thing. The world would exist without conscious selves with only non-living things.

Therefore it's reasonable to posit that the contingent Self must be contained within a metaphysically necessary, unbounded Self.

Let me summarize.

1. I explained why science is not necessarily the only way to understand reality.

2. I made a couple of arguments for a metaphysical Self.

3. With those arguments, I made a case for why the Self is metaphysical (Can't be grounded in physical processes)

4. I made a case that freewill logically follows from the Self because the idea of freewill is also metaphysical.

5. I explained why the Self is finite and contingent and therefore concluded that as a matter of metaphysical necessity, it's reasonable to argue that the Self be contained in an unbounded Self.

3. Consciousness

In this section, I intend to do the following

1. Define the idea of consciousness as construed largely in the west

2. Explain why is there a debate about consciousness

3. Make an argument that it can't be understood from a scientific perspective.

4. A metaphysical case for consciousness

Consciousness is a much debated subject in Philosophy of mind. Like freewill, consciousness is a loaded word with multiple interpretations. For our purposes, I’d like to define consciousness as an internal experience we have of the world. Everything that happens to us happens in our consciousness. We experience the beauty of painting, the sound of music, the fragrance of flowers, and the taste of food in our consciousness. In a nutshell, we experience the world around us in our consciousness - at least according to my understanding of how many philosophers in the west view consciousness. The nature of consciousness has been a subject of debate since the time of Plato and Aristotle. In recent centuries, the discussion has taken a new life in the writings of Descartes, particularly with his Cogito ergo sum (I think therefore, I am) and mind-body problem a.k.a. Cartesian dualism - which is central to the debate about consciousness.

A) Why is there a debate about consciousness?

It matters because consciousness seems to elude our understanding of

What it is - Is it a substance? or is it non-physical?
Its relationship with the physical world - how does it affect change in the physical world?
Its centrality in human experience - why there is “something it is like” for a subject in a conscious experience? and why a subject experiences a specific type of experience.

Let me explain,

The conventional scientific view is that we are made up only of matter. Matter possesses physical properties like shape, size, mass etc. These physical quantities can be observed, measured, tested and understood. But we also have experiences which appear to be non-physical in nature. Is it possible to measure the size of pain or test the mass of joy? These are qualitative experiences that don't have physical properties, and they are experienced only subjectively, and in consequence, seem to be happening in a world of their own. But the catch is, the phenomenal and the physical seem to interact. When I hit my leg against a wall (physical process), I can experience a conscious state of pain (phenomenal experience). Conversely, I can jump in joy, scream in fear, and shout in anger (phenomenal state causing physical activities). The physical process and phenomenal experience seem to be in different worlds, yet they interact, and that's what has given rise to the debate about the nature of consciousness.

B) Science may not explain consciousness

You might've noticed that in the earlier paragraph, I mentioned that the physical and phenomenal worlds seem to interact. You might wonder "What's the mystery here?" phenomenal experiences are caused by physical events. After all, we have neurophysiological explanations for experiences like pain. Scientists and many philosophers argue that phenomenal experiences like pain, joy, love etc are contents of consciousness, and with advancements in neuroscience, cognitive psychology and other branches of brain science, we must have a complete understanding of consciousness.

Those who make such arguments miss a crucial point. The explanation surrounding the nature of consciousness can be classified into 3 categories: The what, The how and The why. Scientific explanations can only provide answers (hypothetically) to 'The what' and not the rest.

The what

There is definitely a correlation between physical states and phenomenal experiences. For instance, I feel really fresh after a half hour evening swim, and very relaxed after a few minutes of practice on the piano. Now, I am sure we can do studies to understand why this happens. For instance, someone can do a detailed study on how swimming can boost your mood, and offer explanations for every single neurochemical process that takes place during swimming and correlate that with the experience of feeling fresh.

I am willing to even entertain the idea that in the remote future, we could have a super computer that could potentially map the physical properties of a person (atoms, electrons etc) in terms of neurochemistry and neurobiology and explain what the person is experiencing at the moment. (It's highly improbable, but within the bounds of logical possibility)

But that's not the point in the debate about consciousness. The points are 'The how' and 'The why'

The how

To put it simply, how does matter with physical properties correlate with a subjective conscious experience. This is what must be explained. Let me illustrate my point with an example.

Consider this thought experiment.

Assume you are walking towards your home after a hectic day at the office. As you are walking, you realize you have an important call to attend right now. Hurriedly, you pick up the phone, open the meeting app, and connect to the call. Since you are too focused on the call, you fail to notice a large wall in front of you, and you eventually ram into it with full force. You had a terrible crash and are in excruciating pain.

At this moment, if someone journeyed through your brain and body, what would they witness? They might witness certain physical processes like blood capturing oxygen, sugars being burned, DNA being constructed, neurons forming synaptic connections, and probably physical processes associated with pain. For the sake of argument, let's assume they witness the entire gamut of physical processes that are happening in your body at that moment.

Now, would they be able to experience your pain? Logically, it seems no? They technically have more information about your internal state. Yet, only you have the subjective visceral experience of pain. Only you know what it means to 'feel' the pain. So, where does this experience (feeling of pain) come from? My example is a variation of Mary's room or the Knowledge argument.

Science can probably never explain this because matter contains only physical properties like mass, size, electric charge etc. But pain is a subjective feeling. How things translate from a physical level of mass, size, or charge, into a phenomenal level of conscious experience is something science can never explain. Why are physical processes ever accompanied by experience? This is also referred to as the hard problem of consciousness. Even if scientists ascribe subjective qualia to matter, you can't really test the qualia using scientific method. Hence, the attempt to explain consciousness in scientific terms might prove to be futile. As I mentioned earlier, scientists can, at best, explain what neuro-physical processes are correlatedwithcertain experiences. But this still begs the question of where that experience comes from?

The why

Why are physical processes accompanied by specific phenomenal experiences? Why should the feeling of pain feel that specific way as opposed to the feeling of joy? Earlier, I shared an article that explained the neurobiology of pain. Why should that particular neurobiology correlate with that specific experience of pain and why couldn't that correlate with happiness or another phenomenal experience? Again, I don't think this question belongs to the domain of science. Which again proves, science is not the right tool to understand consciousness.

Metaphysical case for consciousness

My argument will be similar to the one I propounded for freewill. I have good reasons to believe in an immaterial Self that is imbued with freewill, and consciousness. Let me summarize my reasons.

1. Science can never explain consciousness, as I have explained in the earlier paragraphs.

2. Unlike freewill, one can't call consciousness an illusion - one needs to be conscious even to say that.

3. Nothing is more real than consciousness, yet it cannot be explained in terms of matter.

4. If we go with the assumption that we are made up only of matter, then we must not have a subjective experience. Yet we have!

5. Therefore, consciousness has to be explained from a non-physicalist perspective.

6. It's reasonable to argue that we have a Self - that imbues us with freewill and consciousness - as I have discussed in the earlier under freewill.

However, this consciousness of the Self is finite and contingent, as it's the source of only an individual's phenomenal experience. It's contingent because the world would still function without this individual consciousness. Therefore, it's reasonable to posit that the finite, contingent consciousness must be contained within a metaphysically necessary, infinite consciousness!

Piecing the threads together

I can't emphasize enough that my aim is not to challenge science, but Scientism - science worship that makes people scoff at other endeavors of inquiry. I genuinely believe that science, by no means, has had its final say on the biggest questions humanity has pondered since ages, and I have tried my best to articulate my reasons. In no way do I claim to have proven anything with 100% certainty through my arguments. My intention with this article is to sow the seeds of curiosity in the minds of people who practice scientism and encourage them to embark on a seeking journey of their own.

My opinion is the following.

The domain of freewill and consciousness is perhaps the domain of God. I posit this, because there is no objective way of explaining any of the 3 from a scientific standpoint, yet, in my opinion, our everyday subjective experience corroborates the existence of at least the first two, although science - by its very nature - disallows the possibility for the existence of freewill and it cannot explain consciousness (especially the how and the why). Does this situation render consciousness and freewill any less true? Is my experience of rose's redness an illusion? Was my idea of writing this post predetermined at the time of the Big bang?

Is it the case that the scientific means of 'KNOWING' just does not map on to the subjective domain of human 'EXPERIENCE'? I am inclined to believe that it's the latter. If the subjective is exclusive from scientific means of knowing and if people are in relation to God in their subjective space, I don't see why there must be a compulsion to prove the existence of God. God could very well be a reality that perhaps cannot be empirically demonstrated, mathematically proven, or even logically deduced, but only subjectively experienced!