Consciousness Reframed II

We are the Consciousness Musicians — Electronic Art, Consciousness and the Western Intellectual Tradition

Mike King

The current scientific framework for the investigation of consciousness is the end-result of the Western intellectual tradition. It is shown that this tradition can be re-examined in terms of the Hindu concept of jnani, and that this approach could form the basis of a first-person science of consciousness. Electronic arts practitioners are presented as those who carry out a systematic inquiry into the subjective, and are well-equipped to contribute to the debates on consciousness.

Keywords: consciousness, philosophy, jnani, Hinduism, third-person science, first-person science.

Introduction

At the 2nd 'Towards a Science of Consciousness' conference in 1996 I sat next to a brain surgeon who remarked that most of the speakers were on the wrong track: he could tell them how consciousness is produced. As a brain surgeon he knew the precise combination of chemical and neurophysiological conditions in which a patient was conscious, and those in which they were not. This is a materialist, non-dualist viewpoint which regards consciousness as an emergent phenomenon. Previously consciousness was regarded by the materialists as an epi-phenomenon, or by the dualist philosophers such as Descartes as independent of matter, and brought into relationship to it via God. Since the ascendance of science such dualism became intellectually untenable, and a scientific investigation of consciousness thought unfeasible until the late 20th C. The 'new' physics (primarily quantum theory) has made it possible to re-open the debate, because of a new emphasis on the observer in scientific experiment.

However at the heart of the debate is the question whether consciousness is open to scientific investigation at all. The difficulty can be expressed as the 'zombie problem' where the zombie is defined as: 'a behaviourally indiscernible but insentient simulacrum of a human cognizer'. The zombie has been a useful tool in consciousness studies, partly as a theoretical point of reference, and partly because engineers can go ahead and build one in the hope of analysing its point of departure from the human. Others believe that it is only a special property of the human brain that gives rise to consciousness, perhaps related to quantum mechanical effects in the microtubules. The reverse-engineered zombie, and the quantum investigations are just two approaches to the understanding of consciousness, but whatever the results, they will tell us nothing about consciousness as we know it from the inside. It is an awkward but irreducible fact that only one's own consciousness is available for direct investigation — in other words every one else is a zombie. All the usual reasons for attributing consciousness to others — empathy, common sense, even love — fail the criteria for acceptance as scientific evidence.

My thesis is that consciousness is a suitable subject for a first-person science, a science of the subjective, and not for a third-person science. To explore this proposition I shall examine the Western intellectual tradition from an Eastern perspective, using the concept of the jnani.

Background concepts

In ancient times and up to surprisingly recently, the Western intellectual tradition was bound up with religious thought. The key distinction in religious matters I am introducing for the purpose of this discussion is between the devotional and the non-devotional orientation, and I will use the Indian terms bhakti and jnani to cover these. The British medieval mystic Richard Rolle is an example of bhakti, while the Buddha is an examples of jnani. The characteristics of a jnani include an emphasis on knowing rather than loving, on enquiry rather than surrender, on doubt rather than faith, on will rather than abandonment; possibly non-theistic rather than theistic, and possibly via negativa rather than via positiva. (The latter terms are used in mysticism to distinguish spiritual paths that respectively deny the material world or embrace it.)

Religions are founded by charismatic individuals such as Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, Krishna and so on. The orientation of such men, either bhakti or jnani, has a profound effect on the type of religion they leave behind, and will influence the kind of religious language that the faithful can use as part of their tradition. Christ was bhakti, Buddha was jnani. Hence for a jnani such as Eckhart, born into a bhakti religion,  it was difficult to use the Christian language to express his own insights, and he ran into trouble with the Roman Catholic church.

When we speak of the Buddha, Eckhart, or Krishnamurti as jnani we are talking about the geniuses of this orientation. However I believe that all people, whether admittedly religious or firmly secular, have one or other of the two orientations, jnani or bhakti. It is the person of the jnani orientation who doubts, questions, and thinks, and, given the right intelligence, education and milieu, will become a contributor to a culture's intellectual tradition. The fully developed jnani is very different from the intellectual however, but at the same time I do want to stress that I consider the bhakti to contribute as much, if not more, to society as the jnani.

Patanjali and Eastern traditions of thought

Using the previous terminology Hinduism contains luminaries of both jnani and bhakti persuasion, but we will consider a single important jnani text in the Indian tradition, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.

Here are the first five stanzas:

Now the discipline of Yoga.
Yoga is the cessation of mind.
Then the witness is established in itself.
In the other states there is identification with the modifications of the mind.

Patanjali is codifying and summarising a knowledge that already had a long history, and in the first five lines reduces the system to its essence. To condense it even further:

	Yoga is the cessation of the identification with the modifications of the mind.

The remainder of the Sutras forms a systematic exposition of this proposition, and lays out a method for its practice and achievement of its goal. What is radically different in yoga to any Western tradition is the suggestion that cessation of mind is the route to knowledge. In Zen the doctrine of no-mind is also central to its teachings. However, despite the anti-intellectual implication of this starting point, both jnani Hinduism, and all the forms of Buddhism, have generated vast literatures which have shaped the intellectual traditions of the far East.

The following sutras are important as they touch on epistemology:

The modifications of the mind are five. They can be a source of anguish or non-anguish.
They are right knowledge, wrong knowledge, imagination, sleep and memory.
Right knowledge has three sources: direct cognition, inference, and the words of the awakened ones.

Direct cognition for Patanjali and the sages of the East means a knowing of thing from the inside, using techniques broadly referred to as meditation. Inference is common with the West; it means any knowledge derived from rational thought. The 'words of the awakened ones' has no credibility in the West outside the traditions of faith, mainly because of the obvious problem: who is to say which speaker is enlightened and which not? However for an enquirer into truth in a tradition such as Buddhism, the seeker is encouraged to test his or her own direct cognitions against those of the 'enlightened ones'. The interplay between Master and disciple in Zen, for example, is an illustration of this.

Jnani and the Western Intellectual Tradition

If we now ask why the intellectual traditions have developed so differently in West and East, we can identify three related points of departure: Greek thought, the dominance of Christianity, and the rise of modern science.

Taking the Greeks as the first point of departure from the East, we can formulate this as the difference in emphasis between what we now understand as philosophy, and what is jnani. When we look at Heraclitus or Pythagoras for example, we find many similarities with jnani writings from Hinduism. The central figure in this context is Socrates however, and I have made a detailed study of the proposal that Socrates wasmore like a well-developed jnani such as the Buddha, than a philosopher as we now understand the term. There is not space here to go into the details of the argument, but two pieces of evidence can be mentioned: Socrates's 'fits of abstraction', and his equanimity, or even joy, in the face of death. If we interpret the 'fits of abstraction' from the Eastern perspective as a type of samadhi, then much of Socrates's behaviour becomes clear, and of a pattern shown in many jnani's lives.

Some see the early intellectual debate in the West to be between Plato's mysticism and Aristotle's logic, but my analysis emphasises more the divergence between Plato as a philosopher and Socrates as a jnani. The West has not previously made this distinction, with the result that philosophy became a formal system of thought divorced from the spiritual, but conducive to the rise of science. We can say that Socrates taught from a first-person epistemology, a direct cognition, while Plato developed a theoretical system, partly based on Socrates's teachings.

Some commentators believe that the dominant religion of the West could have derived from Socrates, who is compared to Christ in his teaching manner, and in his persecution and execution, though from our analysis Socrates is a man of the jnani orientation and Christ of the bhakti orientation. There are many contributing factors to the dominance of Christianity, but perhaps the most important one was the initial apologist in each case — Plato for Socrates and St. Paul for Christ. Paul was probably less intellectually gifted than Plato, but his success in the initial propagation of Christianity lay in his appeal to ordinary people. Plato's diluted Socratism appeals to the rulers and intellectuals, while Paul's Christianity appeals more widely to the poor and suffering, and to those whose bhakti orientation was touched by the suffering of Christ. 

However, the initial bhakti nature of Christianity gave an insufficiently broad basis for a religion of the West, and the jnani element was grafted on from the Socratic source, creating a tension that dictated much of European intellectual history. Plotinus (AD 204-270) is  an important member of the neo-Platonist tradition in the West, and is considered to be Plato's apologist or successor, but on close scrutiny (again from an Eastern perspective) we find that he is a jnani in his own right, who happened to usethe vocabulary of Plato to express his own ideas. Like Descartes and Spinoza, considered to be the founders of modern philosophy, Plotinus is evaluated for his formal contributions to philosophy, but analysing the work of these intellectuals from the jnani perspective gives a quite different view of their role.

Going back to Plato we could say that his impact was to prioritise ratiocination, or the dialectic process, over meditation, and so this became the dominant mode for the intellectual investigation of consciousness in the West. Descartes, with his cogito ergo sum, locked the West into giving primacy to thought over all other experience. We can say that the West is characterised by ratiocination and mind, whereas the East is characterised by meditation and no-mind. Patanjali considers both to be routes to correct knowledge, but the East has prioritised one, and the West the other.

The Scientific Method

The devotional nature of the dominant religion in Europe could not give free reign to its jnani-oriented thinkers, who began to turn to empiricism, that is observations of Nature, as a way of legitimising their instinctive tendencies to doubt and enquiry. One half of the Renaissance was preoccupied with neo-Platonism, but the other, epitomised perhaps by Leonardo da Vinci, turned its back on the past and put its energies into a nascent science. Galileo's disagreement with the Roman Catholic church symbolised the parting of science and religion in Europe, which gave the jnani-oriented individual the impetus to abandon religion, though the complete secularisation of Western culture took another three centuries.

Third-person science is a consensual one, that is data leading to scientific conclusions are in the public domain, and in principle there is nothing stopping anyone from repeating the experiments that led to the conclusions. In third person science the first person is the object under investigation, the second person is the scientist, and the third person is any one else who can corroborate the measurements and conclusions of the second. When Galileo published his results it was open to any one with a telescope and some patience to confirm. Although the initial reaction to his discoveries was hostile, it was only a matter of time before 'reasonable' people were convinced, because confirmation was relatively easy.

What then is a first person science? At this point it is not much more than a suggestion by the British mystic Douglas Harding, but clearly the work of the great jnanis, East and West, can be examined for a basis. All that can be said now is that in principle it simply replaces the object of the third person enquiry with the subjective world of the investigator.

Conclusions

In so far as the arts are a systematic enquiry into what is, they are more like a first person enquiry than a third person enquiry, because, although the theme of the artwork may be external and material, the real enquiry is into the subjective response of the artist to the subject matter. Practitioners of the electronic arts are in a good position to engage with a first person science of consciousness because, though artists, they are naturally disposed to science and technology. (I have explored some of these issues in arts and science, and also cyberspace.)

The brain surgeon suggested that the brain produced consciousness. If one was to suggest that a flute produces music, because a skilled flute-maker can give the precise mechanical conditions under which music can or cannot arise from the instrument, it would be absurd. Yet what if consciousness was as independent of the brain as the music is of the flute? After all, can you remember ever having been unconscious?

Mike King is Reader in Computer Art and Animation at London Guildhall University. He is currently working on a computer animated film about Krishna, and researches the intersection between the artistic, the scientific, and the spiritual. Email: kingm@lgu.ac.uk.