07-08-2004, 06:38 AM
(This post was last modified: 07-09-2004, 04:37 AM by Hauma Hamiddha.)
<!--QuoteBegin-Ashok Kumar+Jul 7 2004, 07:41 PM-->QUOTE(Ashok Kumar @ Jul 7 2004, 07:41 PM)<!--QuoteEBegin--> Many scientists take a cheap route and deny that there is anything called consciousness. I call it cheap, because it is very easy to get rid of a problem by insisting/pretending that it doesn't exist.Â
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That is correct- I accept that some of the more triumphalists Western philosophers like Dan Dennett deny that there is anything like consciousness in the sense of first person experience. The biochemical process of signal reception and recording he and his supports says *is* the first person experience. However, one can have all the signal reception/recording without any need to have that "I experience" effect. This indeed is basic hard problem of conciousness.
The archaic Hindus clearly recognized this and went beyond, where western philosophers are just reaching. The Hindus speculated that there were two possibilities: 1) bhUta chaitanya vAda 2)sAttvIka chaitanya vAda. In the former school of thought, mainly pioneered by the lokAyatas and some branches vaiSheshika and nirIshvara sAMkhya argued that chaitanya entirely arose from the interaction of the fundamental bhUtas. The latter school that dominated Advaitic thought and the theistic lineages sAMkhyas and nyAya-vaiSheshikas argued that chaitanya was independent of the emenations of bhUtAdi and existed as a fundamental entity that interacted with the former. Depending on the organization of the tanmAtra sensing structures there may a greater reflection of the structure of bhUtAdi on the pure chaitanya giving rise to experience.
This Hindu viewpoint can entirely be accomodated with the modern scientific framework by postulating that consciousness (chaitanya) is an independent axiom of existence just like mass-energy, charge or spin. However, there are some laws (perhaps undiscovered) that cause a correlation between the entropic information content of matter and the organization of conciousness. This would mean that computers and other structures too may have consciousness of their own but it may not comparable to that of animals due to this information content-organization of consciousness relationship.
One can still argue again this viewpoint with various counterpoint, shifting the old Hindu arguments to the modern context.
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That is correct- I accept that some of the more triumphalists Western philosophers like Dan Dennett deny that there is anything like consciousness in the sense of first person experience. The biochemical process of signal reception and recording he and his supports says *is* the first person experience. However, one can have all the signal reception/recording without any need to have that "I experience" effect. This indeed is basic hard problem of conciousness.
The archaic Hindus clearly recognized this and went beyond, where western philosophers are just reaching. The Hindus speculated that there were two possibilities: 1) bhUta chaitanya vAda 2)sAttvIka chaitanya vAda. In the former school of thought, mainly pioneered by the lokAyatas and some branches vaiSheshika and nirIshvara sAMkhya argued that chaitanya entirely arose from the interaction of the fundamental bhUtas. The latter school that dominated Advaitic thought and the theistic lineages sAMkhyas and nyAya-vaiSheshikas argued that chaitanya was independent of the emenations of bhUtAdi and existed as a fundamental entity that interacted with the former. Depending on the organization of the tanmAtra sensing structures there may a greater reflection of the structure of bhUtAdi on the pure chaitanya giving rise to experience.
This Hindu viewpoint can entirely be accomodated with the modern scientific framework by postulating that consciousness (chaitanya) is an independent axiom of existence just like mass-energy, charge or spin. However, there are some laws (perhaps undiscovered) that cause a correlation between the entropic information content of matter and the organization of conciousness. This would mean that computers and other structures too may have consciousness of their own but it may not comparable to that of animals due to this information content-organization of consciousness relationship.
One can still argue again this viewpoint with various counterpoint, shifting the old Hindu arguments to the modern context.