Conscious Awareness

Conscious awareness or aware consciousness

March 16, 2024, 8:21 AM IST Speaking Tree in TOI Edit Page, India, Spirituality, TOI

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By Deepak Ranade

Consciousness is an attribute of life, embedded in all life forms, right from the unicellular bacterium to the multicellular, multi-organ human being. Consciousness has been considered an emergent phenomenon by neuroscientists and physicists alike.

Emergent properties arise when the interaction of individual components produces totally new properties or functions. “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” as mentioned by Aristotle. Can tangible chemicals and proteins by this process of emergence culminate into an intangible alchemy of consciousness?

Emergence does not involve only the bottom-up causation by which the parts at the lower levels interact to cause novel, emergent, features at the higher levels. It mandates a synchronous top-down effect wherein the higher level influences the lower levels to subserve the whole system.

Emergence is the antithesis of reduc tionism. It is an escape route for scientists who thereafter hypothesise that life properties cannot be fully reduced to the mechanics of their parts. This still was just the easy problem of consciousness.

David John Chalmers, philosopher and cognitive scientist, proposed an ontology of cognitive phenomena associated with consciousness – the easy problem of consciousness: mechanisms controlling wakefulness and sleep and the underlying neural networks, easy because experiments to study them pose no conceptual difficulty. These mechanisms are inextricably associated with conscious processing but are not consciousness.

What really defines consciousness is the subjective experience that is associated with all the cognitive phenomena mentioned above. This has been defined by Chalmers as the hard problem of consciousness, because of the so-called explanatory gap between neuron-level mechanisms and subjective experience.

The hard problem of consciousness, Qualia, still remains unanswered. What constitutes individual experience and makes it unique?

Human consciousness is not just conscious but is also conscious of the fact that it is conscious. Whilst westerners are engaged with a bottom-up approach of addressing the easy problem of consciousness, Advaita Vedanta adopts a top-down approach. Isha Upanishad provides the concept of Organic Wholism: ‘Purnam Adah Purnam Idam Purnat Purnam Udachyate Purnasya Purnam Adaya Purnam Evavasisyate’ – the ‘Organic Whole’ produces ‘organic wholes’. An organic whole cannot arise from parts that have to be assembled. That process can only produce inorganic, mechanical or chemical processes, not living organisms.

Scientific endeavours will eventually have to surrender their reductionism to the existence of an ‘A Priori’ sentience that transcends and, in fact, spawns the spatio-temporal grid. A sentience that is formless, attributeless, without a beginning or an end. An unqualified, intelligent awareness that is eternally in a state of causeless bliss. An intelligent singularity that can manifest as diverse plurality. A formless awareness – Brahmn – that can trifurcate into a trichotomy of the observer, observed and observation.

“It would, therefore, be futile to reduce consciousness to the brain or matter because it is fundamentally irreducible in principle. That implies consciousness is ubiquitous in the universe by itself and it interacts with the physical world through the nervous system and brain,” says Chalmers.

This lends credibility to the Rig Ved quote: ‘Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti’ – the Reality, Truth, is One, Consciousness; the wise call it by various names.

The writer is a neurosurgeon.