Consciousness Across Cultures: A Response to Bina Gupta’s CIT: Consciousness

By Kasturirangan, Rajesh

In recent years, consciousness has reemerged from the nether world of scientific and philosophical investigation and is now seen by many researchers as the last great unsolved scientific problem. There are several reasons for this shift in the status of consciousness studies. For one, neuroscience and the philosophy of mind are occupying the scientific and philosophical center stages, respectively. Furthermore, there has been a spate of books on consciousness by eminent scientists and philosophers. To my mind, the current wave of texts on consciousness started with three pioneering books: Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind (Penrose 1989), Francis Crick’s The Astonishing Hypothesis (Crick 1994), and David Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind (Chalmers 1996), each representing a radically different perspective on consciousness. Crick’s book was the most conservative of the three (despite its title): he claimed that consciousness is entirely a biological phenomenon identical with (as yet unknown) brain processes. Roger Penrose argued that the phenomenon of consciousness is tied to the foundations of physics in general and quantum mechanics in particular. David Chalmers went one step further, claiming that consciousness cannot be explained by any known scientific theory and that consciousness is a fundamental substance on a par with matter. Since then, the trickle of books on consciousness has turned into a flood. It almost seems as if the first thing a new Nobel Prize winner does these days is to write a treatise on consciousness. However, Nobel Prize winners do not have a monopoly on Consciousness. As I am sure the readers of this journal know, investigations of consciousness are not a Western preserve; consciousness is perhaps even more important a topic in Indian philosophy than it ever was in Western philosophy. Dr. Bina Gupta is to be commended for writing Cit: Consciousness (Gupta 2003), the first overview of consciousness from the perspective of Indian philosophy. Her goal seems twofold: first, to introduce to a nonspecialist audience Indian theories of consciousness, which she presents as a ladder of ideas with Advaita Vedanta at the top, and second, to situate Indian ideas about consciousness within modern debates on this topic. Here, Gupta argues that it is Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Vedanta that has the most to offer to modern scientific investigations of consciousness.

I am not qualified to judge whether Gupta has done justice to the various Indian philosophical traditions; my response here is based to a large extent on my reading of her text supplemented by what I know of the Indian traditions. However, as a cognitive scientist, I do have some acquaintance with current psychological and neuroscientific theories of consciousness. This response is an attempt to ask whether Indian theories of consciousness, as presented in Gupta’s book, have concrete suggestions for researchers in these scientific fields.

Let us take Aurobindo’s evolutionary theory of consciousness, which is based on the existence of a hierarchy of levels of conscious entities, with matter and life occupying the two lowest levels and “existence” occupying the highest level. Current scientific theories of nature, especially of biological evolution, do not leave much room for such hierarchical accounts. There is no sense in which human consciousness is superior to that of a bat. A bat can use sonar to detect and perceive objects, so it is quite likely that a bat has auditory experiences that completely escape us human beings, just as color consciousness is beyond the capacity of bats. How does one fit the difference between bat and human consciousness into this hierarchy? Even if one could, does it really tell us anything new about the consciousness of bats relative to humans, as one would expect from an evolutionary account? In my opinion, Aurobindo’s theory is incompatible with scientific accounts of the evolution of species. Whether his theory is right or wrong, it is not the bridge between scientific accounts of consciousness and Indian Philosophy.

In general, while there is much to be admired in entire systems of thought, be they of the Advaitic or Aurobindian persuasion, I think that these systems are unlikely to be useful to the modern scientist when taken as a whole. When I use the latter as the lens through which to judge the Indian theories of consciousness presented in Gupta’s book, what is most useful to the cognitive scientist is the general structure of the Indian theories, and combinations of ideas that do not necessarily fall into one school or the other. Unlike the comparative philosopher, who has to do justice to the coherence of an entire tradition or sub-tradition as part of her comparative task, the scientist has no such qualms. A theoretical physicist might use epistemological ideas of empiricist origin for some purposes but then combine them with metaphysical ideas of rationalist origin as part of her theory building: the conceptual constraints of theory building in science are not the same as the conceptual constraints of system building in philosophy. Despite the danger of inviting the disapproval of purists, I would advocate that scholars and researchers in consciousness studies be as free as a theoretical physicist in borrowing ideas from different Indian traditions and synthesizing them as they see fit. Part of the motivation of this response is to show how interesting hypotheses about consciousness can be generated by integrating ideas from different Indian philosophical schools.

Interestingly enough, Gupta’s book offers a wonderful opportunity to judge whether Indian theories of consciousness are useful to the cognitive scientist, since she doesn’t mention the two aspects of consciousness that most concern this community, namely the qualitative structure of consciousness (such as red McIntosh apples, sharp pinpricks, and other combinations of pleasure and pain) and the uniquely subjective “first person” character of consciousness, where supposedly you cannot tell whether I am having the experience of a red apple or a blue mango even if we are seeing the same object. For most cognitive scientists, the study of the qualitative, subjective character of consciousness has two aspects:

1. The empirical study of the correlation between the subjective qualities of experience and their objective counterparts, which has been studied using psychophysical techniques. A typical empirical investigation would ask about the relationship between experiential variables like color and physical variables like wavelength.

2. The transcendental question of how consciousness, both in its first-person, subjective character (of being for someone) and in its qualitative features (the redness of red), emerges in a world of objects. This is what is often termed the “hard problem” of consciousness, since nothing we know about the objective physical world seems to be compatible with the emergence of subjectivity or qualia.

Gupta’s book deals with neither of these two questions, and I think for a good reason: Indian theorists would not have posed either the empirical or the transcendental problem of consciousness in quite the same way. In fact, it is consciousness’ luminosity (whether svaprakasa or paraprakasa), not its first-person, qualitative character, that seems to be the distinguishing feature as far as Indian philosophers are concerned, and this makes one aware of the fact that the puzzles of qualia and subjectivity have to be understood against the backdrop of Western theories of the mind, especially physicalism. Only a community that implicitly and explicitly accepts that all processes are physical would ask the question “how does one explain the existence of qualitative first- person experiences in a world of third-person physical processes?”

However, one can be a naturalist without being a physicalist, and it is here that Indian theories of consciousness, based on prakasattva, have much to teach Western theorists who are obsessed with qualia. After putting on my unbiased naturalist’s hat, I went through Gupta’s book with two questions in mind:

1. To what extent are the various empirical theories of consciousness in Indian philosophy, such as the Nyaya theory, compatible with a broadly naturalistic account of consciousness?

2. To what extent do the transcendental arguments for consciousness in Indian philosophy matter to modern consciousness theorists?

The rest of this response essay is an attempt to address the two questions above. I will be concentrating on the general advantages of thinking about consciousness through the lens of prakasattva and then make my assessments of how this perspective can contribute to a global research agenda in Indian philosophy, the Cognitive Sciences, and Consciousness Studies.

Let us first note that among the various questions and claims that exercise the modern consciousness theorist, two topics stand out in terms of their importance to the current research agenda on consciousness: the empirical interest in the neural correlates of consciousness and the transcendental claim that consciousness is a separate substance on a par with matter. The two claims are related to each other: while the latter is a form of dualism projected onto the universe as a whole, the first is an attempt by neuroscientists to chip away at consciousness and reduce it to brain processes. In other words, both attempts partake of the usual Western debates between dualism and physicalism. In contrast, I will claim that because the Indian theories of consciousness are founded in its luminosity and its ability to manifest objects, they offer a means to avoid both the devil of physicalism and the deep sea of dualism. Much of the empirical work on consciousness is about locating the neural correlates of consciousness (hereafter “NCC”). NCCs are a way by which a neuroscientist can study consciousness without making any ontological claims about how subjective, qualitative experience actually arises from brain events. A neural correlate of the experience of the color red would be those brain areas and neural circuits that fire when we experience a standard example of the color red. However, correlation is only one step in the scientific chain of reduction. The notion of a neural correlate can be strengthened in several ways-for example, by saying that a particular brain area or neural circuit causes, constitutes, or is even identical with the experience of red.

Now contrast this quest for NCCs and their stronger counterparts with the Nyaya or Prabhakara claim that the percept of red or blue objects happens when a being endowed with the (paraprakasattva of) consciousness also meets certain causal conditions-the mind is in contact with its object, et cetera. As I understand these theories, there is no a priori claim about where in the world (brain, environment, etc.) these causal conditions are actually implemented in terms of physical mechanisms. As long as these conditions are met, and the organism in question has a mind and the appropriate sensory channels, the perception of red is going to occur. This theory of perception in terms of a conjunction of the manifesting powers of consciousness and the causal powers of material processes has much to recommend it. On the one hand, it goes beyond the purely correlational NCC studies, which don’t give us much traction into the actual structure of conscious events, and, on the other hand, it also avoids the reductive strategy of showing that brain events cause or are identical with conscious experiences. In other words, the Nyaya and the Prabhakara theories actually offer an approach toward a naturalistic, causally grounded account of qualia without being reductive or correlational.

Let us see how one might go about doing research into qualia with these Indian theories in the background. Suppose one wants to understand the experience of redness empirically as a Naiyayika; what would one do? First, note that one cannot do standard psychophysics if one is to understand the qualitative character of consciousness. To understand why, let us go back to the example of experiencing red or any other color. The typical psychophysical investigation of color asks the following questions:

1. How is color, a secondary quality, related to wavelength, the primary quality?

2. How come we perceive color as a constant property of objects despite variations in lighting conditions. That is to say, given that the average wavelength of photons hitting the retina after reflection from a red rose is significantly different if the rose is in sunlight or if it is inside a house in neon light, why does the rose look red in approximately the same way?

In other words, psychophysics struggles with an older version of the hard problem: how to explain the phenomenal, secondary properties of objects given that the ostensibly “real,” primary properties of matter are so different?

To this, the Naiyayika could retort as follows: why should one assume that the primary qualities are the true properties of nature? Why not do science with the secondary qualities alone? For example, one could collect a standardized inventory of lighting conditions (i.e., lighting conditions as experienced by us, not lighting conditions defined by wavelength) and a standard list of colors (which, by definition, would be colors as experienced by us) and then see if there is systematic covariation between the two. One could extend this empirical strategy by also including neural variables, by including data gathered using brain imaging and other neuroscientific tools. By doing so, the naturalistic researcher of consciousness would be in a position to develop a purely phenomenological science of consciousness that is neither physicalistic nor correlational (like the NCC approach). For one thing, in this approach the brain does not have any special significance since it is but one element in a phenomenological investigation of the conditions that enable a particular kind of consciousness to emerge (say the experience of ‘red’). Second, the phenomenal data would be amenable to models that have more explanatory power than purely correlational models-for example, they would be able to pick up variations in color experience with changes in lighting. I am not claiming that there is anything special about the Nyaya or Prabhakara approach to consciousness; any account that takes phenomenal experience seriously and has a robust causal framework of explanation will do as long as it is not dualistic or physicalistic in nature-but that is precisely what the Indian realists, both the Naiyayikas and the Prabhakaras have going for them. You can see how a phenomenological science of consciousness could come out of a broadly Indian realist framework.

Now let us come to the transcendental question of whether consciousness is an independent substance. I believe that the postulation of prakasattva as a generic principle of consciousness offers a way around some of the difficulties plaguing modern consciousness studies. One way would be accept the Advaita argument that a principle of manifestation is logically necessary for objects to exist and to be known. Therefore, consciousness is metaphysically prior to the existence of objects. While I agree with one part of the argument-that a capacity for the knowing and manifesting of objects is necessary-one can accept this part of the Advaitic position without accepting that consciousness is metaphysically prior to objects. An intermediate claim, between the denial of prakasattva altogether (which is what the physicalist would do) and the metaphysical primacy of the power of manifestation (the Advaitin’s claim) is to postulate something like the following: prakasattva is an innate capacity of human and other sentient beings.

While it is beyond the scope of this response to give a detailed defense of the “innateness of prakasattva” hypothesis, the arguments for an innate capacity for luminosity run similar to the Chomsky- Fodor arguments for innate linguistic and conceptual capacities. Chomsky (1957) and Fodor (1983) argue for innate linguistic capacities from a transcendental (but still naturalistic) standpoint. They say that the existence of innate capacities for grammar and concepts necessarily follow from the observed linguistic and conceptual data (such as poverty of stimulus, generalizability, and other observed attributes). Similarly, one may aver that from the standpoint of transcendental naturalism prakasattva is necessarily entailed since it is the only explanation of the manifestation of objects as constant, coherent entities. Since primary variables such as wavelength do not give us experiential variables such as color, there must be an innate capacity for conscious experience, which is a capacity of human and other animal minds.

While a transcendental claim about the innateness of prakasattva is a start, by itself it isn’t enough to sustain scientific inquiry, which is concerned with investigating the detailed structure of experience. A scientist is within his rights to ask whether there is a specific mechanism by which prakasattva reveals objects (just like the detailed models of grammar in the Chomskian linguistic enterprise). A further refinement of the innateness of the prakasattva hypothesis is needed in order to convert this transcendental claim into a workable research program. However, even here I see certain several promising lines of inquiry coming out of a consideration of the various theories summarized in Gupta’s book. For purposes of illustration, let me show how one can arrive at a mechanism mediating between the transcendental prakasattva of consciousness and the empirical problem of accounting for the subjective experience of various objects (like red McIntosh apples) by taking the Prabhakara school’s account of consciousness as my interlocutor. According to the Prabhakara theory, “cognition, by its very being, reveals its object as object, its knower as knower, and itself as the knowledge” (Gupta 2003, p. 51). Combining the two, that is, the innateness of prakasattva and the fact that consciousness reveals its object, its subject, and itself, we have a strong empirical hypothesis that can be stated as follows:

1. The power of consciousness to manifest is an innate property of the mind.

2. The mechanism through which consciousness manifests objects is through a simultaneous illumination of the object, the subject, and the knowledge.

Note that one could postulate mediating mechanisms derived from the other schools as well; only empirical inquiry can tell which one, if any, explains our experience of objects. Having postulated this mediating mechanism, several questions arise, such as:

1. Assuming that there is a universal structure to the manifestation of objects (which in the Prabhakara case is hypothesized as the simultaneous illumination of object, subject, and cognition), how do we differentiate between the way in which the various senses manifest their objects? Is there a marker that tells us that we have a visual experience rather than an auditory one? 2. How do the causal conditions (of senses being in contact with their objects, etc.) interact with the mechanism of manifestation (e.g., of the simultaneous illumination of object, subject, and cognition)?

These and other such questions will have to be explored by scientists who take Indian philosophical theories seriously.

As in the discussion of the neural correlates of consciousness, there is no reason to assume that our consciousness is located in our brains. An innate capacity of the human mind might still be distributed across our bodies and the external environment, as perceptual scientists like J. J. Gibson (1979), Francisco Varela (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, 1991), and others have argued. From this transcendental naturalist’s perspective, while consciousness is an innate capacity of our minds, our minds themselves are not in our brains, and the exact relationship between our minds, our brains, our bodies, the minds of other beings, and the environment is a matter of phenomenological investigation along the lines that I sketched for color perception.

In other words, the postulation of prakasattva as an innate principle expands and elaborates the mentalistic vocabulary of the rationalist approach to cognitive science without asking for neural substrates of consciousness, which is what that led to the problem of qualia in the first place. Since the Indian theorists are not bound within a physicalist framework, the prakasattva principle is a perfectly acceptable naturalistic solution to the problem of qualia and also gives us a way to understand consciousness without going to the extreme of claiming that consciousness is a separate substance, as modern neo-dualists like Chalmers are forced to claim. While luminosity is an innate capacity of our minds, unless we identify our minds with reality there is no reason to make the stronger claim that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality as such.

Note that such an investigation may upend our usual conception of our minds; for example, one could ask if two minds can both be in one location. So when I experience a red flower in front of me and so do you, is it reasonable to conclude that both my mind and yours are co-present in that location? The typical neuroscientist (but not the Gibsonians and the enactivists; see Gibson 1979 and Noe 2004) would say that since we don’t perceive the world directly, only its representation in the brain, there is no sense in which my mind is anywhere else but in my brain. Therefore, there is no question of my mind and yours being in the same location. It would be interesting to know if Indian theories of mind debate such claims and, if so, what conclusions are drawn by them.

It is only the abiding scientific distrust of secondary qualities that stops the modern scientist from considering the possibility that prakasattva is an innate capacity. Our innate capacity for consciousness itself could be unconscious, if it is paraprakasa, just as we are unconscious of the operations of our Universal Grammar. In that sense, the postulation of prakasattva as an innate capacity solves two problems in modern cognitive science: it not only provides an answer to why there is conscious experience, it also gives a mentalistic answer to why there are unconscious mental structures such as grammar-namely that there is an internal principle of luminosity that illuminates the outcome of grammatical processes but not the underlying process itself.

In this investigation of conscious states and processes relative to unconscious states and processes, an awareness of Indian theorizing may lead to radically different solutions than the ones palatable to a physicalist. According to the physicalist, unconscious mental processes are mostly brain activities below the threshold of detection. But there is no answer to why these activities are below the threshold of detection and representation- after all, our retinal receptors are capable of registering these events. In fact, the ‘below sensory threshold’ argument is a nonstarter since we don’t represent any brain processes; if we represent anything at all, we represent the external world and mental entities like concepts. So the fact that we aren’t aware of the workings of our grammar cannot be due to the physical structure of the neural events related to language, but rather due to the intentional structure of our minds, the fact that we represent external objects as well as concepts and other mental entities. The puzzle of what we are (and are not) aware of has to be tied to the relationship between the luminosity and the intentionality of consciousness.

Given that Indian philosophy cares more about luminosity and Western philosophy more about intentionality, the investigation of the relationship between these two markers of consciousness can only take place when scientists and philosophers take Indian philosophy seriously in their investigations of consciousness. Gupta’s book has made it much easier for those of us who are not specialists in Indian philosophy to learn about the basic concepts and theories of consciousness in the various Indian philosophical traditions. For this we have much reason to thank her.

My goal in this response was to suggest that Indian theories of consciousness can offer a cognitive scientist many new perspectives on the nature of consciousness. I have outlined two (of the infinitely many) avenues for research here: first, the idea that it is possible to articulate a phenomenologically rich, non-reductive science of consciousness by looking at experienced qualities as primary rather than secondary. This idea was derived from an analysis of the theories of consciousness of the Naiyayikas and other realists in the Indian tradition. The second idea was to suggest that the luminosity of consciousness is fruitfully understood as a transcendental, innate capacity of the mind. This idea was influenced by the Advaitin arguments for the metaphysical primacy of consciousness, though my formulation has departed significantly from theirs. When combined with a mediating mechanism, the innate capacity for luminosity gives an overarching theoretical framework for a study of the detailed structure of consciousness. The first idea offers a non-reductive method for doing phenomenological inquiry into consciousness while the second idea offers a theoretical framework in which the inquiry will be conducted. Both of these ideas are derived from my understanding of Indian theories of consciousness. To summarize, I think that the impact of Indian theories of consciousness will be much greater if they can guide empirical research in the mind sciences as has been the case for the various Western theories. I hope I have convinced the reader that such investigations are not only possible; they are well within our reach.

Now it is up to the cognitive scientists and the neuroscientists of the world to do their part, that is, to read Dr. Gupta’s book, explore those aspects of the Indian philosophical literature that seem important for their own research, flesh out these classical Indian ideas as mathematical models and experimental paradigms, and then test these theories of consciousness in the lab. I have outlined some promising avenues for ‘cross-cultural’ research in consciousness, focusing on particular ways in which prakasattva is important for theoretical and empirical research in the cognitive sciences. I am sure that other researchers will have differing ideas. May a thousand flowers bloom!

References

Chalmers, David. 1996. The Conscious Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.

Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. ‘s-Gravenhage: Mouton.

Crick, Francis. 1994. The Astonishing Hypothesis. New York: Scribner’s.

Fodor, Jerry. 1983. The Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Gibson, James Jerome. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Gupta, Bina. 2003. CIT: Consciousness. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Noe, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Penrose, Roger. 1989. The Emperor’s New Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Varela, F., E. Thompson, and E. Rosch. 1991. The Embodied Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Rajesh Kasturirangan

Fellow, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore

Copyright University Press of Hawaii Oct 2007

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