Tag Archives: brain

AI and Consciousness (Part 2)

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*** 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?

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Brain and Mind

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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

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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.

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Q.541 Knowledge in the Vedas

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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

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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.

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Consciousness

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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.

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Language and Color

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Those people who regularly read my articles will know that, although my educational background is that of a scientist, I frequently criticize science in respect of its inability to say anything useful about the nature of reality. Because science can only operate by virtue of a subject making observations on an object, it only has validity in the empirical realm (vyavahAra). Nevertheless, I do acknowledge that science can sometimes throw light upon the thorny topics that we frequently encounter in advaita.  An obvious example of this is the findings of Benjamin Libet and Daniel Wegner regarding free will, about which I have written several times. Accordingly, I was very interested to hear recently (on a BBC Horizon program about how we perceive color) that scientists have carried out experiments which demonstrate that language affects the way in which we see the world.

I did not expect to see anything relating to advaita in the program but, when they described an experiment concerning the Himba tribe of northern Namibia, it quickly became clear that this was relevant to the vAchArambhaNa sutras from the Chandogya Upanishad.  

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The brain and consciousness

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Original questioner, a Doctor, training in psychiatry: What does the brain do after we die, how long does it stay conscious?

A (Marcus Geduld, Shakespearean director, computer programmer, teacher, writer, likes dinosaurs.) Answered Nov 24, 2014 : Nothing happens to it. It’s dead. ‘Switched off.’ That’s basically the definition of death—when your brain totally stops functioning. This question is kind of like asking how long a radio keeps on playing when it’s switched off.

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Eternity

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If we consider humans as finite beings, what evidence do we have that “eternity” actually exists?

Physical bodies are finite, corruptible, but are human beings just their bodies (and their finite minds)? There is a mysterious, undefinable, and unmeasurable entity called consciousness which appears to pervade all sentient beings and nature in general. Nature, all life, is conscious – dare we say? This entity – consciousness – is undeniable, for it is our most direct and unfalsifiable experience. Consciousness – by consensus of a majority of physicists – escapes all parameters of physics, neurophysiology, and brain studies. But not only consciousness, but so-called matter is also in the same category of the intrinsically unknowable, even if there are methods for measuring and experimenting with such entity as matter-energy.

Again, no one knows what eternity might be, such are the limitations of our means of understanding reality, even though physics and mathematics come to our aid in this and also with the phenomenon of space (space-time). What is more, philosophy and metaphysics have a better grasp of the extra-physical dimensions of reality aided and abetted as they are by (universal) intuition. For metaphysics time does not exist outside of our minds, and, rather than eternity-(duration), timelessness – or what is the same, that only the PRESENT exists – is what, as a concept, gives a semblance of reality to reality (all that is and ever has been) – incomprehensible to the unaided mind.

Q.490 Consciousness and the Brain

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Q: My question is one I can’t seem to clarify through any book, teacher or teaching:

How do we know that the brain isn’t responsible for consciousness? While we can observe mind with all of it’s contents as objects and then say we cannot be that which we observe, how can we be sure that there is not just some part of the brain which does the observing that is giving us this ability to watch thought? How does Vedanta address this? How can we know that the brain isn’t simply the one observing all phenomena?

Side note: I lost consciousness once due to a fall and blacked out, and all I can say is that there was complete absence of being and no one there to be aware of the non-beingness. No observer nor observed. Beyond no-thing. Absolutely no experience beyond the concept of the word. Continue reading →