The inquisitiveness about consciousness is as old as the inception of homo sapiens species, and it is as prevalent and mysterious as God. Philosophers have contemplated it for thousands of years, but the more they study it, the more confusing it becomes. Since most scientists are either atheist or agnostic, they were never interested in this topic, also because they did not foresee any potential in the research of consciousness. Scientists largely found this topic ‘unfit’ for science. Although psychology discussed consciousness, it never became mainstream science because it lacked empirical research. Finally, a mainstream scientist, Dr. Crick, a Nobel Prize winner for discovering the double-helix structure of DNA, moved beyond molecular biology and devoted significant effort to researching consciousness. Today, about 100 research papers on this topic are published every year, and consciousness research has become a full-fledged scientific discipline.
I have divided the discussion of consciousness based on conceptual differences between Eastern and Western approaches. In the first part, I discuss Western studies of consciousness; in the second, I discuss Eastern studies of consciousness. These differences stem from different approaches. The Western world has traditionally been largely materialistic. Therefore, most scientists think that the physical world contains nothing beyond matter, and that consciousness emerges from matter, that is, from a complex assembly of neurons in the brain. Scientists study consciousness from this premise.
The study of consciousness began in the East in prehistoric times, perhaps 7000 years ago, when Rishis (Whom I call ancient scientists) started the tradition of meditation. Many Rishis studied the nature of mind and consciousness through meditation, and they compiled what they learned in ancient scriptures, the Vedas. According to the Vedic model of mind, Atman, the Soul, generates consciousness.
The earliest Western study of consciousness is attributed to Greek philosopher Plotinus, who argued that consciousness relates to experience. He argued that the self consists of different layers of consciousness, each representing a different experience. Thus, Plotinus was the first to introduce the notion of subjectivity. Beyond subjective experience, Plotinus may be the first to attribute consciousness to the divine soul and to introduce the idea of hypostasis, akin to the concept of ‘Brahman’ given by ancient Indian Rishis and seers, and the basis of Advaita Vedanta.
Aristotle used the word mind for consciousness and proposed a theory of how the mind senses external objects and events and forms impressions. His work can be considered as laying the foundation of the science of mind. Aristotle can be regarded as the father of materialism, though he never used the word materialism. According to him, everything that exists, even the soul, must be embodied in matter. He also defined matter as that which can have form, or the formable essence. Aristotle may be regarded as a pioneer in setting the terms of reference for the future discussion of the problem of consciousness.
René Descartes, a renowned mathematician and philosopher, discussed mind and consciousness through a famous mind-body problem. He identified the mind with consciousness and self-awareness. He considered the brain as the seat of intelligence. In his view, the mind is a non-physical, and therefore non-spatial, substance. Descartes went beyond earlier philosophers and argued that the mind cannot be discussed without reference to the body (brain). He argued that mind and body are distinct and separable; this duality is known as Cartesian Dualism. Discussion of consciousness remained largely confined to philosophical debate until Sigmund Freud, who was the first to study consciousness scientifically. He used this concept to develop a model of the mind that formed the basis of his psychoanalytic theory of personality. Though the model of mind and Psychoanalytic theory faced harsh criticism and collapsed, it paved the way for future research.
The study of consciousness became a subject of scientific investigation when American Psychologist William James, a foundational pillar of modern psychology, coined the phrase “stream of consciousness,” meaning the flow of thought. In this way, he was quite close to understanding the nature of consciousness.
I believe credit for speeding up research on consciousness should also go to Mahesh Yogi, the Indian spiritual guru who taught and popularised meditation in the West. Since meditation is nothing but the control of consciousness, many scientists began designing experiments to study its effects on the mind. Francis Crick launched a campaign to convince scientists that consciousness is a legitimate subject of mainstream scientific research. He knew the scientific community viewed consciousness with deep suspicion. So, in a 1979 Scientific American editorial, he wrote:… the time has come for science to take up the previously forbidden subject of consciousness……. As part of his campaign, he wrote a book: Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for Soul. According to the book, emotions, ambitions, and a sense of identity result from the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. He first outlined an empirical approach to studying consciousness, focusing on visual consciousness. He collaborated with Christof Koch and introduced the concept of the Neural Correlate of Consciousness, or, in short, NCC.
David Chalmers posed the Easy problem and the hard problem of consciousness. Neuroscientist Giulio Tononi proposed integrated information theory (IIT), which he claims can predict whether a system is conscious. By 2004, consciousness research had become a full-fledged multidisciplinary field integrating psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and physiology. Many research papers are published every year in mainstream journals and journals dedicated to consciousness studies. The University of Arizona has a center for consciousness studies, and many similar research institutes have been established to bring together disciplines such as philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, physical science, and medicine.
WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS
Consciousness is a very broad term with multiple meanings. Oxford Dictionary defines consciousness as the state of being aware of and responsive to surroundings, or a person’s awareness or perception of something. Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines consciousness as the quality or state of being aware, especially of something within oneself. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, consciousness is a state of understanding and realizing something. Psychologists, scientists, and doctors often use this definition. Every normal human being experiences their surroundings through sensory organs and is aware of what is happening in the mind and body. According to scientists and psychologists, human beings can be conscious because of a brain quality they call ‘consciousness’. Scientists consider consciousness a physical entity that has emerged from the brain, and they have even proposed a mathematical expression for it, denoted by the symbol ɸ. According to one assumption, consciousness is a physical entity like heat, light, and sound, but so far scientists have not found any physical property of consciousness that physics normally attributes to physical entities. The widely accepted notion is that consciousness exists. Perhaps this is why consciousness is not a topic of research in Physics. Although psychologists have agreed on various states of consciousness, they have not identified a well-established physical property of consciousness. Here I have differentiated consciousness from consciousness. Consciousness is an abstract noun derived from the adjective conscious, and consciousness is a hypothesized physical entity. Psychologists, based on observations, categorized many states of consciousness:
(1) Fully conscious, when a person is fully awake. (2) Fully unconscious, when a person is in deep sleep, or when a person is under the influence of drugs or is in a coma. (3) Intermediary consciousness: when a person is asleep but dreaming. (4) Altered state of consciousness when a person is under the effects of recreational drugs.
The word ‘conscious’ has many other uses: when a person drives a car for the first time, he is fully conscious, but after he learns to drive it completely, he becomes less conscious. Whether these states of consciousness relate to consciousness is still being researched. However, some modern scientists are so confident in treating consciousness as a physical entity that they describe it as information and propose integrated information theory.
Many ancient philosophers held views on consciousness that differ from modern scientists, who link consciousness to awareness and subjective experience. Philosophers who advocated physicalism, like Aristotle, regarded consciousness as matter; he called it the soul. Many philosophers used the words mind and consciousness interchangeably. For example, René Descartes did not distinguish between mind, consciousness, and self-awareness. According to him, consciousness is a non-physical, non-material entity that can still interact with matter (the brain). Baruch Spinoza did not use the word consciousness, but he held that everything that exists is a substance, a substance of God, and that God gives the thoughts that appear in the mind.
Few physicists have expressed their views on consciousness. Max Planck, the father of quantum physics, expressed his view on consciousness. According to him: I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot………. Another physicist, Eugene Wigner, has similar views. He said, “I could not have completed my research on quantum mechanics without postulating consciousness.” The proponents of Panpsychism have similar views on consciousness, but they use the word mind for consciousness. According to Panpsychism, mind is the world’s fundamental nature and exists throughout the universe.
The Rishis (ancient Indian scholars) first introduced the concept of consciousness, and the Vedas discuss it extensively. In Sanskrit, it is known as Brahman: the all-pervading, infinite, eternal truth and bliss that does not change and caused the universe’s origin. In the Vedas, Brahman is discussed with the concept of Atman. In English, Brahman is translated as Universal Consciousness, and Atman as consciousness. According to Advaita Vedanta, Brahman and Atman are not two (Advaita) but one and the same. They differ only in quantity: Brahman is infinite, while Atman is finite. In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna tells Arjuna, “Atman is eternal and indestructible…” This is a big hint to modern scientists that consciousness is a form of energy that fuels (gives life, prana) every living being.
PROGRESS OF RESEARCH ON CONSCIOUSNESS
It is a real concern that after three decades of research and about 100 research papers published every year, no universally accepted definition of consciousness exists. Instead of defining it, scientists offer an unscientific description of consciousness. Most agree that consciousness involves sensation and subjective experience. Consciousness is a quality or a state of being aware of an external object (surrounding) and something within oneself (mental phenomena), such as thoughts, feelings, and emotions,
Consciousness research has become a real, functioning discipline not because we properly understand consciousness, but because of sound, scientific experimental design that produces reproducible, meaningful results. Despite these results, consciousness research remains largely surface-level. Some of the objectives of current consciousness research are as follows: (1) To understand the inner workings of the brain to find a possible treatment of mental illness and psychological disorder. (2) To develop a model of mind in respect to mind-body problems, and (3) To understand the origin of consciousness.
PROBLEMS IN CONSCIOUSNESS RESEARCH
Before discussing the problems in consciousness research, it is required to discuss briefly what research is being conducted and how. There are mainly two types of research being conducted: (i) finding the NCC, neural correlates of consciousness, and (ii) measuring the level of consciousness, i.e., to what level a person is conscious. Crick and Koch, the founders of consciousness research, devised the framework for research on NCC. Crick defines the Neural Correlate of Consciousness (NCC) as the minimal neuronal activity jointly sufficient for any specific conscious experience. In layman’s terms, NCC is the physical footprints of conscious experience. More simply, any subjective experience, such as tasting a dish, listening to a piece of music, or fantasizing, gives rise to physical activity (electrochemical changes) in the brain, called neural activity. From a physics perspective, this definition of NCC faces a serious objection. Neuronal activity occurs on the millisecond timescale, while light vibrations are on the order of 500 terahertz, implying that neurons cannot respond to the ultrafast changes in the electromagnetic field of light and therefore cannot fundamentally distinguish between red and green. Consciousness comes into the picture only because a person can have subjective experience; i.e., consciousness requires subjective experience. Subjective experience occurs in the mind, but corresponding neural activity occurs in the brain. According to consciousness research, a one-to-one relationship exists between subjective experience and neural activity that brain imaging tools can measure. In a single neuron, neural activity can be thought of as a pattern of changing electrical and chemical parameters over time. In fact, a single subjective experience activates many neurons, so a neural correlate integrates electrochemical changes across the group. Because it involves activation thresholds and phase shifts, the integration task is mathematically tedious and requires complex computation. Neural activity estimates calculated this way necessarily and regularly correlate with specific subjective experience. In this approach to research, there are many problems and challenges:
(i) It is not evident from this approach where consciousness, as a physical entity, is involved. If a person listens to a high-pitched sound, the auditory signal produced in the cochlea is high frequency, so the time variation in neural correlates will be fast, a physical phenomenon unrelated to consciousness. If a person is unconscious, there is no subjective experience and, therefore, no neural correlates. That means consciousness functions like a switch or a gate, and what we get is a neural correlate of subjective experience, not of consciousness. To study the effect of consciousness, we would need to vary its amplitude and study how that variation affects neural correlates. But a person is either completely conscious (fully awake) or completely unconscious (deep sleep). This would require varying consciousness from the outside to run an experiment. But nature has not provided a knob on the head to vary consciousness.
(ii) In order to establish a relationship between subjective experience and neural correlate, it is necessary to know subjective experience accurately, which is a challenging task. How truly the subject is reporting the experience cannot be ascertained. Thus, the approach to finding NCC is not truly empirical and therefore not fully scientific, in that the conclusions cannot be drawn with the same accuracy as in the pure sciences.
Another empirical research on consciousness was initiated by G. Tononi. He pioneered a technique called Zap-Zip to probe whether a person is conscious. In this experiment, a sheathed coil is placed on the scalp, and a magnetic pulse is sent into the brain by passing a high-current pulse through the coil, a process they called Zapping. An array of EEG sensors recorded the brain’s response. The magnetic pulse perturbs the brain’s normal tiny currents, and the EEG records a perturbed response. Analysis of the EEG output revealed a messy set of damped oscillations from a large group of neurons. No regular or completely random pattern emerged, so we could draw no conclusions. We compressed the EEG data using an algorithm commonly used to zip files on computers and mobile devices. Compressing the EEG data yielded an estimate of the complexity of the oscillations, called the “Perturbational Complexity Index”. The index provides a very crude approximation of the behavior of consciousness.
Because the brain is highly interconnected and extremely complex, experimental data are expected to be complex. G. Tononi made use of this complexity to develop integrated information theory (IIT) to quantify consciousness. Tononi postulated that consciousness has intrinsic causal power associated with complex mechanisms such as the brain. For example, he writes, “In the cerebellum, the mechanism lacks integration and complexity, so it is not conscious.” According to Tononi, IIT derives a parameter that quantifies consciousness from the complexity of the brain’s underlying interconnected structure. IIT has yet to be experimentally verified.
Alongside IIT, the “Talk of the Town” in consciousness research is the “Hard problem of consciousness,” formulated by David Chalmers, a mathematician turned philosopher. In this context, he contrasts the “Hard problem of consciousness” with the “Easy problem of consciousness.” The easy problem is to explain how the mind can discriminate, integrate information, report mental states, and perform different functions. The requirement is to specify a mechanism that can perform a mental function. Although most easy problems remain unsolved, there are fewer of them. The hard problem of consciousness relates to experience, or qualia, a term philosophers use for subjective experience. The hard problem of consciousness asks why and how we have subjective experience while interacting with the environment. Why people have phobias, and why phobias are so powerful. We know some events are innocuous, but we still do not dare to face them. Subjective experiences have power; they feel like something pushing us back. According to Chalmers, Hard problems will persist even after we solve all the easy problems, and it may take another 100 years to solve the hard problem of consciousness. I strongly disagree with him. In fact, philosophers pose the problems. Scientists solve the problem. In my view, philosophers are like politicians who create problems and linger on them to take benefit from them. If all problems in nature are solved, what will philosophers do? They will create and pose problems for survival.
The biggest problem in consciousness research stems from what we understand by consciousness. Are we studying consciousness, a hypothesized physical entity, or consciousness-ness, an abstract noun derived from the adjective ‘Conscious’? Dr. Crick supports this view in his writings, describing consciousness as ‘conscious awareness of subjective experience’. This description does not suggest that consciousness is a physical entity. Elsewhere, Dr. Crick mentions specific neurons in the brain responsible for consciousness, which he calls awareness neurons. This notion limits consciousness’s functional significance because it implies that its role is limited to generating awareness and subjective experience.
Neuroscientists and philosophers both acknowledge the problems and challenges in consciousness research and express helplessness about resolving them. As Anil Seth, a professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience, rightly says, scientists and philosophers may have made consciousness far more mysterious than it needs to be. In my view, when too much research produces no output, it becomes mysterious. Seth adds that instead of finding neural correlates of consciousness, we must find explanatory correlates that actually account for subjective experience. According to Morton Overgaard, “One major obstacle for consciousness research is lacking consensus of how to optimally measure consciousness empirically,” and we cannot identify neural correlates of consciousness unless we can measure consciousness. Scientific tradition and procedure demand that we define a parameter before measuring it. Thus, it remains to be established whether consciousness is physical. A major paradox is that extensive research over the last three decades has focused on an entity not yet identified as physical.
We should also not overlook the views on consciousness expressed by Max Planck, father of Quantum Physics. He quotes: I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything we talk about, everything we regard as existing, presupposes consciousness. Not only Planck; many renowned scientists and philosophers also treat consciousness as fundamental. Panpsychism is nearly the same as Max Planck’s view of consciousness. Great philosophers like Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, William James, and Bertrand Russell have advocated panpsychism. It is surprising that current research on consciousness is based on the idea that consciousness emerged from matter (neurons), an idea that runs counter to the views of many of history’s greatest minds.
When I look at the whole scenario of consciousness research, I am reminded of an analogy I heard when I was very young. I used to accompany my father to Satsang for discourse by Sant Kirpal Singh (Maharaj Ji), a saint from the Radha Soami Lineage. In one discourse, Maharaj Ji described how people search for God and told a story about five dwarf and blind people asked to identify an elephant’s shape. One person touches the trunk, the second touches the huge ears, the third touches the middle portion of the body, the fourth touches only the tail, and the fifth touches the foot. After the search, they are asked to describe the elephant’s shape. Each person could describe only their part; nobody could describe the elephant’s shape as a whole. Likewise, the mind is like an elephant, and to fully understand it, we must study all its aspects, such as human behavior, mood swings, emotions, motivation, and cognitive activities, thought generation, root causes of stress, depression, anxiety, mental disorders, mental illness, origin of conscious awareness, problem-solving capability, and everything that a human being is capable of doing. This also includes various mental states of meditation, such as focused attention, the state of pure consciousness (zero thought), Kundalini activation, and Samadhi, a super-conscious state of the mind in which it is possible to survive without environmental oxygen. Research on consciousness to study Qualia, or subjective experience, is like investigating the tail of an elephant and may yield nothing about the nature of consciousness.
I intuit that Advaita Vedanta might offer a solution to the mind–body problem, one that explains the above-mentioned functions and properties of the mind. This intuition is not prejudice; it is based on my study of Advaita Vedanta. I have not only studied Advaita Vedanta extensively, but I have also found, through my meditation experiences, that the Vedic description of the mind is true. We need to advance the ancient work on consciousness by Indian Rishis with the help of modern scientific developments.
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