CONSCIOUSNESS, PERCEPTION, AND DESCRIPTION OF REALITY

INDIAN PHILOSOPHY IN A NUTSHELL

In the previous parts 1 and 2, we have seen a gross description of the Indian philosophical systems (or Darshanas) and how they generally differ from the western philosophies. In the next section, we shall see how Indian systems, focussing especially on Advaitic Vedanta, deals with the descriptions of reality of the world around us and on the tricky subject of consciousness. The subsequent parts rest primarily on the seminal book of Chittaranjan Naik (Natural Realism and The Contact Theory of Perception). 

Western philosophy in explaining perception starts with the objects of the world. For vision; light falls on the objects and is reflected by said objects to reach the retina. The generated neural impulses then reach the brain where an image forms. It is a mystery, however, how an internal image projects as an ‘outside’ world.  Similar to other sensations – hearing, taste, smell, and touch, our brains reconstruct the world after receiving the data through our senses.

The finite speed of light ensures that what we perceive is no longer an instant picture of the world. The more distant the object, the farther back in time our object of perception. Humans will know about a suddenly disappearing Sun only after about 8 minutes, the time taken for light to travel from the Sun to Earth. Furthermore, we never know the actual state of reality since our perception is a brain construction – an indirect realism. Thus, all the objects in the world have two components- a ‘noumenon’ (the original, forever beyond our comprehension) and the ‘phenomenon’ (the representation in our brain of the world). Hence, in terms of ontology – the reality of the world, the real and actual is always unknown.

The sense of ‘I’, is the ‘consciousness’ that allows us to participate in the world and gives us a sense of doership. The classic western paradigm of consciousness is the state of awareness beginning after waking up from a dreamless sleep and continuing till going back to sleep again, or slipping into a coma, or dying. It excludes deep dreamless sleep. Dreams and ‘self-awareness’ are special forms of consciousness.  The overwhelming western paradigm is that consciousness is a product of the mind.
Indian philosophy has a completely different take on perception and consciousness. There is an incommensurability problem when western paradigms try to understand Indian philosophy through their frameworks of understanding.

CONSCIOUSNESS AND COMPUTATION

‘Who is the I in the I?’
Consciousness studies have become respectable science now with the application of the latest in technology. The biggest mystery is how brain processes, involving 100 billion neurons and 50 trillion synapses, can give rise to consciousness – a unified, well-ordered, coherent, inner subjective state of awareness in response to multiple stimuli of all sorts. There are three main problems of the soul, mind, and matter in philosophy. The west rejects the soul; all discussions are about the properties and interrelation between mind and matter.

The dualists believe that the mind and the body (matter) are fundamentally two different phenomena. In contrast, the ‘monists’ hold that there is only one source of origin giving rise to the other; either mental alone (‘idealist’ monists), or physical alone (‘materialist’ monists). The overwhelming contemporary scientific-philosophic view favours the ‘materialist monist’ theory. Thus the mental stuff, including consciousness, comes from the realm of physical stuff. Matter organizes itself into higher orders of complexity leading to life, bodies, mind, intelligence, and finally consciousness. By logical extension, a computer can lead to consciousness too. This is the basis for Artificial Intelligence (AI) machines.

As John Searle explains in his wonderful book (The Mystery of Consciousness), the strong debate amongst scientists and philosophers between computation and consciousness takes four positions:

1. Strong AI (Artificial Intelligence): A computational process entirely generates consciousness
2. Weak AI: Brain processes cause consciousness. A computer can simulate the processes but does not generate consciousness.
3. Brain causes consciousness; there can be no simulation computationally.
4. Consciousness is a complete mystery.

The first two have the strongest proponents. The strong AI model contends that the implemented program, by itself, guarantees a mental life. There is no first-person inner state at all. Everything boils down to stimulus inputs, discriminative states, and reactive dispositions hanging together in a computer-like brain of ours, and consciousness is a certain type of software of the brain. The weak AI model says that the computer program can give near-perfect answers to questions but does not understand the meaning of the answers at all. Consciousness gives internal, subjective meaning to answers. Programs are entirely syntactical having rules, principles, and processes; minds have semantics with meanings. Syntax is different from semantics.

ONTOLOGY AND PERCEPTION IN WESTERN PHILOSOPHY

Ontology (‘onto’- real; ‘logia’ – science) studies what is real and what exists; the fundamental parts of the world and their relation to each other. The standard Western paradigm is the ‘stimulus-response theory of perception,’ a stimulus (light, sound, smell, taste, touch) evoking an inside brain response through an intermediate causal chain. This is also Representationalism – the perceived world as an internal representation of an external world; hence, an indirect form of reality.

In Kantian philosophy, the original unknown is the ‘noumenon’ (in modern parlance – the ‘non-linguistic’ world) and the known constructed reality is the ‘phenomenon.’ This is the contemporary scientific and philosophical view and gets the terms ‘Scientific Realism’ or ‘Indirect Realism.’ The world being a construction in the observer’s mind is thus mind-dependent. What we perceive are secondary qualities as presented to our sensory faculties and their specific powers. They are not the primary qualities that belong to the objects themselves. All Representationalist systems cannot thus effectively address the topic of ontology (reality) as the real world (noumenon) is always beyond our capacity of comprehension.

A stimulus-response system from the external object to the mind is incoherent in explaining the reality of the world. There is an assumption that the intervening medium, space, time, and their relations carrying data to the sense organs are all noumena; actually, they more logically fit into the category of phenomena. Every object in the causal chain from the external world to the perceiver, including the intervening medium, sense organs, and the final brain becomes a ‘phenomenon’ and have an unknown ‘noumenon realm.’  This logical extension of the current thinking questioning the truth status of the body and the sense organs leads to conundrums and inconsistencies. The stimulus-response theory of perception presents a riddle – what is the actual reality? This problem is unresolved to this day despite untiring efforts.

There have been attempts to develop a Direct Realism theory in western traditions saying that there is no transformation by the intervening medium. Somehow, we experience the world directly ‘as it exists.’  However, these positions do not reject the scientific principle of reflected light on matter reaching our senses and the brain converting the neural data. Problematically, the scientific paradigm of data reaching our brain and then undergoing transformation is perfectly incompatible with Direct Realism. One either rejects science or rejects Direct Realism finally in the western philosophical traditions.

PERCEPTION AND ONTOLOGY: THE COUNTER-NARRATIVE OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHY AND THE PROBLEM OF INCOMMENSURABILITY

Indian traditions have a completely different take on consciousness, perception, and ontology. This has been the consistent view of all the philosophical systems across thousands of years with a few minor variations. The major principles of the Indian philosophical stand are:

1. The Self is a primary substance in Indian traditions with consciousness as its essential attribute and with a subjective notion of ‘self-awareness.’ An empirical criterion cannot verify the existence of this Self. The knowledge comes from Sabda-pramana; inference from the words of an authority, the Vedas here. The Self as a distinct substance resolves the perplexing problem in establishing a coherent ontology (reality) of the world. Thus, perception is of ‘real’ objects only, since the self-effulgent consciousness is a ‘revealer’ of objects. It is like light in revealing objects but the analogy is not completely correct as even light comes under the category of objects.
2. Direct Realism states that there the two entities in perception – the Self and the physical organs of the body, in their respective roles as the primary cause and occasioning cause. The physical processes of the body do not cause transformations in the percept. The sense organs give only a transparency to the Self in the experience of the world.
3. There is a dissolution of the artificial reality-divide, in the form of the phenomenal and the noumenal because all objects are namable and knowable.
4. Entities are fundamentally of two kinds: sentient purusha (soul) and inert prakriti (mind and matter) clearing the confusion to the meanings of the three terms used in philosophical discourse: ‘soul,’ ‘mind’ and ‘matter.’
5. The mind and matter are the same appearing in two different modes of presentations. This explains the correspondence between concepts appearing in the mind and objects appearing in the physical world in a lucid manner without resorting to reduction of one to the other.
6. Importantly, the object that appears in the mind is universal while the object appearing in the world is an individual object. The universal maintains the word reference under all conditions. For, when we refer to Devadatta, what exists in the mind is the universal Devadattahood; and hence, even though Devadatta changes in time from being a child to a youth to a toothless old man, the name would refer to the same person.
7. Objects of the world are mind-independent because their existence, not determined by the individual self, is public. An independent object should be available for perception and interaction by other individual beings. This distinguishes a valid perception from an illusion or hallucination. Thus, material processes are real and reality exists independent of the observer.

DIRECT REALISM OF INDIAN TRADITIONS

Most systems of Indian philosophy have only one clear stand of ‘Natural Realism’ or ‘Direct Realism.’ This is an active ‘contact theory of perception’ where the perceiver (central in the scheme) goes out, contacts the object in the external world to gain direct information about the world as it exists. The external world experienced is an actual world in its reality and not a construction. Direct Realism, to reiterate, is the experience of the objects in an instantaneous and direct manner without any transformations of the intervening medium. Thus, pratyaksha or direct perception is a valid pramaana or means of knowledge. In Western traditions, perception is never a valid source of knowledge as the world remains unknown in its reality.

Thus, Indian philosophy gives an alternative explanation to reality. The reasonings of western paradigms are not applicable in proving or disproving the Indian view – the problem of incommensurability. Representationalism (Indirect Realism) is altogether absent. In Indian philosophy; the closest it has come to is the Sautantrika school of Buddhism. For western traditions honouring science, Indian paradigms do seem difficult to digest or understand. However, the latter has far more important consequences, even leading to enlightenment (moksha, liberation, or salvation) – the highest ideal. In Indian traditions, a belief in a personal God is not a mandatory requirement for liberation. Amazingly, in Indian traditions, ‘philosophy’ is not an independent exercise, but intricately weaves itself into the fabric of both science and tradition.

THE PRAMANAS AND THE NATURE OF THE PRAMEYAS

All traditional Darshanas begin with an explanation of the pramanas. A pramana is a means of obtaining knowledge about an object. There are three basic pramanas in traditional Indian Philosophies. They are Agama or Sabda (Scripture), pratyaksha (perception), and anumana (inference). The object known by means of a pramana is the prameya. The knowledge of the object is prama. Knowledge of an object is not a distinct entity that stands between the subject and the object but a qualification of the subject or the knower.

Now, there is a distinct mark of the prameya, or object, in traditional Indian philosophies that is missing in Science and Western philosophy. This mark is the mark of ‘being seen’ or the mark of ‘knowableness.’ This point is so vital that if we fail to recognize it, it is likely to lead us into such a position that we would not be speaking Indian Philosophy at all. The mark of ‘being seen’ is a mark of prakriti. This feature of objects being ‘the seen’ finds expression in the philosophical tenet that there is a contact between the seer and the seen object – sannikrishna.  The form that the (reflected) consciousness of the seer assumes in seeing the object is ‘vritti.’ Thus, the entire world, directly seen ‘as it is’ has no extraneous mediating factor between the seer and the seen.

SABDA (AGAMA OR SCRIPTURE) AS VERBAL AUTHORITY

Testimony from reliable authorities (Sabda) is a routine way we acquire knowledge in the material or the laukika world. When a high school student accepts Newtonian equations or Einsteinian physics as valid after reading the textbooks, it is sabda in a way as a means for acquiring knowledge. However, the world also shows the means by which the student can actually confirm or deny these equations by way of a channelised education and individualised efforts.

In Indian orthodox Darshanas, sabda as a verbal testimony applies specifically to the alaukika sphere which claims the existence of Brahman. However, like in the laukika sphere which gives the means to confirm the verbal statements of authorities, the Indian Darshanas show the way (Yoga, meditation, and other practices) to confirm the existence of Brahman and achieve liberation. The non-orthodox schools like Buddhism and Jainism accept Yoga and meditation practices as a route to achieve liberation despite denying the existence of Brahman. The problem mainly arises when critics do not want to subject themselves to the means and yet proclaim that these statements from the Vedic seers have no validity. Assertions of any kind should also declare the means by which one can confirm or deny the assertion. These, Indian Darshanas offer plenty and hence ‘sabda’ as testimony is never a statement that one needs to accept in blind faith.        

DIRECT REALISM OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHIES VERSUS THE INDIRECT REALISM OF MODERN CONTEMPORARY WESTERN PHILOSOPHIES

Indian philosophy for thousands of years has been clear on its stand of a ‘Natural Realism’ or ‘Direct Realism.’ Hence, the external world as seen or heard is an actual world in its reality and not a construction. Perception is never a valid source of knowledge in western traditions but it is the most important source of knowledge in Indian traditions. Perception involves transparency between the self and the object and contact between the two. There is no time lag in perception. The physical organs are only to enable this transparency and work as seats of experience too. Perception, an inside-to-outside process, is thus a composite process in which the self, the mind, and the sense organs together participate to establish contact with the object.

Western philosophy stays subservient to science and ties itself in knots in trying to explain the reality status of the objects in the world. Proving Indian thought from western perspective and the other way around remains difficult due to the incommensurability problem, but Indian philosophy seems to give far better explanations of reality and the world than western philosophy. Indian philosophy, most importantly, is also a means to liberation (moksha). If only our education systems would teach this.

The most important differing point of Indian philosophies from Western philosophy is perception as a valid means of obtaining knowledge regarding the objects of the senses. In the Indian tradition, perception is the Jyeshta pramana, the eldest of the pramanas (or the proofs).

THE NATURE OF THE WORLD AROUND US OR ONTOLOGY DESCRIPTIONS

What is the ‘nature of the world’ as it appears through the theories of science? Firstly, there is no distinct thing in science called ‘the seer.’ Secondly, science postulates an elaborate mechanism by which perceptions of objects occur. Accordingly, signals from the object arrive at the sensory organs of the body, these signals then transform into electro-neural signals which various sensory channels carry by to the brain, and then there is the processing of signals to present outputs in the form of images of the objects in the world. Thus, by the very nature of this postulated mechanism, the things seen are of the nature of images and are not the objects themselves.

We have no means by which to verify that these images actually possess the same forms as the forms of objects in the world. In other words, every attempt to see them brings to us images rather than the object as it is. Therefore, the theory presents a host of conundrums if we should insist that the images, we see, are the real objects that exist in the world. Therefore, those who hold on to such a belief, i.e., the belief that what we see is the real world, are Naïve Realists. And the philosophy that holds the perceived world to be the real world is ‘Naïve Realism.’

Then there are those philosophers who argue that there can be no means to know whether there are real objects in the world given that the things we experience arise in our minds and contain in the mind itself. This is a philosophical position termed as ‘Idealism.’ There are many variants of idealism, from the kind of Idealism first proposed in the West by Berkeley (1685-1753) to the later variants known as Phenomenology and Existentialism, but they all fit into the broad category called ‘Idealism’ as they hold the world to be born out of subjective ideations and belief systems. The terms ‘Naïve Realism’ and ‘Idealism’ are fine when used to refer to certain philosophies of the West. But it is wrong to label Nyaya as a kind of ‘Naïve Realism’ or ‘Advaita’ as a kind of ‘Idealism’ which many authors fail to realize.

ADVAITA AND NYAYA

Advaita is not Idealism because it negates both the mind and the world. And, it says at the same time, the mind and the world are different.  Advaita does not negate only the world and leaves aside the mind to say that the world is ‘mind.’ There are twenty-four tattvas defined in Vedanta and only four of them are internal instruments (antah-karanas comprising ego, chitta, intellect, and mind) whereas the rest are external objects. The attributes of the internal instruments cannot transfer to the objects of the world. The world is not ‘mind.’

The objects of the mind, i.e., ideas and thought, have the characteristic of being determined by the individual’s will whereas the objects of the world do not have the characteristic of being so determined. One cannot cook food by merely thinking about the food. In Advaita, the relations between words and objects are eternal, and each word denotes a specific kind of object with specific attributes. Without understanding this basic tenet of Advaita, it is wrong on the part of those authors to label Advaita as Idealism and thereby confuse the world by writing books on the subject.

Some use the oft-repeated criticism that Advaita’s position is that ‘nothing is real’ from a profound misunderstanding. The complete expression is brahma-sathya, jagan-mithya. The subject matter of Advaita is Brahman and not the world and thus, jagan-mithya is never an isolated proposition. The locution of jagan-mithya (world illusion) is always with the locution of brahma-sathya (Brahman–Real). A discussion of the world excluding Brahman however makes the world sathya or real. To deny the reality of the world which excludes Brahman reduces it to an unacceptable Nihilism. Hence Shankaracharya, when refuting Vijnanavada and other Idealist schools of Buddhism denying Brahman, takes the position that the world is real. This is a vital point often overlooked by modern proponents of Advaita Vedanta.

And with regards to those scholars who term Nyaya as Naïve Realism, the notion of the latter is a caricature of reality that has no bearing on Nyaya or Vedanta. The Nyaya (and Vedanta) theory of perception is based on the principle of contact between the subject and object in which there is no chance of the reality of the world becoming ‘naïve.’ Nor is there in them a chance of the world becoming something else than the seen. Therefore, the application of the term ‘Naïve Realism’ to Nyaya betrays a lack of knowledge of Nyaya.

According to traditional Indian philosophies, the object known through a pramana is neither a mere presentation of something else that may be the real object (as in science) nor is it reducible to something lesser than what it presents itself to be (such as a mere idea of the mind). An object is that which stands to consciousness in the cognitive act of perception.  The world in Indian Philosophy is not the world of Naïve Realism nor is it the ideated world of Idealism. If we must find a name for it, it may be the world of Direct Realism – a world as it presents itself directly to Consciousness.

SELF, MIND, MATTER, AND TIME IN INDIAN PHILOSOPHIES

Indian and western philosophies distinctly differ in many issues. Fundamentally, Consciousness (also known as the Self, Purusha, Cognizer) is primary in Indian traditions; it is secondary to matter in western traditions. Consciousness does not include deep sleep state in western definitions. In Indian traditions, the three brain states are the awake state, the dream state, and deep sleep state; and ‘Consciousness’ is transcendental to all three. Mind and matter are different from this consciousness.

Indian philosophy makes a clear distinction between the self and mind-matter as two distinct identities. Mind and matter belong to the same category. In Indian traditions, the category of the cognizer is the self (or Purusha) whose characteristic feature is consciousness. Hence, Self, consciousness, cognizer, and Purusha belong to the same category of sentience. Mind-matter, also known as prakriti and always insentient (inert or having jadatva), is only belonging to the distinct category of the cognized. Thus, both mind and matter belong to inert prakriti distinct from the sentient purusha to which the Self, as the cognizer of objects belongs to.

Mind and matter are the two modes in which objects of cognition appear revealing the legitimate objective reality. In Indian tradition, the nature of an object never changes. When the circular shape of a coin changes to a square one, the law of identity (a thing as itself) stays constant but it is Time that presents the dynamism and change. Thus, Bhartrhari’s Vakhypadiyam says that the creative power of Reality is Time.

Unlike the western notions of an unknowable noumenon where the perceived world loses its intrinsic character, in Indian philosophy, the term ‘unknowable object’ is devoid of reference (vikalpa) and is an illegitimate verbal construction (like the son of a barren woman). In Indian traditions, a conceived object cannot be unknowable; and if it is unknowable, there is no conceiving. In this overarching principle where the perceived world is independent of the mind, we return to the one world that we all experience and live in.

In the next part, we shall see more about the notions of Self and non-Self in Indian philosophies. How does the Self get an embodiment and how does the notion of liberation crystallise in Indian philosophies? The primary objective of Indian Darshanas as an integrated whole combining ‘philosophy, science, and theology’ as in western understanding is to gain liberation or moksha from the repeated cycles of births. The goal of most Indian thought is an eternal bliss arising from the state of no further births. It is not an immortal life.

 Continued on Part 4