Transcendental Nectar of Sadhu-Sanga

by

Purushottama Jagannath Das, Ph.D.

www.mahaprabhu.net/harmonizer

pbanerjee2002@yahoo.com

Mob: +91-9432205775

Science Magazine on the occasion of its 125^th anniversary in 2005, came up with a list of 125 questions, under an article entitled, ‘What don’t we know?’[1], some of which are listed below:

1) Can the laws of physics be unified?

2) What is the biological basis of consciousness?

3) How much can human life span be extended?

4) How and where did life arise on the earth?

5) How did cooperative behavior evolve?

6) What are the limits of learning by the brain?

7) How much of the personality is genetic?

8) What are the evolutionary roots of language and music?

9) What are the roots of human culture? ...

 

For the last 200 years in the history of modern science these questions were not considered very seriously. Scientists thought that these questions were merely metaphysical, religious or unanswerable and thus not important for their inclusion within their scientific research. However, contemporary science is being forced to confront these important questions in the scientific curriculum. Max Born had said, “the results of the scientific search in which, during several decades, I have taken part, … leads unavoidably back to those eternal questions which go under the title metaphysics.” Schrödinger asked in his book entitled ‘What is Life’, “What is the characteristic feature of life? When is a piece of matter said to be alive? When it goes on ‘doing something’, moving, exchanging material with its environment, and so forth, and that for a much longer period than we would expect of an inanimate piece of matter to ‘keep going’ under similar circumstances.”

 

Today scientists can only meagerly study life processes within the body of an organism by applying the principles of equilibrium and close equilibrium thermodynamics over a finite interval of time.[2] But Schrödinger was wondering, “How would we express in terms of the statistical theory the marvelous faculty of a living organism, by which it delays the decay into thermodynamic equilibrium (death)?” Today the advancements in the field of biology have revealed many interesting details. Thus some scientists are forced to think that in continuing the development of science, it is necessary to include some additional principles other than conventional concepts.

 

For example, Jacob et al. [2] proposed that “….meaning-based natural intelligence is a fundamental requirement of life, and that the roots of cognition can be traced back to bacteria. However, the fundamental semantic and pragmatic cognitive functions are likely to require as yet undefined mechanisms at the genomic level. Based on these predictions and the outline of such a cognitive mechanism, we face the following questions:

(1) Are we subject to a metaphorical fallacy, namely a convenient but distorting extrapolation from current linguistic theory?

(2) How can the ontological reality of such a formulation be tested?

(3) Is the linguistic construction consistent with the current gene-network picture of the neo-Darwinian paradigm?

(4) How might this formulation be constituted within the constraints of physical causal determinism and time causality?

 

 

Jacob et al. [2] further summarized, “Returning to biological systems where operations at regulated rates and flow of information are crucial, we suggest that additional accumulation of ever increasing wealth of details is not sufficient to explain how complex systems are organized and function by harnessing their internal functional complexity and stored information. What we propose instead is that we are missing a fundamental biotic principle based on some yet unknown physical principle. “Information” points us in the right direction, but a biological theory to account for its workings and effects remains a beguiling challenge.

 

Thus since last few decades, consciousness and cognitive science have become an important part of modern studies.[3] One common feature among the leading quantum physicists is that they all try to explain the collapse of wave function through some interaction of mind or consciousness. But there is practically very little evidence that such a collapse of the wave function really occurs.[4] Thus quantum mechanics has not been able to penetrate much into the domain of these very fine cognitive acts. Michael Polanyi stated, “…consciousness is a principle that fundamentally transcends not only physics and chemistry but also the mechanistic principles of living beings.” Thus there are many differing ideas among scientists and scholars about consciousness and that definitely indicates the need for a deeper conceptual study.

 

Thus it should be fruitful by necessity that we include more philosophical and thoughtful dimensions in our inquiry for the sake of satisfying our reason in scientific research. Even the experimental observations imply that there are many glaring gaps in our present ways of understanding. Aristotle had argued about the importance of a final cause. Today in science we are concerned with only the material cause and the formal cause. But we neglect the more important questions which arise from the necessity of a final cause. Kant had discussed the question of ‘cause’ in some detail and found some differences between an organism and a machine. In this regard Ginsborg stated, “In a watch, one part is the instrument [Werkzeug] of the movement of the others, but one wheel is not the efficient cause of the other; one part is there for the sake of the other, but not there through the other”. So a watch meets the first condition of being a purpose, but not the second. In contrast to the case of an organism, its parts do not produce one another; nor does it produce other watches or repair itself when damaged. Thus, Kant goes on to say, “an organized being is not merely a machine, for that has solely moving force, whereas an organized being possesses in itself formative force . . . a formative force which propagates itself, which cannot be explained through the capacity of movement (mechanism) alone.”[5] Thus the deeper questions regarding the ultimate goal of all scientific research or goal of human form of life are important.

 

A good point to begin this kind of inquiry as suggested by many philosophers like Descartes, Kant, Leibniz and Hegel is ‘thought’. For the last 200 years in modern science these most essential and deeper subjective studies have become more or less neglected due to its focus being limited to a domain of objective studies. It is about time that scientists are beginning to realize that subjectivity remains an essential part of reality. Thought is an essential aspect of rational human beings. All scientific theories have their origin in thought. There is no science without thinking. Yet we cannot say where is that thought located within the objects of our study even after so many advances in physics, chemistry and biological sciences. We have many branches in modern science to study planets, microbes, DNA, RNA etc., yet we have no department or discipline to study the ‘principle of thinking’ which is studying these objects.

Srila Bhaktisvarupa Damodara Maharaja (Dr. T.D. Singh) said, “Spirituality begins when the subject becomes the object of his own study..” The first aphorism of Vedanta sutra, explains that human life is meant to begin this inquiry – athato brahma jijnasa. Who am I? What is the purpose of my existence? What is my constitutional position in relation to the ultimate reality? Yet it is often overlooked that a serious study of the self-conscious aspect of reality does exist that is scrutinized and presented by the Indic texts. Both subject (scientist) and object (science) have activities in relation to each other as a unified reality. There is an interdependence between consciousness and its content. Sripad Bhakti Madhava Puri Maharaja, Ph.D. said, “A recent book by American stem cell scientist Robert Lanza, entitled "Biocentrism" makes the point that consciousness is fundamental, and everything else rests upon that. This is the same paradigm that Vedanta has held since antiquity.” Western science has also some rich contributions from scientists as well as philosophers like Gödel and Hegel, on these topics. However in modern science, the primary focus on an analytical approach to understand reality is not going far, when faced with the more difficult challenges like the search for a unified theory or search for the origin of life. The Vedantic conception of reality is holistic unlike the analytical concept in modern science. Thakur Bhaktivinoda has explained that the Original Whole (akhanda vastu) is not an additive collection of a large number of finite entities. In Vedanta the origin is Wholesome. And from the whole comes uncountable number of wholes. And even though so many wholes originate from the original whole, it remains as the complete balance (there is no reduction in original whole). Thus the Vedantic paradigm, its ontology and epistemology can help us in furthering our progress in search for ultimate reality.

 

 

Sincerely,

 

References