Let me make it very clear before the start of this essay that my scientific background is limited, and hence the information shared in this essay is based upon the positions held by prominent scientific minds like David Chalmers on this subject, as per my knowledge available on open-source interviews. My essay comes from an understanding of Advaita Vedanta philosophy, looking at the limitations posed to scientific minds about consciousness.
Science has been an excellent tool for understanding matter to the extent of explaining how things work in the universe. Still, most recently, it faced an impediment in explaining how matter produces consciousness. This impediment has been there since the advent of science, but nobody ventured into this domain as they related consciousness to neural (brain) activity. However, no scientific theory explained how neural activity produced a subjective experience. This means that science could not explain, for example, the relationship between how neural activity in the brain produces the subjective experience of seeing the color red. This problem is now termed the hard problem of consciousness by prominent scientific minds like David Chalmers.
The hard problem of consciousness is, therefore, a problem faced by science in explaining how matter produces the subjective experience of every individual human being – the experience of “I am,” “I exist,” and also “I experience.” For example, each individual experiences beingness and also experiences seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling, and thinking. Science can correlate a particular neural activity in the brain if someone gets pinched on their hand, but it cannot explain how this neural activity translates into that individual experiencing pain when they get pinched. Although an AI robot can be programmed to remove its hand when it gets pinched the same way a human being will, the AI robot cannot have the subjective experience of being pinched.
As far as I know about this subject, which is pretty much available online, science handles this issue of the hard problem of consciousness in two ways:
It totally dismisses consciousness and has a position that consciousness is nothing but brain activity and that this brain activity makes us feel like we are conscious. In summary, it says that everything is matter, and what we experience as consciousness is just brain activity. They are very satisfied to correlate all individual experiences to brain activity, and that is the end of it.
The second approach to this problem is that scientists agree that there is a subjective experience of consciousness, but it is related to brain activity, and the problem lies in the ability to know this gap. They accept that now, science is unable to explain how the brain produces consciousness, but given due time, it will uncover this knowledge and explain how the brain produces consciousness. It believes that the objective experience of consciousness is neural activity in the brain, and the subjective experience is consciousness.
There is also a third approach now becoming more and more acceptable to scientists in the form of a hypothesis that proposes that consciousness could be a fundamental reality just like time, space, and matter. It also is open to the idea that it is possible that matter affects consciousness and vice versa. Some scientists point to the observer effect in quantum mechanics, which basically means that the simple act of observing a quantum property changes that property. It is as if the photon or electron somehow knows it's being watched and immediately stops what it was doing. This could be an example of how consciousness affects matter. However, scientists are extremely careful about venturing into this hypothesis, and it is still unproven.
However, science, to some extent, has agreed to the subjective experience of consciousness being a fundamental reality as it is impossible to deny it.
Now let us examine each and every scientific point of view from the perspective of Indian philosophy and ask some questions as we are here with an open mind:
Materialism: Science has always claimed that only matter exists and that consciousness is produced by matter, and either they need not prove it or they need time to prove it. This position is held by the Indian philosophical position of Charvaka, where it claimed that all of existence can be reduced to matter, which is composed of four elements: earth, water, fire, and air. It also states that consciousness is a byproduct of matter and is produced by a combination of certain elements. However, without knowing, this position declares that there is one reality, which is matter, and the reality of consciousness is also matter. So this position is also non-dual as it proclaims that there is only one reality, and that reality is matter. This means that the reality of this universe and behind consciousness is one – which they term as matter; however, it is one reality. Most importantly, as we go deeper into matter at a subatomic level, it becomes difficult to predict what the nature of matter is, and this is also a major impediment that science is facing right now after the advancement of quantum theory.
Dualism: Now let us examine the second position, which states that consciousness is a separate fundamental reality and matter is a separate fundamental reality. This position is similar to the Indian school of philosophy Sankhya, which states that there are two separate fundamental realities – Prakriti and Purusha, which can be correlated as consciousness and matter. However, in such a case, these two fundamental realities do interact in our experience. We do experience consciousness, and we also regularly interact with matter. Hence for them to interact with each other, these two realities must be part of a larger single reality; else, how would they interact with each other? Therefore, it would not be too far-fetched to assume that the reality of matter and the reality of consciousness are non-dual, i.e., it is a single reality.
Both these positions held by science are already aligned with different philosophical systems from ancient India, but they eventually pave the way for a non-dual representation of reality. In my opinion, science can never arrive at a concluding opinion on consciousness as it relates to the noumenal aspect of reality, whereas science deals with the phenomenal aspect of reality in its entire scope. The limitation of science to objectify consciousness in order to arrive at some conclusion would be a major impediment in this endeavor, as consciousness deals with the pure subjective experience that can never be objectified.
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