I was sad to read of the passing away of Prof. Anand Vaidya. Aeon magazine has published a wonderful essay prepared by his wife Manjula Menon showing how he combined an interest in ancient Indian philosophy with scholarship in the modern philosophy of mind.
I quote from the article which discusses David Chalmers' 'hard problem of consciousness'.
The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience … How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion?
Evolution. If such a thing actually exists, it is either a 'spandrel' or increases fitness in some way. In the latter case, we would assume it arises by the law of increasing functional information. If it is 'separable' then it is itself selected for because of some function it fulfils by itself. But, it may not be separable. Consider the soul. Bart Simpson sells his soul but then becomes terrified that he has lost an essential part of himself. Lisa buys it back for him. It seems the thing fulfils a function and, presumably, has evolved alongside our consciousness and linguistic ability. But is it 'separable'? Could it exist independently? Is it a necessary or sufficient condition for something else- e.g. salvation or reincarnation?
If the thing were empirically separable and a suitable experiment could be performed, then what would burgeon would be a science or praxis (this is 'vigyan' in Sanskrit) which actively changed outcomes. If 'separability' is merely nominal and part and parcel of an explanation or elucidation, then what we are speaking of is 'dogma' (matam) or a particular axiomatic or 'natural deduction' system. Various different dogmas (e.g. that of the Iyers vs that of the Iyengars) may have the same 'vigyan'- i.e. they are 'observationally equivalent'- i.e. the phenomenology is the same or the orthopraxy is the same. Are the dogmas different from each other in any real sense? Perhaps. A point may come where a crucial experiment can differentiate between dogmas and thus a currently 'open' problem in philosophy may be closed. Meanwhile, devout Hindus may point to verse 1.27.10 in the Rg Veda- "Jara-bodha tad vividdhi vise-vise yagniyaya stoman rudraya drisikam" - which suggests that the rituals connected to the sacrifice to Lord Rudra have, since ancient times, been explained in multiform manners by great sages. In particular, the Ati Rudra Maha Yagna which involves the recitation of the Sri Rudram hymn, from the Yajur Veda, is considered to have complementary rather than competing explanatory dogmas, or modal epistemologies, associated with it. Thus, it may be, the same Sage authored two different commentaries which were taken up by seemingly rival schools.
Ramanuja, the founder of the 'qualified monism' Iyengar sect, propounded a doctrine of “Aprthaksiddhi” (inseparable existence) on the basis of Bodhayana's gloss on the Brahma Sutra. Sankara, who is revered by the Iyers, does not consider attributes or predicates, inseparable or otherwise, to be real and permanent. It is a delusion to hold this view and a stumbling block to salvation. Are these views complementary or are they incompatible? If we are unconcerned with the after-life, we may be content to say they are complementary. Perhaps that is best for Faith qua faith, but- if faith is merely a means to an end- viz. getting to Heaven- then one path is better than the other at least for a particular person.
The kind of consciousness being described is phenomenal.
It is conventional. A particular sub-discipline decided there were some 'qualia' of this sort. But there is no empirical evidence for them. We might say, from a pragmatic point of view, that the qualia are delusional or that thinking about them is a waste of time.
That is to say, it has to do with the felt quality of experience.
which is itself not felt but is imputed without any supporting evidence.
Consciousness has a ‘what it is like for me’ aspect that is accessible both through phenomenal contrast (eg, seeing blue vs red), and subject contrast (eg, the experience of Anand vs that of Manjula).
Some people may be conscious of this distinction. I suppose a painter or a philosopher may want to investigate this so as to make a creative breakthrough of some type. But so may an advertising copywriter. What it's like for me to buy widgets from Bloggs & Sons is wholly orgasmic. Switch to Bloggs & Sons widgets today!
It is typically the phenomenal component that comes along with what the German philosopher Franz Brentano referred to as intentional states.
In other words, the thing is a word which may be unconnected to anything in the world, and it comes along with another word of a wholly metaphysical type. We may assert that both are 'cum fundamentum in re' but what are we really asserting? What is the reality in which they are founded?
The question for Indian philosophy is whether a state like 'nirvikalpa samadhi' is 'intentional' even though it is characterized by an absence of thought and has no object. Is 'pure awareness' awareness of some thing or does it subsist without relationships of any kind?
Drawing on the work of medieval scholastic philosophers, Brentano
who had broken with the Church because he could not accept Papal infallibility. But who is to say that what he had to say about introspection or intentionality was itself infallible?
argued in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874) that all mental phenomena is directed, is about something.
There is no evidence this is the case. We may think that minds developed because of selective pressure. However, this merely means that there will be 'increasing functional information'. This means that different functions which produce more information will gain equally from the selective pressure. This militates for plasticity and multiple realizability. In other words, the mind will have many ways to kill a particular cat and 'mental phenomena' will be different for different people. I solve a math problem in the way I have been taught- viz. by using calculus. An autistic savant may do so in a way which uses discrete math or heuristics of a type computer science is only now unveiling. But he may not be able to give an account of how he just 'knows' the answer.
We can imagine an expert calculator who 'is in the zone', solving hugely complex problems without any feeling of strain or consciousness of the incredible feats he is pulling off.
Indeed, there cannot be a mental state without that state having an object.
This is an ipse dixit assertion. One could equally state that no mental state can have an object other than itself because minds are not material and have no access to each other.
Whether one is thinking about how to analyse a tree, or admiring the way sunlight sifts through its branches, listening to the sound of its leaves shaking, or even experiencing an uplifted mood due to its mere presence – all of these mental phenomena are in reference to something: the tree.
No they aren't. We don't give a fuck about the tree. We may be in the mood to write a poem or to think wistful thoughts. By contrast, the lumber jack is thinking about the tree and how much money he can make by chopping it down.
As Brentano put it: ‘There is no hearing unless something is heard, no believing unless something is believed; there is no hoping unless something is hoped for.’
One could equally say, 'there is no hearing save if there is silence, no believing unless nothing is believed, no hoping save for a hope that alone exists.'
This intentional or referential quality is what defines all mental phenomena and separates mental states from the physical objects in the world.
Yet men are 'physical objects'. We see a lumberjack approach a tree. We know what his intention is. But that would also be true of a robot designed to chop down trees.
The hard problem of consciousness emerges when we try to explain scientifically the phenomenal aspect of intentional states – what is it like to have a conscious experience of a tree?
Stupid problems arise when we make a category mistake and try to explain what isn't scientific, but wholly subjective or imaginative, in scientific terms. At around the time Brentano invented intentionality, lots of smart people were seeking scientific proof for ghosts or fairies or telepathy.
To distinguish the hard problem of consciousness, the feeling associated with being conscious in the world, from easy problems like reasoning and taking accordant action,
which isn't easy at all
Chalmers offers a thought experiment.
First, he asks that we posit the existence of ‘zombies’, which are creatures that are like us in every way, except that they lack phenomenal consciousness. Zombie-Chalmers, for example, is a physical duplicate of Chalmers that lives in a physical duplicate world of ours, but for which there is no phenomenal consciousness.
In which case 'phenomenal consciousness' has no physical basis. But, in that case, it is outside physics- i.e. is metaphysical. We may as well talk of people who sold their soul to the devil and thus who are no longer capable of empathy.
If zombie-Chalmers is conceivable, that is, if there is no contradiction in the idea of a physical duplicate of Chalmers that lacks phenomenal consciousness,
there is a contradiction if you believe that minds are affected by physical bodies. Of course, if minds are the creation of an Occasionalist God who has synchronized those 'windowless monads' in pre-established harmony, then maybe zombie-Chalmers is possible- but only if God wills it into existence.
then Chalmers argues that we have prima facie evidence for thinking that zombie-Chalmers is metaphysically possible.
In the process, we gain prima facie evidence that any crazy shit is metaphysically possible. One may as well read comic-books featuring guys who gained super-powers by being bitten by a radio-active spider.
And if zombie-Chalmers is metaphysically possible, then that, allegedly, proves that something other than the physical exists in our world.
If God is possible then Sir Keir Starmer could have turned invisible and entered my house and hidden my TV remote. After all, God may not want me to watch so much TV.
Does prakāśa or ‘illumination’ have anything to say about the hard problem of consciousness?
It says the answer to the problem is God or the Buddha or being really really good at Yogic meditation.
We think it might. But first we need to explore some foundational ideas in classical Indian philosophy.
But what is even more important is the foundational ideas of Indian esoteric psychology and physiology- stuff like how to attain nirvikalpa samadhi, not to mention gaining Nirvana or Kaivalya Gyaan or Moksha or, indeed, supernatural 'siddhis' such as the ability to levitate or to inhabit more than one body at the same time.
The classical Indian philosophical tradition is usually – if somewhat misleadingly – classified as comprised of the five
six. They are Purva and Uttara Mimamsa, Samkhya, Yoga, Nyaya & Vaisesika.
sub-schools of Vedic Hinduism and three schools outside of it (Buddhism, Jainism, Cārvāka),
Agamic Hinduism is equally important. Ramanuja gives equal status to the Pancharatra Agamas and the hymns of the Alvar Saints. I suppose one could make a similar point about other Hindu sects. Did Shaiva Siddhanta influence Sankara or was it the other way around? Hindus don't greatly care. By contrast, the Carvakas may never have existed. They were a straw-man mentioned only so as to be refuted.
each representing a long lineage of scholars who argue in favour of different notions of metaphysics and epistemology. We will focus on ideas from one of the Vedic schools, the Vedānta,
Uttara Mimamsa
which builds atop three foundational corpora:
Why no mention of the Vedas, Brahmanas & Aranyakas? It is with them that the Upanishads are concerned.
the Upaniṣads, the Brahma-sūtra and the Bhagavad-gītā. We will focus on two figures within the broadly construed Vedānta tradition, the singularly influential 8th-century philosopher Śaṅkara, and one of his interlocutors,
critics
the 11th-century philosopher Rāmānuja.
He was an 'Acharya'- i.e. the founder and leader of a specific sect.
For a flavour of the kind of things classical Indian philosophers thought about, we will begin with a bird’s eye view of a few notions from classical Indian philosophy, with the caveat that every idea described below has been hotly debated for hundreds of years.
Hilariously debated.
Central to Indian philosophy is the idea of illusion.
It is also central to Platonic philosophy and the idea that Philosophers, though ill paid and stupid, are actually way way smarter than rich and powerful people. BTW, the notion that I am ugly and have a tiny dick is totally delusive.
Phenomenology is about making do with illusion since we can't get to the Noumenon. But, if a critical experiment can be made to decide between two 'dogmas' or axiomatic approaches, we can move beyond phenomenology.
Here, there is a distinction between temporal and presentational notions of illusion. The first holds that whatever is not permanent in time, or else beyond time, is thereby an illusion. Of the various schools of Indian philosophy, Buddhism and Advaita Vedānta agree in accepting this account.
No. Buddhism says there is only this bare and empty moment. Past and Future are illusions. Vedanta says there is only a single, undivided, eternity. Time and Space are an illusion.
The second notion holds that whatever is presented to a subject of experience as other than how it is, is an illusion.No. Mithya is just flawed or misapplied cognition. As in a court of law, flawed testimony can be corrected such that an informative part of it can be separated from the mistaken part. In this way, the Judge may be able to arrive at a true picture of what happened.
This notion derives from the school of Nyāya, its early proponents from the 1st millennium and the work of the 14th-century philosopher Gaṅgeśa, considered to be the founder of the New Nyāya movement.
It is common sense. Nyava-Vaisesika was the more logical/scientific school which embraced the soteriology but rejected the ontological excesses of Vedanta. Nevertheless, nobody denied that there are some people who can gain the bliss of 'Sat-cit-anandam' wholly spontaneously. Either they said 'God has done this for a purpose of his own' or 'God has incarnated in this body' or something of that sort.
With talk about illusion, of course, comes talk about reality. And here the classical Indian philosophers made a number of fine distinctions. For our purposes, three are of note: conventional reality, apparent reality, and ultimate reality. Conventional reality just means everyday reality, one that is based on the pragmatics of everyday life under societal conventions and laws. Think of money, or the game of chess. Apparent reality is the notion of a reality that depends on our sensory organs of perception and the machinations of the mind: what we see is a tree and not an aggregate of organic molecules. Finally, ultimate reality is the notion that there is an underlying or hidden substratum to the world. Advaita Vedānta, for example, holds that brahman is identical with this ultimate reality.
The West had the same thing. Lord Jesus Christ, by the Hypostatic Union, is the hypokeimenon, or underlying substratum of all that is.
The other great Indian topic we’ll be concerned with is the self.
Which is the soul with which all Religions are concerned with.
The self is frequently understood in five different aspects.
This is the case in all places and at all times.
The first three are often also explored in contemporary Western philosophy of mind: the self as what makes decisions, engages in rational activity, and enables action; as what can gain and lose knowledge over time; and as what experiences in the ordinary empirical world.
It would be fair to say that in India, psychology and philosophy of mind were separate. My impression is that Western Christendom was more psychologistic and concerned with 'Moral Sciences' (e.g. Economics) and that philosophy of mind only came into its own at a later point in time, though this did involve the revival of some Scholastic ideas.
These three notions of the self might encompass what William James, in the chapter ‘Consciousness of Self’ from The Principles of Psychology (1890), called the ‘empirical self’, which he defines thus: ‘The Empirical Self of each of us is all that he is tempted to call by the name of me.’
In my case, my empirical self isn't, as I fondly believe, Beyonce. It is what other people see me as- viz. an elderly, indigent, imbecile.
James contrasted the notion of the empirical self with the more subtle, transcendent ‘pure’ self.
Which doesn't fart or wank.
The fourth aspect is perhaps what some would call more ‘spiritual’ – and which we simply define here as a subjective and usually ineffable experience of something venerable and greater than oneself. This is the self as what is permanent in time, and what undergoes transmigration from one body to another through karmic rebirth; it is sometimes expressed by the word soul.
This is where the Indians diverge from the Europeans. However, Islam has a notion of 'barzakh' similar to Hindu 'antarabhava' or Tibetan 'bardo'. This may be because of Zoroastrian influence. What is puzzling is why Islam retains an idea which has applicability only in a karmic context- viz. what determines the rebirth of a particular soul in a particular body. It is the Gandharva demi-gods who preside over this.
The fifth aspect is the self as the individual manifestation of a universal and single foundational consciousness (brahman).
which is what happens in Greek orthodox theosis. The soul partakes of the Divine.
And here we return to Yama’s lesson.
to Nachiketas.
Śaṅkara offers an analogy about how to understand all this. He compares brahman to a tree:
Its roots above, its branches below, this is the eternal banyan tree.
This is a quotation from the Gita. The leaves of the banyan, whose roots are in Heaven, are the pages of the Vedas. We must cut down that tree with the axe of non-attachment.
That alone is the Bright! That is brahman! That alone is called the Immortal! On it all the worlds rest; beyond it no one can ever pass.
He goes on to focus on the illusory nature of experience in his accompanying commentary:
It is a tree, so-called because it is felled; this tree consisting in manifold miseries of birth, decay, death and grief, changing its nature every moment … the subject of several doubtful alternatives in the intellects of many hundreds of sceptics … growing from the seed of ignorance … having for its trunk the various subtle bodies of all living things … having for its tender buds the objects of intelligence and the senses, having for its leaves the logic, learning and instruction … having various tastes such as the experience of joy and sorrow, having endless fruits on which living beings subsist, with its roots entwined and fastened firm by the sprinkling of the waters of desire … reverberating with the tumultuous noise arising from dancing, singing, instrumental music, joking … induced by mirth and grief, produced by the happiness and misery of living beings and felled by the unresisted sword of the realisation of the highest Self proved by the Vedānta, this tree of saṃsāra always shaking by its nature to the wind of desire …
It must be said, the Gita does the job better. Moreover, it has dramatic tension. But then, the dual of the Bhagvad Gita is the Vyadha Gita taken together with the Nalophkhyanam. It is to the latter- which shows that 'principals' must learn, or apply, statistical game theory to overcome akrasia or 'vishada'- which smart people like Vaidya should have paid attention.
The idea that the only foundational reality is brahman,
which is the case for Brahmins by reason of their priestly vocation
and that all else is presentational illusion, does not go unchallenged. The philosopher Rāmānuja disagrees with Śaṅkara on almost all the key points.
Ramanuja is of interest to Christians because he introduces a Trinity of mirror, image, and object.
He makes the following argument. First of all, foundational reality cannot consist in the existence of a single hidden and purely phenomenal consciousness, as per Śaṅkara, because the subject-object dichotomy is an inherent attribute of all mental phenomena.
No. Ramanuja doesn't deny that God could subsist in any modality he might wish to. Rather, he asserts that Sankara is not faithful to Scripture. Indeed, the feeling was that Sankara was a crypto-Buddhist and virtually an atheist. Iyers follow Sankara and are looked down on by Iyengars who follow Ramanuja, who started off as one of us. As far as I know, no Iyer has been malicious enough to suggest that Ramanuja thought there was a subject-object dichotomy. He was a qualified monist who considered the self and God not to be wholly distinct. Rather the knower and the known are aspects of a unified reality, like the image you see in a mirror.
(This point anticipates Brentano.)
No. Buddhist 'cetana' is like Brentano 'intentionality'. Ramanuja was clearing a path back to Vedic theism. Madhva took the next step to dualism. The fact is Indians are pious people. We want to worship God in Heaven and hope to be reunited with our loved ones after death.
Moreover, our everyday perception of the world cannot be fundamentally illusory (again, as per Śaṅkara) but must be said to accurately represent reality if we want to claim to understand anything about the world at all.
The feeling was that Sankara had thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Still, we revere him because he revitalized devotional piety across the four corners of the land.
Finally, there is no coherent reading of the foundational texts without invoking the idea of a transcendental God, one wholly and fundamentally different from everything else.
There is such a reading and it is supported by the Itihasas. Purva Mimamsa wasn't so bad. Indeed, it shares much with Jainism.
Therefore, Śaṅkara’s monism is false to the textual tradition.
It is part and parcel of that tradition. Ramanuja started off as an Iyer- i.e. a follower of Sankaracharya.
Incidentally, somewhat later, the French philosopher and polymath René Descartes would employ similar reasoning to argue in favour of a dual conception of reality in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), viz that there are two fundamentally different kinds of things in the world, mind and matter, with God being distinct from both.
By then Islam had embraced Occasionalism. It has been suggested that this idea had entered Europe through Nicholas of Autrecourt. However, it was Mechanistic philosophy (the idea that a structural causal model must describe a mechanical relationship between things) which gave an impetus to European Occasionalism. They could thus keep their clockwork mechanisms without thinking of man as merely a bête-machine or machine made of meat.
While the prevailing view is that Rāmānuja’s most important contribution to Indian philosophy is his defence of theism, his arguments against illusionism and monism are more interesting when it comes to contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind, and the contribution that Indian philosophy can make to them.
My impression is that philosophy of mind is as dead as the dodo.
What is really at stake here is the question of the very nature of consciousness as ‘illumination’ (prakāśa).
the question of the nature of x as y is always a foolish one. On the other hand, what is at stake in the hard problem of Socioproctology is access to the Bank Account of myself as Beyonce. It isn't foolish at all for you to send me some cash so I can continue my investigations into this. Once I get access to the funds, I promise to repay you with interest.
For Śaṅkara, the relevant sense in which consciousness consists in ‘illumination’ is not a matter of what is thereby illuminated or revealed, but that ‘illumination’ is what allows for the revealing to occur in the first place.
Either illumination reveals something or it doesn't. If it can never reveal anything, what was the point of it?
It is not just another object in the world but the very condition for the appearance of objects.
Just as a light bulb is the very condition for the appearance of objects in my room late at night. But a light bulb is just another object in the world as is my body which contains eyes and a brain.
As Wolfgang Fasching insightfully puts it in 2021:
[Śaṅkara] insists on the ontological uniqueness of consciousness:
No. He insists on its ontological uniquity and self-identity.
it is fundamentally different from anything we ever encounter as an object of consciousness,
because it isn't a delusion
as different as ‘light’ is from ‘darkness’, as Śaṅkara says in the initial statement of his Brahmasūtrabhāshya.
They are the same if there is nothing to see.
So, as Fasching continues, for Śaṅkara,
[C]onsciousness is to be distinguished from all contents of consciousness that might be introspectively detectable:
No. Viveka consists of distinguishing what is real from what is illusory. It sublates but is not itself sublatable. It distinguishes but can't itself be distinguished. Were this not the case, there would be some ritual which would procure the same benefit.
it is precisely consciousness of whatever contents it is conscious of and not itself one of these contents.
That which is not sublatable may be conscious of itself. Aham Brahmasmi is the maha-vakya of a self conscious adept who has gone beyond duality.
Its only nature is, [Śaṅkara] holds, prakāśa (manifestation); in itself it is devoid of any content or structure and can never become an object.
Thus, one could say, with Jeddu Krishnamurthy, that 'Truth is a pathless land'. However, that which can't be an object for its holder may be termed so for one who lacks it. Beyonce is the manifestation of Beauty and Grace. I reify that Beauty and Grace and long for it to be transferred to me. Beyonce, herself, is unconscious of these qualities of hers. That is why she devotes herself to her art with such diligence.
For Rāmānuja, on the other hand – and this is key to his disagreement with Śaṅkara – consciousness is not an abstract, contentless, structureless illumination,
It could be. Ramanuja accepts that a jivanmukta could exist though cessation of worldly awareness was not necessarily entailed. In other words, you can have the contentless illumination while still being able to do your job. At a later point, Vishistadvaitins came to see jivanmuktas as an infernal Advaitic perversion but Ramanuja accepted the possibility.
but is always tied to objects and to individual selves (jīva).
But the jiva is an amsha of the Lord.
Rāmānuja maintains that consciousness is relational.
It may be. It may not be. God may want a particular person to have non-relational consciousness while wishing another jivanmukta to remain engaged with the world.
It has both content and structure.
Only if so ordained by the Lord. Ramanuja was standing up for our traditional Tamil bhakti (devotional) theism. I love Mummy. I don't think I am myself Mummy. I adore and worship God. I don't want to be God though I may accept I'm an 'amsha'- a limb- of the Lord for such is his will.
Let’s loop back now to the hard problem of consciousness, the problem that so preoccupies contemporary analytical philosophy of mind. How are we to explain the felt phenomenology of conscious experience?
In the same way as we explain the verbiage produced by guys who were paid to gas on about how their kundalindi kept rising such that they were becoming one with the Lord and the hard problem this created for them of not having a sufficiency of gold and diamonds to erect a suitable idol of themselves for the masses to worship.
One increasingly popular attempt to find a solution to the hard problem lies in some form of panpsychism.
Which is better than priapism because even Professors can get Me tooed.
Panpsychism is the notion that consciousness is already everywhere and in everything, or at least is already a fundamental building block in the Universe.
Gremlinism is the notion that evil imps inhabit each atom and wait and watch for opportunities to fuck us over.
It has deep roots within Western philosophy, stretching back to pre-Socratic Ionian philosophers, including Thales, who lived in the 5th-6th century BCE. While the popularity of panpsychism as a doctrine has peaked and ebbed over the millennia, it is currently experiencing a renaissance in contemporary analytical philosophy.
Which is the place terrible ideas go to die.
Strawson, for instance, defends a ‘micropsychism’ that posits micro-conscious entities at the fundamental level to explain macro-conscious entities such as humans.
Sadly, that defence didn't defend him from death. He no longer has even micro-consciousness. What explains consciousness is the ability of minds to invent cool new stuff and drive other species into extinction.
This version of panpsychism must face up to a combination problem: that is, it must explain just how micro-conscious entities combine to form macro-conscious entities.
This can be done by the law of increasing functional information.
Currently, there is no agreed solution to this problem of combination.
There may already be not just a general solution but very useful applications of it in remunerative fields.
Philip Goff therefore instead defends ‘cosmopsychism’, which aims to move away from the underlying atomistic metaphysics of micro-conscious entities to an underlying non-atomistic metaphysics of universal consciousness:
why move away from useless shite to equally useless shite?
it is the cosmos as a whole that is fundamentally conscious.
Moreover, the Cosmos as a whole is eating a Pizza and watching Netflix.
But cosmopsychism has its own recombination problems to face: how do we get from a single all-pervasive universal consciousness to individual consciousness at the level of individual human organisms, each with its own unique first-personal perspective on the world?
You can get from any stupid shit to any other stupid shit by saying that when Spiderman entered the Mirror Universe along with Dr. Strange, he accidentally caused Mind-Master's masturbatory machine to conflate cosmopsychism with the Giant Spaghetti Monster. I'm pretty sure I saw this on Netflix.
Contemporary solutions to the hard problem of consciousness often claim that phenomenality is already a part of fundamental reality and so not explicable in other terms. And this move takes us straight back to the debate about consciousness between Śaṅkara and Rāmānuja.
There was no such debate.
For them, the debate concerns the standing of individual subjects of consciousness (‘selves’, ātman) and not the attempt to explain phenomenality as such.
I suppose one could say Sankara was playing catch-up with Nagarjuna but by the time Ramanuja stuck his oar in Bhakti was ascendant and would continue to be. Incidentally, what explained phenomenality was karma which itself was associated with a cyclical decline in morality and spirituality.
For panpsychism posits that phenomenal consciousness is fundamental,
No. It posits that even inanimate objects have some mindlike quality. We can just term this complexity and appeal to the law of increasing functional information.
and the goal is not to explain fundamental consciousness, but to use it to explain subject-level consciousness, or individual subjects of consciousness, or selves.
How can you use a thing which you can't explain to explain something else? You would think me mad if I said 'I can't explain what a quark is. But I know for a fact that the only explanation for why my TV remote is missing is because some fucking quarks ate it.'
The real hard problem of consciousness is asking why and how a self is intentionally and phenomenally conscious.
Asking questions is not hard. Getting the answer from Google isn't hard either. I imagine the answer would involve the law of increasing functional information.
In other words, if we take panpsychism as a solution to the hard problem, we must then enquire into the nature of subjects, the self.
They are complex and diverse- as we would expect on the basis of the law of increasing functional information.
The only way that micropsychism and cosmopsychism can solve the hard problem of consciousness is by finding a mechanism that takes us from the fundamental to the non-fundamental.
That's what physics does. You have fundamental forces which have themselves evolved as has everything else. Metaphysics is of no use here.
One must find a way to move from what is fundamental –
e.g. the electroweak force
micro-conscious entities or a universal consciousness – to ordinary subjects of consciousness.
Surely, the reverse is the case. Start with what you have access to and then formulate hypotheses about what you don't have access to.
In doing so, one must provide answers to three pressing challenges – modal coherence, mechanical generation, and metaphysical explanation :Modal coherence: is combination from micro-conscious entities or decombination from a universal consciousness modally coherent?
Yes, if it has a concrete model. Otherwise, there is no way of telling.
Does it avoid inconsistencies as to what is possible or impossible, and respect necessities and obligations as to the relationship between the entities?
We know that our best existing theories in Physics suffer inconsistencies. This matters greatly. But inconsistencies in useless subjects don't matter.
Mechanical generation: what is the mechanism for combination from micro-conscious entities or decombination from a universal consciousness?
A landscape which exerts selection pressure.
Metaphysical explanation: why does combination from micro-conscious entities or decombination from a universal consciousness occur?
It doesn't occur.
The physicalist – one who holds that everything in the universe is physical – might respond to the second and third challenges with the promissory note of science: while scientists may not have the answers now, they will eventually. As for the first, they might point to how other physical properties combine, for example, gravitational or electromagnetic fields, even while the component parts of the system retain individual characteristics. While this may satisfy some, it won’t satisfy all.
But this nonsense might.
Neither Śaṅkara nor Rāmānuja are physicalists,
they were Brahmins- hereditary priests. It was their job to be spiritual.
and their approaches are different. Śaṅkara might respond to the challenges above as follows: The true self, ātman, is strictly identical with brahman. There is no incoherence between the true self and ultimate reality because they are the same.
In other words, Brahmins can just carry on doing their jobs with worrying too much about whether they would go to Hell because of some metaphysical error. This is also the point of the Gita. Live your best life. Don't sweat the small stuff.
The empirical self as referred to earlier does not identify with the true self, ātman, in ordinary life because the empirical self is born with ignorance of its true nature as brahman.
More particularly if you are born as a Brahmin and have to perform religious rituals to make an exiguous living. Having to worry that you don't have the right epistemology or hermeneutic theory is just a twisting of the knife.
It can access this truth only through experience devoid of conceptualisation. Ignorance is the mechanism through which individual empirical selves are differentiated from each other.
The ‘decombination’ of brahman into individual empirical selves occurs because of ignorance. However, Śaṅkara does not have an explanation as to why metaphysically there is ignorance that generates a failure to identify with the true self.
But Hinduism supplies it. We are living in Kali Yuga- an age of decline and decay.
His view is that this truth must be experienced in inwardness and not through rational explanation. Explanation has limits.
We might say that Sankara says concepts are sublatable and so there is an infinite regress of sublation. But, what it asymptotically approaches, is the honeyed wisdom of the Chandogya.
The other Indian schools provide other solutions to the three challenges. All, however, make the issue pivot on the nature of the human self,
they are soteriological- i.e. concerned with salvation of the soul.
rather than on that of the phenomenal quality of individual conscious states. In this they seem to be ahead of their time.
They were similar to other great religious movements in other countries.
In grounding discussions of consciousness in a notion of ‘illumination’, they shift the problem away from the one that Chalmers introduces (and for which panpsychism seems to offer a promising solution)
Jainism and Samkhya have something similar. It also exists in some combination of Vedanta with Shaivite or Sakta worship.
and onto the more fundamental ‘hard’ problem, which is to explain the nature of the self.
There was an esoteric psychology, sometimes associated with 'Tantric' practices, which accompanied the orthodox schools.
Given the ongoing and raging debates, it is perhaps safe to say that the knowledge that Naciketas, in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad, wanted more than anything else remains enigmatic.
Faith is founded on a mystery. So is Love and everything else which makes Life sweet.
What we have tried to do in this essay is to demonstrate one way in which the traditions of ancient and classical India, encapsulating in their canonical texts the wisdom, insight and argumentation of seminal philosophers from the past,
Sankara and Ramanuja were 'Acharyas'- i.e. Saintly leaders of specific sects. There were some 'Upadhyayas' (professors) of Darshan-Gyan (philosophy) and some such were venerated in later years though, their own contemporaries may have thought of them as savants and pedagogues.
can fruitfully intersect with contemporary work being done around the world by modern philosophers in the more recent analytical tradition.
Is any of that work useful? There are applications to assessing AI or to Ethics (Vaidya himself worked in that field) but will they produce results? I suppose, if the guy doing it is smart, the answer is yes. But that may be because of his smartness not the utility of what he has been taught.
One outcome of this exchange, we would like to hope, is that analytical philosophy itself becomes a truly global endeavour.
It isn't a national endeavour because it has gone nowhere. I suppose it is global enough in the sense that you have useless Professors of this useless shite in campuses across the globe. But no discipline can flourish once it becomes adversely selective of imbeciles. Meanwhile, Hindu philosophy will attract spiritual people because the subject it addresses is one they recognize as matching their own passionate intuition. But this is also true of Islamic or Jewish or Christian or Taoist philosophy.
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