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Abstract
The current scientific framework for
the investigation of consciousness is the end-result of the Western intellectual
tradition. It is shown that this tradition can be re-examined in terms of
the Hindu concept of jnani, and that this approach could form the
basis of a first-person science of consciousness. Electronic arts practitioners
are presented as those who carry out a systematic inquiry into the subjective,
and are well-equipped to contribute to the debates on consciousness.
Keywords: consciousness, philosophy, jnani, Hinduism, third-person
science, first-person science.
Introduction
At the 2nd 'Towards a Science of Consciousness' conference in 1996 I sat
next to a brain surgeon who remarked that most of the speakers were on the
wrong track: he could tell them how consciousness is produced. As
a brain surgeon he knew the precise combination of chemical and neurophysiological
conditions in which a patient was conscious, and those in which they were
not. This is a materialist, non-dualist viewpoint which regards consciousness
as an emergent phenomenon. Previously consciousness was regarded by the
materialists as an epi-phenomenon, or by the dualist philosophers such as
Descartes as independent of matter, and brought into relationship to it
via God. Since the ascendance of science such dualism became intellectually
untenable, and a scientific investigation of consciousness thought unfeasible
until the late 20th C. The 'new' physics (primarily quantum theory) has
made it possible to re-open the debate, because of a new emphasis on the
observer in scientific experiment.
However at the heart of the debate is the question whether consciousness
is open to scientific investigation at all. The difficulty can be expressed
as the 'zombie problem' where the zombie is defined as: 'a behaviourally
indiscernible but insentient simulacrum of a human cognizer' [1]. The
zombie has been a useful tool in consciousness studies, partly as a theoretical
point of reference, and partly because engineers can go ahead and build
one in the hope of analysing its point of departure from the human. Others
believe that it is only a special property of the human brain that gives
rise to consciousness, perhaps related to quantum mechanical effects in
the microtubules [2]. The reverse-engineered zombie, and the quantum investigations
are just two approaches to the understanding of consciousness, but whatever
the results, they will tell us nothing about consciousness as we know
it from the inside. It is an awkward but irreducible fact that only
one's own consciousness is available for direct investigation in other words
every one else is a zombie. All the usual reasons for attributing
consciousness to others empathy, common sense, even love fail the criteria
for acceptance as scientific evidence.
My thesis is that consciousness is a suitable subject for a first-person
science, a science of the subjective, and not for a third-person science
[3].
To explore this proposition I shall examine the Western intellectual tradition
from an Eastern perspective, using the concept of the jnani.
Background concepts
In ancient times and up to surprisingly recently, the Western intellectual
tradition was bound up with religious thought. The key distinction in religious
matters I am introducing for the purpose of this discussion is between the
devotional and the non-devotional orientation, and I will use the Indian
terms bhakti and jnani to cover these. The British medieval
mystic Richard Rolle is an example of bhakti, while the Buddha is
an examples of jnani. The characteristics of a jnani include
an emphasis on knowing rather than loving, on enquiry rather than surrender,
on doubt rather than faith, on will rather than abandonment; possibly non-theistic
rather than theistic, and possibly via negativa rather than via
positiva. (The latter terms are used in mysticism to distinguish spiritual
paths that respectively deny the material world or embrace it.)
Religions are founded by charismatic individuals such as Christ, Mohammed,
Buddha, Krishna and so on. The orientation of such men, either bhakti
or jnani, has a profound effect on the type of religion they leave
behind, and will influence the kind of religious language that the faithful
can use as part of their tradition. Christ was bhakti, Buddha was
jnani. Hence for a jnani such as Eckhart, born into a bhakti
religion, it was difficult to use the Christian language to express his
own insights, and he ran into trouble with the Roman Catholic church.
When we speak of the Buddha, Eckhart, or Krishnamurti as jnani we
are talking about the geniuses of this orientation. However I believe that
all people, whether admittedly religious or firmly secular, have one or
other of the two orientations, jnani or bhakti. It is the
person of the jnani orientation who doubts, questions, and thinks,
and, given the right intelligence, education and milieu, will become a contributor
to a culture's intellectual tradition. The fully developed jnani
is very different from the intellectual however, but at the same time I
do want to stress that I consider the bhakti to contribute as much,
if not more, to society as the jnani.
Patanjali and Eastern traditions of thought
Using the previous terminology Hinduism contains luminaries of both jnani
and bhakti persuasion, but we will consider a single important jnani
text in the Indian tradition, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.
Here are the first five stanzas:
Now the discipline of Yoga.
Yoga is the cessation of mind.
Then the witness is established in itself.
In the other states there is identification
with the modifications of the mind. [4]
Patanjali is codifying and summarising a knowledge
that already had a long history, and in the first five lines reduces the
system to its essence. To condense it even further:
Yoga is the cessation of the identification with the modifications of the
mind.
The remainder of the Sutras forms a systematic exposition of this proposition,
and lays out a method for its practice and achievement of its goal. What
is radically different in yoga to any Western tradition is the suggestion
that cessation of mind is the route to knowledge. In Zen the doctrine
of no-mind is also central to its teachings. However, despite the anti-intellectual
implication of this starting point, both jnani Hinduism, and all
the forms of Buddhism, have generated vast literatures which have shaped
the intellectual traditions of the far East.
The following sutras are important as they touch on epistemology:
The modifications of the mind are five. They
can be a source of anguish or non-anguish.
They are right knowledge, wrong knowledge,
imagination, sleep and memory.
Right knowledge has three sources: direct cognition,
inference, and the words of the awakened ones.
Direct cognition for Patanjali and the sages of
the East means a knowing of thing from the inside, using techniques
broadly referred to as meditation. Inference is common with the West; it
means any knowledge derived from rational thought. The 'words of the awakened
ones' has no credibility in the West outside the traditions of faith, mainly
because of the obvious problem: who is to say which speaker is enlightened
and which not? However for an enquirer into truth in a tradition such as
Buddhism, the seeker is encouraged to test his or her own direct cognitions
against those of the 'enlightened ones'. The interplay between Master and
disciple in Zen, for example, is an illustration of this.
Jnani and the Western Intellectual Tradition
If we now ask why the intellectual traditions have developed so differently
in West and East, we can identify three related points of departure: Greek
thought, the dominance of Christianity, and the rise of modern science.
Taking the Greeks as the first point of departure from the East, we can
formulate this as the difference in emphasis between what we now understand
as philosophy, and what is jnani. When we look at Heraclitus
or Pythagoras for example, we find many similarities with jnani writings
from Hinduism. The central figure in this context is Socrates however, and
I have made a detailed study of the proposal that Socrates wasmore like
a well-developed jnani such as the Buddha, than a philosopher as
we now understand the term. [5] There is not space here to go into the details of
the argument, but two pieces of evidence can be mentioned: Socrates's 'fits
of abstraction', and his equanimity, or even joy, in the face of death.
If we interpret the 'fits of abstraction' from the Eastern perspective as
a type of samadhi, then much of Socrates's behaviour becomes clear,
and of a pattern shown in many jnani's lives.
Some see the early intellectual debate in the West to be between Plato's
mysticism and Aristotle's logic, but my analysis emphasises more the divergence
between Plato as a philosopher and Socrates as a jnani. The West
has not previously made this distinction, with the result that philosophy
became a formal system of thought divorced from the spiritual, but conducive
to the rise of science. We can say that Socrates taught from a first-person
epistemology, a direct cognition, while Plato developed a theoretical system,
partly based on Socrates's teachings.
Some commentators believe that the dominant religion of the West could have
derived from Socrates, who is compared to Christ in his teaching manner,
and in his persecution and execution, though from our analysis Socrates
is a man of the jnani orientation and Christ of the bhakti
orientation. There are many contributing factors to the dominance of Christianity,
but perhaps the most important one was the initial apologist in each case
Plato for Socrates and St. Paul for Christ. Paul was probably less intellectually
gifted than Plato, but his success in the initial propagation of Christianity
lay in his appeal to ordinary people. Plato's diluted Socratism appeals
to the rulers and intellectuals, while Paul's Christianity appeals more
widely to the poor and suffering, and to those whose bhakti orientation
was touched by the suffering of Christ.
However, the initial bhakti nature of Christianity gave an insufficiently
broad basis for a religion of the West, and the jnani element was
grafted on from the Socratic source, creating a tension that dictated much
of European intellectual history. Plotinus (AD 204-270) is an important
member of the neo-Platonist tradition in the West, and is considered to
be Plato's apologist or successor, but on close scrutiny (again from an
Eastern perspective) we find that he is a jnani in his own right,
who happened to usethe vocabulary of Plato to express his own ideas. Like
Descartes and Spinoza, considered to be the founders of modern philosophy,
Plotinus is evaluated for his formal contributions to philosophy, but analysing
the work of these intellectuals from the jnani perspective gives
a quite different view of their role.
Going back to Plato we could say that his impact was to prioritise ratiocination,
or the dialectic process, over meditation, and so this became the dominant
mode for the intellectual investigation of consciousness in the West. Descartes,
with his cogito ergo sum, locked the West into giving primacy to
thought over all other experience. We can say that the West is characterised
by ratiocination and mind, whereas the East is characterised by meditation
and no-mind. Patanjali considers both to be routes to correct knowledge,
but the East has prioritised one, and the West the other.
The Scientific Method
The devotional nature of the dominant religion in Europe could not give
free reign to its jnani-oriented thinkers, who began to turn to empiricism,
that is observations of Nature, as a way of legitimising their instinctive
tendencies to doubt and enquiry. One half of the Renaissance was preoccupied
with neo-Platonism, but the other, epitomised perhaps by Leonardo da Vinci,
turned its back on the past and put its energies into a nascent science.
Galileo's disagreement with the Roman Catholic church symbolised the parting
of science and religion in Europe, which gave the jnani-oriented
individual the impetus to abandon religion, though the complete secularisation
of Western culture took another three centuries.
Third-person science is a consensual one, that is data leading to scientific
conclusions are in the public domain, and in principle there is nothing
stopping anyone from repeating the experiments that led to the conclusions.
In third person science the first person is the object under investigation,
the second person is the scientist, and the third person is any one else
who can corroborate the measurements and conclusions of the second. When
Galileo published his results it was open to any one with a telescope and
some patience to confirm. Although the initial reaction to his discoveries
was hostile, it was only a matter of time before 'reasonable' people were
convinced, because confirmation was relatively easy.
What then is a first person science? At this point it is not much more than
a suggestion by the British mystic Douglas Harding [6], but clearly the work of the
great jnanis, East and West, can be examined for a basis. All that
can be said now is that in principle it simply replaces the object of the
third person enquiry with the subjective world of the investigator.
Conclusions
In so far as the arts are a systematic enquiry into what is, they are more
like a first person enquiry than a third person enquiry, because, although
the theme of the artwork may be external and material, the real enquiry
is into the subjective response of the artist to the subject matter. Practitioners
of the electronic arts are in a good position to engage with a first person
science of consciousness because, though artists, they are naturally disposed
to science and technology. (I have explored some of these issues in arts
and science [7], and also cyberspace [8].)
The brain surgeon suggested that the brain produced consciousness. If one
was to suggest that a flute produces music, because a skilled flute-maker
can give the precise mechanical conditions under which music can or cannot
arise from the instrument, it would be absurd. Yet what if consciousness
was as independent of the brain as the music is of the flute? After all,
can you remember ever having been unconscious?
References
[1] Moody, T.C., 'Conversations
with Zombies', Journal of Consciousness Studies, Volume 1, No. 2
1994
[2] Penrose,
Roger, Shadows of the Mind - A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness,
Oxford University Press, 1994
[3] King,
Mike, 'From Schroedinger's Cat to Krishnamurti's Dog Mysticism as the First
Person Science of Consciousness' in Consciousness Research Abstracts,
proceedings of the "Tucson II" conference (Journal of Consciousness
Studies) Arizona: University of Arizona, 1996, p,141
[4] Rajneesh,
B.S., Yoga - The Alpha and the Omega, Rajneesh Foundation, Poona,
1976.
[5] Master's
dissertation, University of Kent at Canterbury, 1996, unpublished.
[6] Harding,
D.E. The Near End - The Science of Liberation and the Liberation of Science,
Shollond, Nacton, Ipswitch IP10 OEW
[7] King,
Mike, 'Concerning the Spiritual in 20th C Art and Science' Leonardo,
Vol. 31, No.1, pp. 21-31, 1998
[8] King,
Mike, 'Concerning the Spiritual in Cyberspace', in Roetto, Michael (Ed.),
Seventh International Symposium on Electronic Art, Rotterdam: ISEA96
Foundation, 1997. p. 31-36
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