Consciousness across Cultures: A Response to Bina Gupta's CIT: Consciousness

Abstract

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 occu pying 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 pioneer ing 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 conscious ness. 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 con sciousness is tied to the foundations of physics in general and quantum mechanics in particular. David Chalmers went one step further, claiming that consciousness can not be explained by any known scientific theory and that consciousness is a funda mental substance on a par with matter. Since then, the trickle of books on conscious ness 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 com mended for writing Cit: Consciousness (Gupta 2003), the first overview of conscious ness from the perspective of Indian philosophy. Her goal seems twofold: first, to in troduce to a nonspecialist audience Indian theories of consciousness, which she presents as a ladder of ideas with Advaita Ved?nta 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 Ved?nta 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 sug gestions for researchers in these scientific fields.