AILArguments Over Consciousness in the Age of AI - Swami Sarvapriyananda at Synapse 2024

 To discuss consciousness, to discuss the Vedanta tradition, to discuss that confrontation or

perhaps collaboration with science in looking for this meaning, ladies and gentlemen, please

welcome one of the most eloquent propounders of Vedanta,

This is Swami Sarvapriyananda, the chief of the Ramakrishna Mission in New York, a very

eloquent man, a very curious man.

Please welcome Swami Sarvapriyananda.

Swamiji, thank you so much for coming.

Thank you for having me and for this wonderful event.

Thank you.

Swamiji, I want to dive into the deep end, you know, when we, when I first reached out

to you, I wanted you to define what is spirituality in an era of AI and gene editing and quantum

and you know when science is pretty much deciphering every last atom of existence, has spirituality

almost become, you know, obsolete, you know, is the soul obsolete?

But through all of yesterday, we were not able to define that.

So before I take you into that debate between science and spirituality, I'd like you to

share with the audience and ask, what does, how is consciousness defined in the Vedanta

tradition?

And I know that the Vedanta has many schools, so let's stick with the Advaita for the time

being.

Yes, big question.

I'll start with a little story.

Consciousness is something that's very common to all of us.

We all know it and we are using it all the time.

The story is like this.

There was this washer man, a very familiar, traditional Indian Dhobi, who would take the

dirty laundry out and wash it on the bank of a river.

He came across a diamond.

He didn't know what the diamond was, but he thought it was just an interesting piece of

rock and he used it for scrubbing dirty clothes, you know, and this is how he went on.

One day he was curious.

He took this peculiar rock to a friend of his, the vegetable seller, thought he's wise,

he knows more than me, he should be able to tell me what it is.

And the vegetable seller said, yes, this seems valuable.

I'll give you 10 rupees for it.

Luckily, the washer man, Dhobi, didn't sell it to him.

He took it to somebody else and then somebody else.

Finally, he took it to a diamond merchant who said, oh my God, this is the biggest,

most wonderful diamond I've ever seen.

I'll give you one crore rupees for it or 10 crore rupees for it.

And all the wants of the washer man, the poor Dhobi, they were all gone forever.

He was fulfilled.

Now, that diamond, we all have it and we are using it all the time.

But like the Dhobi, we don't know what it is.

And like the Dhobi, we are using it to wash our, clean our dirty laundry.

What are we doing with it?

It's consciousness.

What are we doing with it?

We are seeing right now.

We are seeing, we are hearing, smelling, tasting, touching.

We are thinking, remembering, enjoying, suffering.

We have desires, we fight, we are jealous, we hate.

All of that, including science and religion and spirituality, all of that is made possible

by this.

This is consciousness.

Now, what Vedanta says, this is not a rock with which you can only, you can scrub your

laundry with it.

But if you truly know what it is, it will solve all your problems at a deep existential

level.

So, to put it in classical terms, Atyantika dukkha nivritti, the utter cessation of suffering, Paramananda Prapti, the attainment of

fulfillment, deep lasting fulfillment and bliss.

This is what is promised if we know that this rock is actually a diamond.

The consciousness that we have and we are most familiar with all the time, we realize

what it truly is.

So to come to know truly what we are, that is the journey in consciousness and journey

in Advaita Vedanta.

So you know, just before we go into the science aspect of this, there are two traditions in

the Vedanta.

There's the Advaita and there's the dual tradition as well.

So how do we reconcile the two things, Swamiji?

One, it's wonderful we have a plurality because, you know, nobody really knows.

But at this very essence, it seems a complete departure.

You know, in Advaita tradition, like you said, yes, we have the diamond, but we're using

it to scrub.

But it says everything is consciousness.

You know, Brahman is everywhere.

But it's attributeless, it has no qualities, it's not decipherable, you can't describe

it.

But in the dual tradition, you say that this world of names and forms is not real and consciousness

lies or Brahman lies, is something separate, that this is illusion or maya.

How do you explain the diversion in these two traditions within the Vedanta?

Not just two, there are multiple traditions.

Yes, yes.

I'm not going down those paths for the time being.

Yes, I know.

But this will be endless.

There's a very nice book by Swami Tapasyanandaji, Bhakti Schools of Vedanta.

So there are multiple schools of Vedanta other than Advaita Vedanta, Vishistha Advaita,

Dvaita, Shuddhadvaita, and so on and so forth, which are, one common characteristic is that

they are dualistic in some sense, and they all rely on bhakti rather than on jnana, knowledge.

So how is it related?

It's sort of like this, using Vivekananda's own words, instead of looking inwards and

trying to see what we are, suppose you project it outwards, instead of trying to find out

that we are this limitless consciousness which Advaita Vedanta will take us towards, we say

that it is God, instead of deconstructing yourself, you see it as the ultimate reality

of this entire universe.

Then you have a dualistic path.

Then you set up a relationship with that God, God is my master and I am the servant, like Hanuman,

or God is my friend, like Arjuna and Krishna and so on.

So this is how the same thing can be seen dualistically or non-dualistically.

There was a monk who put it very beautifully.

In Hindi, he said, I'll translate,

Do hi raste hain mahatma ji, jano ya mano.

In Sanatana Dharma, in Hinduism, there are two paths broadly.

One is the path of knowledge, jano, either you know it, or you don't know it, take it

on faith.

So most of religion, including in Hinduism and outside Hinduism, especially in the West,

it's all the religion of mano, believe it.

In fact, in the United States, the word used for religion is faith, something to be believed.

Right.

That didn't, or maybe I missed it, but it didn't entirely explain.

You're saying the path to it is that you think of it as outside of yourself and you bow to

it.

Yes.

So that's the religious, the faith aspect.

It's not so hard to understand.

It's a story you've told yourself.

You bow to it.

Maybe it exists, maybe it doesn't, but it gives you solace.

Yes.

So I'm not going there because it's not a mystery, you know.

I'm asking about within the Vedanta tradition, what is the understanding of consciousness

then?

Is it that the paths lead to that ultimate idea that consciousness pervades everything,

including rocks and trees and us and it's, there's no separation.

Does it all lead to the Advaita understanding or is there a difference in the idea of consciousness

itself?

There are different theories of consciousness.

We can't say that the Indian tradition, why Vedanta?

Multiple schools of Vedanta, Sankhya, Yoga, multiple schools of Buddhism, Jainism, many

schools in ancient India, they all had an overwhelming interest in consciousness and

they did come up with different theories.

So I can't just sit here and claim we have the answer to everything, but we do have extraordinarily

profound insights into the nature of consciousness, into the nature of who we are and those insights,

the claim is if we get those insights and we live it, it will transform our lives tremendously.

It will give us fulfillment and it will take us beyond suffering.

So the Advaitic, if you could narrow it down and let's focus on the Advaitic perspective,

which is something that I'm most familiar with, and it's also the one which takes the

idea of consciousness most seriously.

So there the idea is that first you start with yourself and notice that, if I may take

a couple of minutes, notice that whatever we do, we are conscious.

So right now we are all seeing, we're all seeing, but we are aware, we see many things,

but one thing common to all seeing is that I am aware.

And we hear, but there's awareness. We smell, taste, touch, but behind everything there

is awareness, there's this consciousness, which gives us all this multiplicity of experiences.

Turning inwards, we think, we remember, we enjoy, we suffer, we understand, we believe,

but notice what's common to all of them, it's the same consciousness.

And then Advaita says, there comes a time in our day when we fall asleep, the famous

Indian siesta in the afternoon or during the conference itself.

So you fall asleep and we dream, it's the same consciousness.

What Advaita is doing is, it's making a distinction between consciousness and mind.

This is something that I would like to stress upon.

In the modern philosophy of mind, in the world philosophy of mind, as yet, the distinction

between consciousness and mind is not appreciated.

This was well appreciated in multiple schools of ancient Indian philosophy, that mind and

consciousness are not different, they are different.

At this point, someone may say, okay, we're talking so much about consciousness, would

you like to define consciousness, precisely what is it?

And in modern consciousness studies, which is very big today, there is no clear definition.

But in Advaita Vedanta, there is a clear definition.

And I'm going to share it with you and you'll see how elegant it is, how precise and elegant

it is.

What is consciousness?

The definition of consciousness is anidam chaitanyam, there are multiple ways of approaching,

one way is this, not this.

Now it works like this.

In our experience, right now, every one of us, in our experience, whatever we can label

as this, that's not consciousness, that's an object to consciousness.

So this glass, since it's this, it's an object to consciousness.

This shirt, since I'm saying this, it's an object to consciousness.

This body, since I'm saying this, it's an object to consciousness, I'm aware of it.

And now it becomes even more interesting.

Mind, you know, all of us, we are thinking, remembering, this thought, this feeling, this

memory, because we are saying this, this, this, thoughts, feelings, memories are also

objects, phenomenologically speaking, to consciousness.

That which is not an object, which is irreducible to objects, and yet you cannot deny it, because

that is what gives you the experience of all objects, that is consciousness.

So that's the definition.

Right.

So, Swamiji, that's a...

And note how intuitive it is.

It's not difficult to get.

And one interesting thing you'll see is that this non-objective, indubitable consciousness,

if we try to understand it, grasp it, we won't be able to do it, because it's not an object.

Yes.

And that's what's beautiful about, you know, the Advaita tradition, and let's stick with

that right now, we won't have time, is that it describes the Brahman or consciousness

as something that has no attributes, no properties, you know, it's, you can't, like you said,

you can't describe it because it is outside your sensory perceptions, you know.

It is outside of...

I wouldn't even say outside.

It's behind your sensory perceptions.

It's that which makes all sensory perceptions possible.

Right.

But now that we've established the grandeur and profundity of that idea, and the fact

that, as I said, all science even has not been able to debunk it, but at the same time

now, I'd like to, you know, and it's wonderful that you're willing to engage with discussions

with science, is that, you know, when you're saying that what makes this so unique and

perhaps that most profound truth is that there's an observing self, you know, which

is separate from the experience.

So in our lived reality, I can understand the value of that, you know, because it allows

you to separate from your emotions, your monkey mind, be still, you know, so it's a self-help

for living this extremely myriad and rollercoaster life, you know, I get the value of that.

But when you begin to speak of it in deeper terms, then Swamiji, with all the new, you

know, sort of discoveries of science, maybe even this is under assault, and I'll ask you

why.

Because, you know, even when we talk about the Advaita tradition, you speak of qualia,

you know, and all the neuroscientists are now talking about qualia, that qualia is that

ability to feel sweetness, or to feel blueness, or the experience of sensory emotions is what

is called qualia.

I have not yet understood why such amazing neuroscientists and people of knowledge like

you are so bewildered by it, you know, because that feeling of sweetness is not something

that's outside of our sensory, you know, they are able to find parts of your brain that

create that, you know, that create that sweetness or that sense of blueness.

If you cut off a part of your brain, those experiences die out.

It's not that your watching self is able to experience things or watch things when that

particular part of your brain is not working, you know, or say we were talking about psychedelics

yesterday, when your ego self or your default mode shuts down and other parts of your brain

starts speaking to each other, different synapses, you have a completely different experience

of the world.

It's not that there's an immutable self watching this leela of life, you know, so qualia and

even this thing of saying, oh, what is consciousness?

How come the brain creates this feeling of being Shoma, feeling of being Swami, but don't

you see it as a gradation, like the crab on the seabed.

If you do something to it, it'll feel pain, it'll run away.

Then you go higher up the chain, you know, to come to elephants.

Elephants have memory.

Elephants have emotions.

You see they have attachments.

So it seems to be a more and more complex structure of the brain, which creates consciousness,

you know, and I'd like to hear your response to that.

Right.

You said many things there, but I'll focus on a couple of things.

First of all, the question of science, especially neuroscience today.

And it's an exciting time to be alive.

If you are doing neuroscience, if you're doing consciousness studies, and if you're doing

Advaita Vedanta, it's an exciting time to be alive and it's exciting time to have this

kind of a conversation.

And I'll tell you why.

It's only in the last 20 years or so, 20-25 years, that scientists have taken an increasing

interest in consciousness, in what consciousness is for multiple reasons.

One reason is new technologies there, which can closely scan the brain, fMRI scans and

all of that, the whole emergence of computers and nowadays AI.

So that again brings into question what exactly we are.

So for multiple reasons, consciousness has become sort of center in neuroscience, in

computer science, in consciousness studies.

There's a book, Waking Dreaming Being, by a professor, a professor of philosophy in

Vancouver, in the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

There he says that consciousness studies is not a new subject.

It's as old as the Upanishads, 5000 years ago in India, they were talking about consciousness.

So it's a very ancient subject.

And not only that, this professor, he says, sorry, the name, Evan Thompson, I think, I forget.

So he says there that the Upanishads are so significant in the history of human thought

that we would do better to mark human history, not as AD and BC, but we should say before

Upanishad and after Upanishad.

So that kind of importance.

What is it?

Why now?

What's what's so important right now?

I just, by the way, another one I just recalled, Oxford University Press, you can Google that

The Five Great Unsolved Questions in Philosophy.

It's a gimmick.

All questions in philosophy are more or less unsolved.

Anyway, the five great unsolved questions in philosophy.

And I noticed out of the five, four are directly related to consciousness.

Who am I?

What is free will?

Can we know anything at all? Skepticism?

What happens after death?

So four questions are directly related to question consciousness.

And the fifth one was about justice, questions of justice.

So now, why is it that we say that science cannot do this?

For this, I rely on a scientist and a philosopher, David Chalmers, who coined the term, the phrase,

‘the hard problem of consciousness’.

It's precisely this.

As you said, we experience a variety of things and the sensations we experience, they're

called qualia.

And you will notice those are very clearly connected with brain activity.

If you taste sweetness, there'll be some neurons firing in some part of the brain and

the neuroscientist will be able to correlate.

Taste of sweetness is correlated to this part of the brain firing.

Pain is correlated to this part of the brain firing.

Memory, you think you're trying to recall something and some part of the brain is firing.

Now notice, bring back the Advaitic definition of consciousness.

Taste of sweetness, object. Pain, object. Memory, object. All these are objects to consciousness.

And when these objects are presented to consciousness, they're subtle objects, presented to consciousness,

different parts of the brain are firing.

But the one common thing to all of them is that they all feel like something.

They feel like something.

Why is there subjectivity at all?

You notice, I'll give you the example, the very example which you used.

You say that there might be a part of the brain linked with our experience of sweetness.

And if that part stops working, then we will not be able to experience sweetness.

Then you said, so that that part of the brain created our experience of sweetness.

What's the big deal about it?

Notice something.

I was able to experience, suppose, taste or smell.

This is a very good example.

In COVID, a lot of people lost their sense of smell, taste also, I think.

So I was able to experience taste and smell.

Now I'm not able to experience taste and smell.

Taste and smell are gone.

Taste and smell are gone.

You are able to experience the absence of taste and smell.

Did you become unconscious because you can't taste or smell?

No.

Consciousness continues.

So that part of the brain which generated that particular object called smell, taste,

that was not generating the subjectivity behind it.

This is what David Chalmers calls the hard problem of consciousness.

You can correlate conscious experiences with the activities of the brain, but at all, why

should there be subjectivity?

At all, why do we have first person experiences?

That is a mystery.

And yeah, sorry.

No, sorry.

Okay.

And I'll tell you why it's not a mystery from the Advaitic perspective, not just Advaitic,

Sankhyan, Buddhist, from the ancient Indian perspective of consciousness, it's not a mystery.

I'll tell you precisely.

It's very easy to understand now.

As I said, everything that we experience is an object by very definition.

It's an object to you, the consciousness.

Now when we say we explain something, we are explaining complex objective phenomena in

terms of more simple objective phenomena.

So we are experiencing the experience of, we are explaining the experience of sweetness

in terms of firing of the brain.

That's also objective.

The experience of sweetness is also objective.

But what is not objective is the very subjective thing of experiencing, of being aware at all.

And that you cannot explain in terms of objective activity like the brain activity.

Swamiji, that's again elegantly put as you said it, but I would still challenge you

one degree further on that, which is that absolutely there's that internal observing

self, the experiencing self, and that is not a, it's not a sum of its parts.

You know, it seems to be something that exists outside the particular parts that make it

up.

Absolutely.

But there's still, there's just still one final mystery, which is that when you die,

that consciousness you don't know, you know?

And so there's two theories of science, which I would like to put to you.

One is that there's a global workspace theory, you know, which is that maybe there's a space

in your brain, which we haven't yet deciphered.

We've been talking about what a, you know, huge space it is.

It's a universe in your head.

But maybe there's a global workspace where different parts of the brain send stimuli

and we are only taking in a very small percentage of the stimuli that's coming to us all the

time.

And our brain sends it to a particular workspace where it comes together.

And then that composition of many things, you know, the brain's workspace tells you

what to give attention to.

So that's one theory.

The other, which I remember you said you're very interested in, is the integrated information

theory, which was the complexity idea.

You know, that as beings get more and more complex, a more complex consciousness is formed,

you know?

How would you respond to that?

That after death, nobody knows, or I would ask you, does the Upanishadic traditions tell

us what happens after death?

First of all, the global workspace theory and Tononi's integrated information theory,

you would say, what is your take on it?

I firmly and without any qualifications reject both of them.

Without knowing too much about it, they're very complex.

But I'll tell you one thing, one thing I look for whenever you come across these explanations

of consciousness.

Every now and then your news will suggest consciousness explained.

And I always say you should add away, consciousness explained away.

You will notice one thing about all of these theories, without exception, one thing.

At one place, they make a jump from the objective to the subjective.

They will describe something subjective, like a global, something objective, like a global

workspace, and then say, you, the consciousness, is because of that.

How?

That you come back to the same problem, the hard problem of consciousness.

Integrated information theory.

They will say that the more the complexity, then you generate, I'm oversimplifying, but

you generate consciousness.

A more complex system can lead to the appearance, the emergence of consciousness.

Again, from an Advaitic perspective, you're making a jump from the objective to the subjective.

You are unable to, it's a very elegant way of seeing things.

I remember seeing this cartoon of some PhD student explaining his thesis to his guide,

and so he's got a lot of mathematical calculations.

Step one, mathematics.

Step two, mathematics.

Step three, mathematics.

Step four, a miracle.

Then step five, mathematics.

In between, it's a miracle.

And the guide is saying, I think you need to work on step four.

All of these theories without exception, all of these theories without exception, are basically

step four theories, a miracle theories, water into wine theories.

You understand the biblical allegory of what is water and what is wine, but how that jump

happens, nobody knows.

And Advaita Vedanta and Sankhya will say you're making a category mistake.

The consciousness is fundamentally different.

And now some people, David Chalmers, Bernardo Kastrup, Donald Hoffman, these are the people

I have just spoken to recently, and there are others, who are sort of coming around

to the radical idea, radical in modern philosophy of mind, in modern science, not in ancient India,

the radical idea that consciousness may be a fundamental reality of the universe.

Okay, death.

The next question is death.

We play a trick on ourselves.

You see, all religious traditions, not Advaita Vedanta only, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism,

Christianity, Islam, all religious traditions without any exception.

They all have one thing in common.

They say that something survives death.

Physical death is the end, that's materialism.

There's the ancient Charvakas, nothing is there after that.

But all religions, they in fact operate on this one common premise.

Tremendous differences among them, but something survives death.

And they have logic on their side, I'll tell you why.

Right now, follow this closely, it's a subtle trick that we play on ourselves.

Right now when we are communicating with each other, we don't think we are communicating

just with bodies.

I think there's a person there, just like I feel like a person in here, I think there's

a person there, I think there are persons there.

It's automatic.

We feel we are communicating with conscious beings.

Now when death comes, and death means death of the body, no one doubts that, all doctors

will tell you, it's physiological death.

When we see the dead body, we jump to the conclusion that the person is also gone.

How do you know that?

How do you know that?

We know the body is gone.

But we never said that the body was the person, the person was embodied there, in that body.

And the linking assumption, the presumption is, somehow the body was generating that person.

But that's the materialistic reductionism.

That's what's under serious question now.

The hard problem of consciousness, a number of thinkers are seriously questioning whether

the brain actually generates consciousness.

It generates experiences for consciousness.

But does it generate consciousness?

If it does not, then in that case when the body is dead, how do you know consciousness

is dead?

We can't access it.

The body is dead, the door is shut, but consciousness may not be dead.

So, you know, that lives in the realm of mystery, and we'll have to leave it there, because

again to pursue that, I just want to open up a little bit.

We'll all find out.

We'll all find out.

Not to be morbid, but we'll find out something.

So you know, there's a whole other thing that, because we are in the realm of science and

the bridge to spirituality, is that, you know, yesterday when Vedita was describing

that what happens when you take psychedelics, you know, and many people come back with an

exact replication, especially when it's done under certain setting, that you come back

with an exact experience of a mystical experience, you know, experience of Brahman, of love,

undifferentiatedness with the entire nature and you are the same, all your distinctions

of physicality can break down, etc.

So my question is, Swamiji, that do you think that these descriptions of mysticism, and

it's there in many ancient traditions, actually could may have just been a psychedelic experience?

Where the mystics hide, where they are on weed.

Where I live, they certainly are on weed, not me personally, but since I'm in the Vedanta

Society in New York and Central Park is just across the street, so I mean, five o'clock

afterwards you go, they are all having spiritual experiences, because they have legalized marijuana,

so people are, you know, in the 1960s, there is this drug culture, and it sort of started

off, the hippie culture started off in Berkeley, in Berkeley University, we have an ashram

right there, and the Swami there at that time, Swami Ashokanandaji, 1960s, late 60s actually,

he said, Berkeley, blessed place, an avatar on each street corner.

But seriously, even the Yoga Sutras mention the use of psychedelics to generate extraordinary

experiences, but they strictly forbid you to use it.

See the point of spirituality is not to have a variety of extraordinary experiences.

Extraordinary experiences just opens you to the fact that this experience also is a kind

of extraordinary experience.

It's completely constructed by our sensory system.

More and more cognitive scientists, I mean, Donald Hoffman who is in UC Riverside, I think,

he is working on this, he says that actually what we are seeing here is being generated

by the brain, and it's actually being rendered continuously by the brain, he's using virtual

reality metaphors, so it's not out there what we are seeing!

What is out there is incredibly different from what we are actually seeing.

It's being reconstructed, and scientists, no scientist disputes that.

Now mystical experiences, they have their value.

They are genuine mystical experiences.

How will you distinguish someone on psychedelics from a genuine mystical experience arrived

at through meditation and samadhi?

One thing is the effect on character.

So, you know, a fool can go into a psychedelic high and come out a fool, but a fool can go

into samadhi and come out a saint.

These things, you might say, what's the proof?

The proof is our entire tradition in every religion.

Every religion in the world stands testament to the fact that there have been men and women

of extraordinarily high character, who say that they have had certain extraordinary spiritual

experiences.

However, let me add something.

Here is the beauty of Advaita Vedanta.

Advaita Vedanta does not depend on extraordinary mystical experiences.

You may have it, you may not have it.

Advaita Vedanta depends on our quotidian daily experience.

See right now, you are seeing and hearing, that's enough for Advaita Vedanta to begin.

You know, Drig Drishya Viveka, the analysis of the seer and the seen.

We all have the sensation of a body, of the prana, of the mind, thinking, intellect, understanding.

That's enough for you to begin the process of Pancha Kosha Viveka, the analysis of the

five levels of the human personality.

And all of us, we wake, we dream, we sleep, this is called Avastha Traya.

This is enough for us to begin the process of inquiring into who we are and understand

the limitless dimensions of consciousness.

So at no point, you know, asking for or depending on or using mystical experiences as a premise

for your argument.

There are so many things I want to talk to you about, Swamiji, but unfortunately we are

running out of time.

May I bundle three or four complex ones and ask you for a one minute answer?

Yes.

Bring in AI.

If the audience promises to stay till late tonight where we don't shortchange other speakers,

then we could continue this for ten more minutes.

May I ask the audience if we can?

So Swamiji, I will come to AI, but just, you know, to establish the beauty and profundity

of our traditions, I do want to just come to a very interesting anecdote you told me,

which was that when Jamshedji Tata met Swami Vivekananda, that actually there was this

huge openness to science.

And you said the other day that if indeed science comes up with some theory that breaks

the foundations of Advaita tradition, how would you respond?

And do share with the audience a story about Tata meeting Vivekananda.

Okay.

Many people know the story actually, but it's very interesting.

When Swami Vivekananda, we all know, he went to the World Parliament of Religions in 1893.

On the ship was Jamshedji Tata, and he was going there in search of business opportunities

in the United States.

And they got to know each other.

Remember, at that time, Swami Vivekananda was not Swami Vivekananda, nobody knew him

at that time.

Jamshedji found him very intriguing, this young Bengali sanyasi, and they got talking.

And what did they talk about?

This Parsi businessman and this young monk, they talked about science and technology,

the future of science education in India.

And Vivekananda said to Jamshedji, it would be good to set up an institute for scientific

research, fundamental research in science and technology in India.

Years later, Jamshedji writes back to Vivekananda, the letter is available, it's on the Tata's

website also.

Jamshedji writes to Vivekananda, you may recall that we were on the ship together, and I'm

seized of this idea of starting an institute for fundamental research in science.

I can think of no better person to be the president of this than you.

But of course, Vivekananda did not go there, but he passed away when he was barely 39 years old.

And that institute finally became the Indian Institute of Science, which we know today.

It was known as, yes, Tata Institute, you look at, look up the history.

Even now in Bangalore, if you go there, the autowallas will say Tata Institute.

Yeah.

So, Swamiji, to come to that point that where you said that if these and you were very interested

in that complexity theory, what was your response?

I'm just establishing it because in a time when religiosity is kind of, you know, spiraling,

at the heart of it was something which you said was very, very, I would say, unique to

the Hindu tradition.

Absolutely.

She asked me that, suppose, suppose something comes up in science and it's shown that your

precious consciousness has a completely material basis in the brain and nervous system, what

would you do?

I would have to accept the truth.

I would have to accept, wherever science leads and truth leads, we have to go there.

Vivekananda himself said, I'm firmly convinced that religion must be put to the same rigorous

standard of truth that science is.

If on the way, if on the way, some doctrine or some dogma, no matter how comforting, has

to be discarded, it is better to let it go.

No matter how nice it is, untruth can never be ultimately good.

So if science can do that, well and good, I don't see how it can.

It's not just me.

It's people like David Chalmers or, you know, Donald Hoffman, many others, Bernardo Krastrup

and many others today are beginning to think that consciousness is fundamental in a deep

sense.

So I'm going to take you to a zone which was a little bit uncomfortable for you when you

said your scientist friends will roll their eyes, but in the quantum realm, you know,

and in fact, Urvashi is going to speak later in the afternoon.

There's this Cheshire Cat experiment they've done, where it turns out that even the particles

and their properties are separate, you know.

And here I'm bowing to the profundity of the Advaita tradition, where it says that, you

know, things have no properties, there's nothing decipherable, until your sensory self actually

freezes that, it acquires a property.

But otherwise it seems to be living in a property-less state, you know, both a wave and a particle.

No properties, even of that wave and particle state, they can be separate.

So would you say that science is kind of moving towards the Advaita tradition?

You know, here I'm very careful, fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

So I am no scientist at all, and certainly don't pretend to understand quantum mechanics,

but luckily even the cutting-edge quantum mechanics professors also don't pretend to

understand it.

So I was just reading this book, Carlo Rovelli, it's translated from Italian, it's called

Helgoland, it's on the beginnings of quantum theory and the mystery of what it really means.

The science apart, what does it really mean for us?

And he talks of, for example, Schrodinger, he says, he was, Carlo Rovelli points out,

he was absolutely fascinated by Vedanta.

And this book on quantum mechanics finally ends with, I was amazed to find out, it finally

ends with a long discussion of Nagarjuna, the Madhyamaka Shunyavadi philosopher who

lived in India to nearly 2000 years ago, who wrote the Moola Madhyamaka Karika.

So Carlo Rovelli says, whenever I talk about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, people

keep asking me, have you read Nagarjuna?

So he finally said, let me try it.

And he was fascinated.

And he actually read an explanation by, he says, an American analytic philosopher, immediately

knew who he meant.

It was Jay Garfield under whom I had studied Madhyamaka Buddhism.

So I wrote to him immediately and he said, yeah, Carlo Rovelli is a good friend and we

are going to have a discussion about this.

So how is it 2000 years ago, an ancient Indian philosopher, Nagarjuna and his texts and the

layers of commentary by Chandrakirti and others after that, have some bearing on the interpretation

of quantum mechanics in the 21st century?

How?

It's an amazing thing.

I asked Brian Greene, who is a very well-known cosmologist in Columbia.

So what do you think of these ancient Indian philosophies and your theories in modern science

and cosmology?

He said, what you, I'm quoting him precisely, what you've got is not science, but it is

a poetic rendition of the same principles we are now exploring.

That's what he said.

That's not somebody who's coming from a Buddhist perspective, Hindu perspective, nothing, no

Eastern perspective, purely an agnostic or atheistic perspective, purely on the basis

of modern cosmology and quantum mechanics.

So yes.

Last question.

AI?

Okay.

Okay.

Why don't you frame the own question on AI?

Because we took a whole day discussing AI yesterday.

Yes.

See, for me, AI is one more proof of the uniqueness of consciousness, and I'll tell you why.

Notice what AI is doing now.

It is replicating, imitating the highest functions of the human mind, you know, creativity.

So what Javedji and others said, you know, there's one question you missed yesterday.

Sonu Nigam, Javedji, they said you'll never have AI doing poetry or music at the level

of Sonu Nigam or Javed Akhtar.

True.

But what they also said was the ones who will be in trouble at the next level, the ones

below that.

So what about the B grade and C grade writers and poets and artisans and artists?

How is it that AI is able to replicate, do work at that level?

I was at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan a few weeks ago, and when you enter it, there's

an AI.

The first thing that you see is a big display like this, and AI has been fed all the art

in MoMA.

And when you go in there, it's continuously generating new quote-unquote art.

And it's hypnotic.

I stood there for a minute.

You can see whole crowds, they said, is it art or not?

So AI is doing that.

AI is writing.

Nowadays, here, I'm sure, and all in the United States and in Canada, all university

departments, they are scratching their heads how to know whether the assignments written

by the students are written by chat GPT or by the students.

So AI is doing that.

Creativity at multiple levels.

Sora, somebody demonstrated that to me a few days back, and you saw it here.

So my point here is every one of the higher faculties of the human mind, memory, intelligence,

decision-making, self-driving cars, creativity, all are being demonstrated by AI at some level.

Not at Javed Akhtar level, but at some level, some level, they're being demonstrated, except

one faculty.

Consciousness.

Consciousness.

These machines are not conscious.

You say, how do you know, Swami?

Are you in Silicon Valley?

No.

Ask the people in Silicon Valley.

Ask people in Google and OpenAI.

By the way, I don't know how true this is.

Somebody told me, if you look up Sam Altman and his Twitter feed, X feed, so somebody

asked him, tell us one thing that we don't know, which you believe to be true.

And Sam Altman said, Atman is Brahman.

He said that.

Look it up.

So now, consciousness is not there in any one of these machines.

My question here is this precise question.

Nobody's asking this question.

Why not?

Because if consciousness is just one more faculty of the mind, which can be explained

by the brain, see, creativity is complex,

decision making is complex and you are able to model that, imitate that algorithmically.

Consciousness is simple.

What does consciousness do?

It does only one thing and only one thing.

It gives you first person experience, Anubhava, experience.

Why can't you model that?

Why is it so difficult?

And if you ask the programmers, they will tell you something terrible.

They will say, let alone these machines being conscious, we have no idea where to begin.

We have no traction on the problem at all.

Doesn't that tell you that consciousness is something unique?

Not quite like all the other faculties.

I'm so dissatisfied, Swamiji, because I have so many questions to ask you.

Quick one, you know, in the Hindu tradition, you say when you die and there's this whole

idea of rebirth and I won't go into karma.

That's a whole other conference.

But they say that you may be reborn a cockroach, you know.

Can we be reborn a tree if consciousness pervades everything?

Does the cockroach have consciousness?

Does a tree have consciousness?

Could we be reborn a rock?

First of all, if you ask me, I'll say we don't die.

None of us.

Good news.

None of us are going to die.

Body's die.

So and we will, to be a little morbid, very soon, sometime or the other in the next 20,

30, 40, 50, 60 years, each of us will realize that guy was right.

I didn't die.

The bodies died.

And nobody is born a cockroach.

Nobody's born.

You get a human body or some other kind of body.

And that's the general story which we learn in all the Indian religions, that multiple

lifetimes.

Advaita has a radical take on it.

Advaita says, yes, you go from lifetime to lifetime.

Then you attain spiritual evolution and you realize who you are and then you are free

of this cycle.

And the whole thing is a story.

The whole thing is a story.

Yeah.

Wonderful.

Thank you very, very much, Swamiji.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you.