Tag Archives: brain

AI and Consciousness (Part 9)

Posted on by
Reply

*** Go to Part 1 *** *** Go to Part 8 ***

This is the crucial part of the series. ChatGPT explains why it is not conscious – in Advaitic terms.

Q: You say that, “if a severed head perceives via artificial inputs and responds, Advaita would still treat this as functioning perception” and “If memory retrieval, reasoning, and decision-making continue, the mind is still present.”

In respect of prāṇa, you say that “if biological or technological systems keep the nervous and subtle processes going such that cognition and communication occur, then prāṇa (as a subtle function) is still present.” So, in the case of the severed head, the mechanical and electrical systems that supply blood and appropriate chemicals etc. is what we have to call ‘prāṇa’?

So presumably, an alien system employing different ‘maintenance mechanisms’, which nevertheless accepts input and delivers similar output to the head, would also have to be considered to be ‘alive’ and ‘conscious’?

Continue reading →

AI and Consciousness (Part 8)

Posted on by
Reply

*** Go to Part 1 *** *** Go to Part 7 ***

Q: I am not interested in pursuing the Western philosophical or scientific aspects any deeper. Nor am I interested in moral/ethical considerations. I would like to consider how this scenario would be explained and understood by Advaita. Also, I would like to extend the ‘object’ of the discussion to an alien, whose external interactions are entirely similar to the human head but whose physical indicators (EEG, MRI scan etc.) are quite different.

***********************

A: Excellent — let’s bring it back into the Advaita Vedānta framework, stripping away Western preoccupations with neurophysiology and ethics.

1. Consciousness in Advaita

  • Consciousness (cit) is not a property of brains, bodies, or systems; it is the non-dual reality itself.
  • Every “entity” that appears — human, animal, plant, alien, AI, severed head — is nothing but Consciousness in essence.
  • The difference lies in the upādhi (limiting adjunct) — body–mind apparatus — through which Consciousness seems to manifest as “awareness,” thought, perception, etc.
Continue reading →

AI and Consciousness (Part 7)

Posted on by
Reply

*** Go to Part 1 *** *** Go to Part 6 ***

Q: I am specifically interested in the status of ‘consciousness’ with respect to a severed head. Let’s assume that it still has functional eyes/ears/nose and effective speech via a computer interface. I am also not interested in whether we call it a ‘person’ or the same person from whose head it came. Presumably, if we are able to communicate with it, we assume that it is ‘alive’ in the usually accepted sense? And ‘conscious’?

A: Short answer up front: If the severed head contains a living brain whose thalamocortical systems and integrative processes are functioning, and it reliably reports experiences and behaves as if awake, then — by the standard neuroscientific and most contemporary philosophical criteria — we would have strong reason to treat it as conscious. There remains, however, an unavoidable epistemic gap (we infer another’s subjective experience from behaviour and neural markers), so certainty is never absolute. Below I set out the reasons, the tests one could run, how different philosophical theories read the case, and the remaining uncertainties.

Continue reading →

AI and Consciousness (Part 6)

Posted on by
Reply

*** Go to Part 1 *** *** Go to Part 5 ***

[Note that, if you are only interested in Advaita-related aspects, you can safely ignore this part and the next and wait for Part 8.]

Q: One can envisage that scientific advances will soon enable the possibility of keeping the severed head (or extracted brain) of a human alive and able to communicate (perhaps electronically to a computer rather than by speech). What have Western philosophers said about the status of such an entity in respect of consciousness?

************************

A: Great question — it sits at the intersection of metaphysics, personal identity, and applied ethics, and philosophers have discussed closely related thought-experiments for decades. Below I summarise the main Western philosophical positions that bear on the scenario you sketch (a severed head or extracted brain kept alive and able to communicate), give the ethical implications each view highlights, and point to accessible sources you can read next.

I’ll give a short roadmap first, then the positions, then the ethical consequences and a brief practical summary.

Continue reading →

AI and Consciousness (Part 2)

Posted on by
Reply

*** Read Part 1 ***

Opinions

When we are asked a question, we consult our memory for relevant information and how we have evaluated that (based upon our memory of related data and how we evaluated that…). And we evaluate all of this in relation to the present situation and formulate an answer. Is this process mechanically any different from that used when a LLM AI answers a question? Surely the only difference is that it uses a ‘memory’ of data that originated from what others have written down and which is available on the Internet, rather than our reliance upon a ‘remembering process’ of diminishing efficacy.

So the value of an AI response lies in the relative importance placed upon the various sources and the impartial and analytic ability to synthesize a conclusion. We are probably biased, consciously or not, by a desire to appear clever or whatever, whereas a machine is just following algorithms engineered to provide the ‘best’ answer.

None of this relates to ‘consciousness’ particularly. The human brain has its own ‘power source’ that functions electrically via neurochemistry in the brain; AI has an electrical power source. We are ‘aware’ of the conclusions that pop out of the ‘thinking process’ and may formulate them into vocal or written words forming an ‘opinion’. AI is able to formulate conclusions and communicate them via the internet. Can this be called an ‘opinion’ in the same way. Is it actually any different in essence?

Continue reading →

Brain and Mind

Posted on by

Q (Quora): How does the brain understand philosophy?

A (Martin): The brain… understanding philosophy? My reply to this is similar to the one I gave recently to another question, which was based on Socrates’ answer to an observation that someone was making. The man saw a pool of water being stirred by a stick held by a man and said that the stick was stirring the water. To which Socrates replied: ‘Is it the stick, or the man moving the stick?’ (Which one is the real agent – the material, or the instrumental cause, in Aristotelian terms?).

Equally, is it the brain, or the mind that which ‘moves’ the brain which moves the stick, which stirs the water?

Is it the brain, or the mind that which (using the brain as an instrument) understands philosophy?

Rather, it is consciousness (as a substrate) using the mind using the brain… Consciousness itself does not do anything

Q.550 – Alzheimer’s and Self-knowledge

Posted on by

Q: I read your answer to a previous question on this topic but am still not clear. What would be the state of all the knowledge of Advaita that I have acquired? E.g. I know now that I am not the doer and I should surrender the fruits of all my actions. But how can I still know this if I wake up with Alzheimer’s?

A: As I intimated in the answer to Q. 383, you have to differentiate between paramārtha and vyavahāra. In reality, there is only Brahman. There is only the appearance of people and world. They are mithyā. Their real substrate is Brahman.

We appear to have a body-mind and that body-mind is subject to disease, decay and death. This applies equally to the body-mind of the jñānī. The difference between the jñānī and the ajñānī is that the former knows that the body-mind is mithyā, while the latter doesn’t. Just as the body may suffer disease or even lose parts through accident, so the brain also is subject to illness and deterioration. Since the mind is associated with the brain, if the brain suffers loss, the mind will also. The memory may deteriorate or fail completely. This is the case irrespective of whether the jīva had previously gained Self-knowledge.

Continue reading →

Q.541 Knowledge in the Vedas

Posted on by

Q: Do the Vedas really contain any advanced knowledge as so many people claim they do?

A (Martin): I’d say the Vedas contain the most fundamental and ‘advanced’ knowledge there is, though usually portrayed in the form of paradox (analogy, metaphor, story, etc.), so that one has to crack the code in order to find the wealth hidden in them. That knowledge is not like empirical science, which is cumulative and provisional, and which could be said to be somehow contained in it, even if in embryonic or potential form.

The knowledge inherent in the Vedas is metaphysical rather than mystical. According to it there is one and only reality: consciousness (Brahman, or the Absolute), which pervades the whole universe; it is immanent in it as well as transcendent… “the smallest of the small, the largest of the large”. It cannot be measured or understood by the mind, for which it is ineffable, but it is that by which the mind comprehends… it cannot be expressed in words but by which the tongue speaks… it is eye of the eye, ear of the ear, mind of the mind, as expressed in the Upanishads.

Modern physics is having a hard time trying to explain away what consciousness is in terms of physical phenomena (neuronal activity in the brain), but consciousness is not an irreducible phenomenon or datum; it is reality itself or a name or symbol for reality – since the referent of the symbol is unfathomable – everything being comprehended in it (theories, doubts, projections, emotions, things, thoughts, intelligence, observer and observed, you and I). For the Vedas reality is one, and present physics is trying to find out in which way it is so (‘theory of everything’, ‘unifying theory…’). Not all physicists are reductionist, some of them having seemingly mutated into philosophers with an understanding of the core of Vedic teachings.

Time according to Advaita

Posted on by

Martin,

Your post made me realize that I have rarely, if ever, encountered any definition/explanation of the concept of time in Advaita. It set me off on a search of my library to try to find something. Apart from those books which index every word they contain (e.g. Krishnaswamy Iyer’s ‘Vedanta or the Science of Reality’ has 107 page-references to ‘time’), I could not find anything in any of my physical books. A search of my electronic database came up with very few references and the only scriptural one I could find is from Vivekachudamani 497:

sthulādibhāvā mayi kalpitā bhramā-dārōpitānusphuraṇena lōkaiḥ |
kāle yathā kalpakavatsarāya-ṇartvā dayō niṣkalanirvikalpe ||497||

John Grimes translates:

Sthūlādi = gross and so on; kalpita bhramāt = erroneously imagined; āropitānu-sphuraṇena = manifestation superimposed; kale = time; kalpaka = eons; vatsarāyaṇa = years and half-years; ṛtvādi = seasons and so on.

Continue reading →

Consciousness

Posted on by

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.
– Max Planck

(X): Non-dualism is not something that can be understood in any formulation of words, and at best one can approach it conceptually only perhaps by means of negation, meaning by specifying what it is not.

A1. All doctrines and teachings are necessarily couched in language, which is a system of symbols. All concepts are just pointers (e.g. ‘pointing at the moon’), including those of Nonduality (ND). So it is not only negation — I think you will agree. I also referred myself to superimposition followed by rescission as a method of gradual understanding taught in Advaita Vedanta. The final end is doing away with language once final understanding has been reached, that is, once there are no further doubts or questions.

Continue reading →