PART 1
The author of this wonderful treatise, Chittaranjan Naik, holds an undergraduate degree in Aeronautical Engineering from IIT Madras and a post-graduate degree in Industrial Engineering from the same institute. Despite a sterling professional career in various companies, he quit his job in a quest for higher spiritual pursuits. He chose the path of Advaitic Vedanta. Simultaneously, he involved himself in a deep study of the six traditional darshanas of Indian philosophy along with Western philosophy. With a solid hold on science, western, and Indian thought by way of his unique educational background and specific interests, he comes up with a book which leaves the reader stunned. The book deserves a place in all the library shelves along with the other classics like by Bertrand Russell and Will Durant. He brings out the profundity and richness of Indian thought in a manner which can only bring pride to every Indian of our civilizational heritage. This book on Indian philosophical thought directly challenges the contemporary paradigms in Western science and philosophy. The present series is a humble effort to summarise some of the key points of the book, with the kind permission of the author himself, to prepare the readers to engage with the book itself in more detail.
Bertrand Russell says philosophy as something intermediate between theology and science in his book, ‘History of Western Philosophy.’ Like theology, it consists of speculations on matters where there is still no definite knowledge; and like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority of a tradition or revelation. Philosophy occupies thus a No Man’s Land between the definite knowledge of science and the dogma belonging to theology. It exposes itself to attacks from both sides. Philosophy in the western world explain religion, but it takes care not to question the scientific dogma. It always moulds itself to be alignment with science. This overriding principle of philosophical pursuits is typical of Western philosophy.
In contrast stand the six systems of Indian philosophy, the sheer depth, strength, and antiquity of which is completely unknown to most Indians unfortunately. Western philosophers have been either ignorant of Indian thought or perhaps thought that the East had nothing to contribute to philosophical thought. Our colonial consciousness allows to persist with that view. There have been great exceptions of course. Indian philosophy influenced and impressed a few like Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Voltaire, and Schopenhauer, but this was hardly adequate. Bertrand Russell acknowledged the differentiation between the Eastern and the Western thoughts.
The Indian philosophical system classifies into orthodox or non-orthodox depending on whether they accept the Vedas or not respectively. The orthodox systems include the six systems called Samkhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaisesika, Mimansa, and Vedanta. The orthodox schools combine in pairs: Yoga-Samkhya, Nyaya-Vaisesika, and Mimansa-Vedanta. The first element is the practice and the second element pertain to theory. The non-orthodox systems are Charvakism (materialism), Buddhism, and Jainism. In Indic traditions, philosophy never takes a dry intellectual exercise like its western counterpart. Most importantly, philosophy should have ‘soteriological’ power-the power of intense individual transformation from ignorance and bondage to freedom and wisdom. This has been the driving force for Indian philosophy, to reiterate. There is never a sacrifice to reason and experience, but what distinguishes Indian philosophy is that there is no extreme reverence to science. It does not make any attempts to reconcile itself to scientific dogma. In its quest to achieve human liberation, it would get rid of science too if it comes in the way. The strength of Indian philosophy comes from the fact that despite so many scientific advancements over centuries, it has never felt the need to change or adapt new lines of enquiry. We can only rediscover but not reinvent.
Philosophy has engaged with the most engaging questions for humanity. What is my purpose in life? What is the purpose of Universe? What is the reality status of the objects in the Universe? Are they ‘real’ in the true sense of the word or is everything we see a representation and reconstruction in our brains? Is there a God? If so, what is the relation between God and Nature? Does the individual soul exist? How does mind and matter correlate? At the root of all these questions is the most important one of whether Consciousness is primary (the Indian view) or a secondary phenomenon of matter-mind (the Western view). These are some of the quintessential questions of philosophy.
In this book, the author takes up specific and important questions related to the perception process of the external world, the reality status of objects in the world and the mind-matter relationship. He compares Indian and Western thought on these issues, and shows clearly that they are two different paradigms in explaining reality. There is a huge problem of ‘incommensurability’ here which means that the reasoning of one paradigm cannot explain the other paradigm going in a completely different direction. Because Western philosophy honours science without arguing much against it, the Indian paradigms perhaps seem difficult to digest or understand. However, a little thought shows that the answers and the consequences are far clearer. It might even lead to salvation, without even believing in the existence of God. In Indian traditions, even atheism is a route to liberation. Philosophy is not an independent exercise, but intricately weaves itself into the fabric of both science and tradition.
Indirect Realism And Direct Realism
When it comes to perceiving objects in the external world, the standard Western paradigm is that light falls on an object first. This reflected light enters the eyes, falls on to the retina from where neural impulses travel via the nerves to a region of the brain. Here, the image gets a reconstruction, and the person ‘sees’ the object. The same sequence is true for all the other senses too like hearing, touch, smell, and taste. This is the ‘stimulus-response theory of perception,’ a stimulus of some sort evoking a response inside our brains through an intermediate causal chain. Of course, there is a little difficulty in explaining how an internal image inside the brain projects to the outside world.
Hence, in effect, what we perceive in the external world are not as they really exist, but how the interpretation occurs in our brains depending on our endowed senses. This is Representationalism- the perceived world as only an internal representation of an external world; hence, it is an indirect form of reality. What exists outside is never known. What is known is by the reconstruction of neural impulses in the brain. The world outside is not a true world in this sense. In Kantian philosophy, the original unknown is the ‘noumenon’ (in modern parlance- ‘the non-linguistic’ world) and the known constructed reality is the ‘phenomenon’. Representation is the contemporary scientific view and gets the term ‘Scientific Realism’ or ‘Indirect Realism’, and forms the basis of both philosophy and neuroscience.
In contrast, Indian philosophy for thousands of years has been clear on its stand of a ‘Natural Realism’ or ‘Direct Realism’. All the six systems of Indian philosophy with some minor variations propound an active theory of perception where the perceiver is central in the scheme of things. The perceiver goes out and reaches the object in the world. This is the ‘contact-theory of perception’ of Indian philosophy in contrast to the ‘stimulus-response theory of perception’. Contact with the object by the perceiver gives a direct information of the world as it exists. Hence, the external world as seen or heard is an actual world in its reality and not a construction. This establishes the role of pratyaksha or direct perception as a valid pramaana or means of knowledge. This contrasts with Western philosophy where the world can never be known; hence, perception is never a valid source of knowledge in western traditions. This also becomes the driving conclusion of the author in the book.
Western Philosophy And The Problem Of Ontology
Ontology (‘onto’- real or existence; ‘logia – science) studies what is real and what exists. What are the fundamental parts of the world and how are they related to each other? Are physical parts more real than the immaterial concepts, like for example are the physical shoes more important than the immaterial concept of walking? And what exists-the shoes or the walking? Along with metaphysics, ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or thought to exist and how such entities group, relate within a hierarchy, and subdivide according to similarities and differences. Ontological studies divide into two groups: one believes that the material processes are real and reality exists independent of the observer; while the other group believes that the immaterial mind and the generated consciousness are the true reality, and the world is a construction in the observer’s mind.
Thus broadly, there are two contemporary philosophical positions with how we perceive and experience the reality. Representationalism (Scientific Realism or Indirect Realism) believes that the perceived world is only an internal representation of an external world; hence, it is an indirect form of reality, because the brain reconstructs the neural impulses impinging on it to create a world outside. The real world remains unknown. Idealism is a variation of contemporary thought that believes that the world we perceive is subjective and mind-dependant. The world has no existence independent of the mind and of our subjective perceptions of the world. In both the above forms, the world is mind-dependent. There is a third position called Realism. Western philosophy has a slightly different meaning for this position. The thesis of the book holds Realism as a position that the world exists independent of our perceptions of them.
If there is a mind dependent world, then what is the ontological status or the true reality of the world? All we ever know are the ‘phenomenon’ with the true ‘noumenon’ always unknown. By the beginning of the 20th century, there was an impasse in the philosophical world, which was the ‘problem of the external world’. The perceived world is the world we are immediately aware of; it is the world we experience and transact with; it is the world we refer to by the language we use in everyday life; and it is a world that appears to be external to us and to be existent independently of our minds. Yet, the externality and mind independence of the objects perceived becomes problematic. What we perceive are secondary qualities, as presented to our sensory faculties and their specific powers. They are not the primary qualities that belong to the objects themselves. All Representationalist systems cannot thus effectively address the topic of ontology (reality) as the real world (noumenon) is always beyond our capacity of comprehension.
The belief that there are some motions in the bodies and in the intervening mediums that carry the data to the sense-organs has logical inconsistencies and conundrums. These motions and transmissions of data through a medium such as space or air would be existing prior to the appearance of the representations. In other words, they are noumena. In which case, how can we speak of the ideas of motion, medium, space, time, and their relations when they are all categories applicable to phenomena? The stimulus-response theory of perception presents a riddle. The riddle will not go away irrespective of whether we believe in Idealism or Representationalism. If, then, we are constrained to speak of the perceived world merely as mind or phenomena and we do not possess the capacity to speak of the real world external to us- noumenon, in meaningful terms, how indeed would we be able to investigate the topic of ontology? In the field of Western philosophy this problem is unresolved to this day.
The Western Response
The response to the impasse came from two different directions: the phenomenogical epoche of Husserl and the linguistic turn in philosophy spearheaded by Frege. The former, through the systematic procedure of ‘phenomenological reduction‘ suspends judgment regarding the belief in the existence of the external world, and examine only the phenomena as originally given to consciousness. The author shows that Phenomenology is not a philosophy, but rather, a science of consciousness with a limited domain of applicability. It fails to address the questions that arise with respect to the central topics of philosophy, namely metaphysics and ontology.
The linguistic turn in philosophy gave birth to the philosophical stream known as Analytical Philosophy. This rejected natural language as a suitable device for providing the kind of clarity and exactness required for philosophical discourses. They attempted to build an alternative ideal language embodying a specially devised notation with precisely defined meanings and rules for its use and manipulation. This would avoid the errors of the past philosophers. The author calls Analytic Philosophy as a ‘horse with binders’ approach as it focuses on narrow topics while ignoring the broad topics. Neither the incorporation of mathematics nor the development of a powerful logical technique seems to have enabled Analytic philosophy to solve the problem of showing how objects may be mind-independent.
Requirements To Explain The Reality Of The World
There are certain requirements for contemporary paradigms with relation to explain the reality of the world. The first is the relation between mind and matter. This has again occupied Western philosophers since Descartes’ conception of reality as a duality comprising mind and matter in which the two were disparate kinds of things. For Descartes, mind was a thinking kind of thing and, matter an extended kind of thing. What is their correlation?
Idealism seeks to overcome this problem by denying the existence of matter altogether and holding that matter is nothing but mind. Only the mind exists and the sensation of an outside world, when nothing exists at all, is only because of impulses generated internally in the brain. Physicalism attempts to overcome the problem by reducing mind to matter; and thereby avoiding having to treat the mind as an independently existing thing. In both these cases, there is reduction of one kind of thing to another kind of thing. But reduction is not the solution to the problem; it is a semantic conflation, that is, a conflation brought about by taking the meaning of one word for the meaning of another; and such semantic conflation amounts to a cognitive error. An investigation into reality must therefore strive to resolve the problem of mind and matter without resorting to reduction.
Secondly, the distinction between perception and hallucination needs clarity. There should be an assurance that the perceived world is existent unlike the things seen in an illusion or a hallucination which merely seem to be existent. If we are to undertake a meaningful investigation into ontology, the distinction between perception and hallucination needs grounding in ideas of mind and matter; perception as objective and mind-independent; and hallucination subjective and mind-dependent.
The theory of perception today as a stimulus- response system from the external object to the mind is incoherent in explaining the ontological status or reality of the world. If there is an unknown ‘noumenon’ and a representative ‘phenomenon’, then every object in the causal chain from the external world to the perceiver, including the intervening medium is unknowable. Even the brain is a noumenon because we see it. What is the truth status of our body and the sense organs? This logical extension of the current thinking leads to conundrums and inconsistencies. Some have undertaken a Direct Realism philosophy to sort the problems, but leaving the prevailing stimulus-response theory of perception unquestioned. A stimulus response theory is simply incompatible with Direct Realism. An indirect theory of perception (a physicality theory) can never achieve a transparency due to the transforming nature of the operations of the physical causal intermediaries. The brain-in-a-vat hypothesis in which there is no need of an object at all in an ‘external’ world for the phenomenal object to appear is an extreme but logical extension of the Representationalism’s proposal.
Attempts for Direct Realism and The Time-Lag Argument
Contemporary philosophy has tried to formulate theories of Direct Realism, where the perception of the world is as it is. There is no transformation of the object by the intervening causal chain of intermediaries. This ensures that there is a complete transparency of everything in between from the perceiver to the external object. The perception of the object is in its raw, original, and true form. In contemporary philosophy, the thesis that stands by such a strong form of Direct Realism is Disjunctivism. However, the Disjunctivist makes no attempt to provide an explanation of how the objects seen in a perception may be the same as the objects that exist in the world. The naïve assumption Disjunctivism makes that they are the same makes it a form of Naïve Realism.
The strongest objection to any conception of Direct Realism comes from science; and this at the core of all contemporary philosophy’s rejection of Direct Realism- Western or Indian. This is based on the time-lag argument, which goes like this: There exists a time interval between the reflection or emission of light from a physical object and the light reaching our sensory apparatus, so considering that (i) perception involves a long and complex causal series of events, and (ii) that the object itself may not be existent by the time the reflected light reaches us and gets processed through the causal chain, what is perceived must be something other than the object. One might be seeing a distant star today in the skies which might have completely disappeared millions of years ago. The famous physics example often quoted to explain this time-lag is if the sun completely disappears from the skies, a person on Earth would realize it after eight minutes or so.
So, given that these causal intermediates are present, irrespective of whether the percipient has prior awareness of them or not, what is it that assures the Direct Realist that the percipient directly perceives the object exactly as they are? The finite light velocity is an obstacle in explanations for any direct realism. The Disjunctivists are unable to counter this. This is because a good and cogent defense of Direct Realism is impossible if the stimulus-response theory of perception remains intact, says the author. Direct Realism is incompatible with the stimulus-response theory of perception, and this is the incommensurability problem. They belong to two different paradigms, and one paradigm cannot judge the truth value of the other with its rules and concepts. The implications of the categorical divide in the form of phenomena and noumena that the stimulus-response process of perception invokes has resulted in only confusion rather than solutions.
Refutation of Representationalism and its Variants
Most contemporary philosophers think it foolish to doubt the role of the physical process-chain from the external object ending with the physical brain as the main cause of our perceptions and motor abilities. Representationalism leads to contradictions and logical conundrums. The logical conundrum is because the brain is also a perceived object as are other objects of the perceived world. There must be hence a ‘noumenal’ brain too for the ‘phenomenal’ brain; and there must be ‘some processing mechanism’ presenting the phenomenal brain to us; the original existing in the unknown realm. This postulation of a processing mechanism simply leads to a situation of going one step backwards. The processing mechanism has now another ‘noumenal’ and ‘phenomenal’ attributes with respect to another processing mechanism. Such steps all the way back to infinity leads to a situation of a reductio-ad-absurdum. It is thus difficult to conceive an end point ‘processing mechanism’ as the final percipient which lies outside the phenomena of all representations.
It is not only the external object which has the ‘noumenal’ and ‘phenomenal’ attributes; the real and the represented respectively. Every single aspect in the chain of transmission of information- the medium like air, water; the sensory organs; the nerves carrying the information to the brain; and the brain itself also lie in the perceived world. The transforming mechanisms of the noumenon into phenomenon also have these two attributes. How can one be then so sure of the transforming chain as ‘real’? It is only a presupposition.
When the objects and events in the noumenal external world are not perceivable and non-cognizable, how can we ever infer that the objects and events seen in a perception are reliable indicators of the existence of objects and events in an external world? Thus, the stimulus-response theory of perception, which purports to explain how we perceive objects, ends up postulating that we do not perceive objects at all, and indeed logically leads to a position in which objects would be entirely imperceptible.
Correlation Is Not Causation and The Falsifiability Criteria
There are correlations between brain processes like neurological impulses and brain waves and the individual’s perceptions. This is a proof to substantiate the stimulus-response theory, claims contemporary paradigms. The author says that this position is faulty as correlation does not equate to causation. This, because both the brain-processes and perceptions are ‘phenomena’. The correlation established between brain-processes in an individual and the changes that take place in the individual’s perceptions cannot form a ground for inferring that the brain is the primary cause of perception.
Moreover, the belief in the stimulus-response theory of perception, and the notions of the phenomenal world and noumenal world that it leads to, makes the theory of perception itself into a superfluity in as much as all the prior stages of the imagined noumenal causal chain of processes leading up to perception can be dispensed with; and the explanation for perception can be provided merely by considering them as representational states of the (noumenal) brain alone. Indeed, considering the law of parsimony, it would be more reasonable to accept the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis as the explanation for perception than to posit an entire chain of causal processes. This serves in explaining perception in a needlessly cumbersome manner.
Moreover, the proponents of Scientific Realism hold that a scientific proposition must have a falsifiability criterion. In the case of the claimed division between phenomena and noumena, there is no criterion by which it can be empirically falsified. Thus, as measured by the yardstick of science itself, the proposition is unscientific and accorded the status of a superstitious belief. The division of phenomena and noumena, or phenomenal-objects and things-in-themselves, is an imaginary division not sustainable through empirical means nor through reason.
The Intentionality Theorists, Computers, and Artificial Intelligence
The Intentionalists, another variant of the Representationalists, say that the representational states or cognitive activity in the physical brain are like that in computing machines. But, even in the case of computing machines, what exists in them are mere physical states and not representations, and these physical states attain the status of representations or activities only because of conscious agents. It is meaningless to speak of the representational state as something deployed in nature independently of conscious agents. To superimpose arithmetic activity, logical activity, or some other form of cognitive activity, which exist purely in the minds of conscious agents, onto the physical system and to believe that the physical computer system itself engages in cognitive activity is nothing short of delusion.
There can be no cognitive activity in a computing machine because it lacks the essential characteristic that makes for a cognitive activity- self-awareness. Self-awareness is the distinguishing principle that distinguishes a cognitive activity from a physical activity. Therefore, the physical processes in a computer, even if they seem to exhibit the external behavior of human beings, are not cognitive activities; they are merely simulations, or appearances, of the external behavior of conscious beings.
The Intentionalist’s thesis, which holds that representational states can be in purely physical substrates without the presence of conscious agents, or that cognitive activity can take place in the physical brain as it takes place in a computing machine, has no reasonable basis. The intentionalist’s explanation of perception fails to account for its essential character-self-awareness. The intentionalist might argue that consciousness or self-awareness along with other features of perception, emerges from brain-processes as a secondary phenomenon (an epiphenomenon). In which case, all the arguments against representationalism would become applicable to intentionalism too.
Refutation of Idealism
There are three important concepts in philosophy: the soul, the matter, and the mind. The soul is also the perceiver or the consciousness which has the important property of self-awareness. It is also the sense of ‘I’ in every person. The ultimate question is philosophy is whether consciousness is primary or secondary to other processes. Indian traditions are clear about the status of consciousness as primary; and Western philosophy considers it secondary. Western philosophy does away with the soul and considers mind and matter alone. The only trouble is trying to correlate them. One group reduces everything to matter; with the brain, mind, and later consciousness emerging consequently as epiphenomenal processes. The other group, calls everything as mind, and matter becomes an outcome of this mind. The matter and the universe are only representations of some form in the mind. The latter philosophy, as we saw before, is Idealism. In the Indian tradition however, the two things which exist are the soul (purusha) and matter-mind (prakriti). In the Indian tradition, mind and matter are the same. There is no differentiation and there is no reduction of one to the other.
The Idealists posit that all matter is finally the mind; and the world becomes mind-dependant, like in a dream. Idealism is quite old in Indian traditions. Indic tradition in the course of the historical debates between the Nayyayakas and the Bauddha Idealism has refuted at length Idealism. The knowledge that dream-objects are just creations of the mind is based on the mind-independent structures of objects, and the impossibility of these objects from accommodating within the space of the body. Thus, there is a negation of the reality of the dream object. The dream world is sublated by the waking world.
A dream or a hallucination is sublated by the waking state world which shows that the former is mind-dependent. Similarly, a mind-dependent world of the waking stage would need in theory a sublating knowledge in the existence of a parallel mind-independent world. Thus, the sublating knowledge would reveal a world of real objects whose forms the objects seen in the current waking state would be mimicking. The sublating knowledge would, while showing the world perceived currently to be mind-dependent stimulations, invoke a parallel world of real mind-independent objects. We do not have any evidence of such parallel worlds. String theory shows maybe such parallel worlds; but the theory itself suffers from the lack of ‘falsifiability’ criteria required by science.
Empirical Evidence from Science
There is a strong tendency and dogma among many contemporary philosophers to give pride of place to science. The physical sciences deal with the physical world which constitutes the field of the perceived. Whereas, the theory of perception does not deal with this field but to the process of perception of this field by our sensorium. Representationalism would superficially appear to be a natural consequence of the stimulus-response theory. However, it turns out to be problematical, because it invokes the perceived world as a representation of a delusional non-existent ‘real world’, which, on examination, turns out to be nothing more than an illusory reference conjured up by an illegitimate verbal construction. Yet, philosophers, in general, continue to espouse the stimulus-response theory of perception because it happens to be the theory supported by science; and science has shown a correlation to exist between brain-processes and our perceptions of the world. Philosophers today have succumbed to the inducements of science without labors to examine its foundations with the acuity that philosophy demands. The result is a kind of belief reflected in Will Durant’s words who thought ‘philosophy may blithely allow itself to be led by the hand of science.’
In the context of the theory of perception, there are two claims that it would be mandatory for us to examine; these are: the claim of a correlation between brain processes and our perceptions of the world; and the claim of a time-lag between the occurrence of an event in space and its perception by a human observer. What science has done is to merely locate the processes of the specific organ in the human body which exhibits a correlation with the altered state of perception.
In the next part, we will see how the Indian philosophy seeks to offer a counter-narrative and give an alternative explanation to reality. Direct Realism of Indian traditions most importantly contend that no time-lag exists; and that the claimed observations of the time-lag have all been theory-laden with the presumptions implicit in the theoretical framework of science itself. Direct Realism contends that the time-lag does not pertain to the time taken for light to travel from the source of light to a human observer; it pertains to the time taken for light to travel from the source of light to an object that gets illuminated by the source of light; such an object may be a measuring instrument.
PART 2
The author now looks at Indian view on perception. He reiterates that it is a paradigm going in a different direction; and the criteria of Western philosophy are not applicable in proving or disproving the Indian view. The major considerations are of course to give an alternative and better explanation to reality. This view not only transcends contemporary science but has the capacity to correct some of the concepts that underlie the scientific endeavour. In the Indian tradition, the philosophical position of Representationalism is altogether absent. The closest that an Indian philosophy has come to it is a school which is the Sautantrika school of Buddhism.
In this part, we will see the position of Indian Darshanas or six systems of philosophy on the core questions related to the Self, mind, matter, causality, embodiment, liberation, and so on, to clearly understand the contact theory of perception. The contact theory or Direct Realism, to reiterate, is the experience of the objects in an instantaneous and direct manner without any transformations of the intervening medium.
Self, Mind, Matter, and Time
The Western tradition does not use the word ‘soul’ and there is mixing up of the words, ‘self’, ‘consciousness’ and, ‘mind’.‘ The results are that certain issues of philosophy, such as the mind-matter problem, become muddied due to the occurrence of an indiscriminate mixing up of the categories.
In the Indian tradition, the cognizer (purusha) and the cognized (prakriti) belong to two distinct categories with essential characteristics of sentience or consciousness (chaitanya) and inertness (jadatva) respectively. Mind and matter belong to the category of inert prakriti as distinct from the category of sentient purusha to which the self belongs. The self, as the cognizer of objects, is different from mind and matter, the latter being two modes in which objects of cognition appear. These two modes of presentations reveal the legitimate furniture of objective reality.
In the praxis of the Indian tradition, the nature of an object never changes. What produces change in an object is time that presents objects sequentially in their various facets. When the circular shape of a coin changes to a square one, there is no creation or destruction of any shapes. Thus, the law of identity (a thing as itself) stays constant and yet the change is possible as a showing forth of different attributes. It is Time that drapes itself, as it were, over unchanging objects to present the dynamism and change. It is for this reason that Bhartrhari says, in the first verse of the Vakhypadiyam, that the creative power of Reality is Time.
The Word and The World- ‘In the Beginning Was the Word’
Nouns, verbs, and all other kind of words have four stages – the para (Brahman stage), pasyanti (incipient ideation stage), madhyama (effort for articulation stage) and vaikhari (audible stage). The first three stages are beyond an ordinary person enveloped in ignorance. The para stage of speech is like internal eternal light and by its true intuition a man attains salvation. In the world of objects, Turiya is the state of Brahman, Prajna that of objects in their undifferentiated unmanifest state, Taijasa the sphere of ideated objects, and Visva is the sphere of gross physical objects. It is not difficult to see the correlation of the word to the world in Indian traditions.
The madhyama stage wherein meanings of words appear in the mind and the vaikhari stage wherein they appear as manifest objects – is the key to grasp the relation between mind and matter. Vivarta-vada of Advaita explains the paradoxical relationship between them. Vivarta indicates the emergence of an effect from a cause without there being any transformation in the cause. It points to the pre-existence of the effect in its entirety in the cause. The apparent difference between them must belong to some paradoxical power existing in reality- this power is maya. The self perceives the eternal object through two different modes of cognition. For the self, the mind is an instrument to think about the object while the sense-organs are instruments for perception of the object. Thus, mind and matter are two conditions of the same thing, the one appearing as thought and the other as an individual object in the world. It is maya that makes the same object apprehended through the two different modes of cognition as different.
In the Indian tradition, therefore, there is rejection of the idea of language having a physical substrate. Instead, language is coterminous with Consciousness, the Ground of the Universe. At its most primal level -the speech stage of Para or the object-stage of Turiya, it is luminous and same with Brahman. Grammar can be a route to salvation too in Indic traditions! The ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides and recent philosopher Spinoza seem to have glimpsed something similar. However, they stand alone in the western traditions.
Mind Independence of The Perceived World
The Cartesian notion of mind and matter say whatever object is known or knowable first-hand belongs to the realm of mind; and it follows from this principle that for an object to be a real object, it would have to be unknowable (‘noumena’ or the contemporary ‘non-linguistic world’). If this notion remains, the perceived world has lost something of its intrinsic character and remains as one pole of a tensional duality that it has artificially constructed. This is the crux of the problem: philosophers of the West have been unable to comprehend that the term ‘unknowable object’ is devoid of reference. The expression is an illegitimate verbal construction generating the illusion of having a reference when there is none, like the expression, ‘son of a barren woman’.
In Indian traditions, a conceived object cannot be unknowable; and if it is unknowable, there is no conceiving. In the darshana of Yoga, such illegitimate verbal constructions, which are devoid of reference, are known as ‘vikalpa’. In the tradition of Indian Logic (Tarka), all objects are ‘namable and knowable.’ This is an inviolable principle which is universally applicable to all objects. In the light of the overarching principle of the namableness and knowableness of objects, the sophistry of the artificial reality-divide dissolves and we return to the one world that we all experience and live in and refer to by means of language. This is a clear position of Indian traditions that the world is independent of the mind.
Illusions and Hallucinations
The realms in which two conditions of objects appear to us are the realm of mind and the realm of world, the taijasa and vishwa respectively. The objects manifested in the mind are private. Illusions and hallucinations are in the realm of taijasa and not to vishwa. It is because the object seen in both taijasa and vishwa is the same object appearing in two different conditions that the object appearing in taijasa has the potential to appear with the same intensity and vividness as an object seen in the world. However, the object being private to the individual, it belongs to the realm of ideation.
The individual self has no power to manifest these objects in the world, in the realm of vishwa, by the mere will of the individual self. What then brings forth these objects into the world and holds them in place to make them available for public perception? In the Indian tradition, this power belongs to the Unobstructed Consciousness which forms the Ground of the Universe. It is known by the name Brahman, also referred to as the Immutable Akshara and the Great Imperishable.
An object having a Datum of Consciousness does not prevent it from being mind-independent if its mind-independency stems from it manifesting in the public space of the world without individual power to bring about such a manifestation. The idea that an object requires to be without a datum of consciousness for it to be mind-independent is an ill-begotten idea stemming from Cartesian misconceptions about mind and matter.
The Embodiments of The Self, Perception, Liberation, and Reincarnation
The self, being of the nature of consciousness, is self-effulgent. And it has, by virtue of its self-effulgence, the capacity to reveal objects directly and instantaneously. The absence of ubiquitous perception indicates that there is some primal covering over the self which obstructs its natural revealing power from revealing the objects of the world. In Indian philosophy, this obstruction over the self the body itself. Embodiment is three-layered. At the most primal layer, it constitutes a covering over the self. This covering is essentially of the nature of sleep. The middle-layer is the layer of ideation, the realm of mind. The outermost layer is the layer of the gross physical body through which the embodied-self comes to be a creature in the world. The three layers are known as bodies with different names: mula-sharira (seed-body), sukshuma-sharira (subtle-body) and sthula-sharira (gross body) respectively.
The paradox of embodiment is that the embodiment of the self does not, in truth, exist. How can something arise in Consciousness-the ground of all universe, and then contain it? The embodiment of the self comes about not through a spatiotemporal physical process but through a cognitive condition whereby the self becomes morphed to the body, as it were, and cognizes the body to be the self. This erroneous idea is the mithya-gnana superimposed on the self and the body. This makes one see the body manifested in the realm of the world as the self. An idea in the mind is the same as the body apprehended in the world as the self. As seen before, the idea in the mind and its corresponding matter in the world are the same appearing in two different modes of cognitive presentations.
The idea of the self’s embodiment through a cognitive condition is central to the Indian tradition; it forms a core tenet in all the six darshanas or systems of philosophy, though with slight technical variations. Embodiment is by an erroneous cognitive condition; hence, by right-knowledge confers liberation. Embodiment persists so long as the erroneous knowledge continues. For, even when the physical body undergoes destruction, the notion of the body would continue to persist in the realm of the mind. The Self, still equipped with the power of thinking, would consider the destruction of the body as a loss, and crave to be in possession of a body. In the Indian tradition, this craving, along with the law of causation that bears upon the embodied soul’s moral actions in its past births, results in reincarnation of the self in another body.
It is within this three-fold structure of embodiment that we must look for the instruments of perception. For, even though the self has the capacity to reveal objects by virtue of its intrinsic effulgence, maya obstructs its power of revealing. The innermost layer is the layer in which the clearing in the covering of maya appears; the middle layer is the layer which actively reaches out to the object with the help of the instruments of perception; and the outermost layer comprising the physical body is the layer that constitutes the seat of experience.
Seen and Unseen Causes, Karma, and Experiencing the World
Perception and experience of the world occurs to the individual self when there is a clearing in the veil of maya. The clearing appears by the Wheel of Causation operating in nature or prakriti. The causality that operates in them is of two kinds: the seen and the unseen. The causality that operates between physical objects, and which is determined by the natures of the objects themselves is causality of the seen kind.
The causality of the unseen kind is that in which the immediate effect of an action is invisible. But all actions of conscious agents do not produce unseen effects; it is only those actions that have a moral dimension to them that result in unseen effects. The effect of an individual’s moral action is apurva, meaning that which did not exist before and is newly born. It is the result of either a virtuous action or a morally transgressive action, and its effect in the world surfaces at a future time when the conditions for it to fructify are satisfied.
The total of the un-fructified apurvas of an individual is the individual’s adrshta; also referred to as past karma since it is the net balance of the accumulated effects of past actions held in store for future fructification. Shankara, in commenting on the Brahadaranyaka Upanishad, in the context of a man’s rebirth, explains it as follows: ‘He has adopted the whole universe as his means to the realization of the results of his work; and he is going from one body to another to fulfil this object.’ And as Satapata Brahmana says, ‘A man is born into the body that has been made ready for him.’
There is perfect synchronicity between the world that an individual being perceives and the individual being’s past karma. The Law of Causation (Dharma Chakra or Wheel of Dharma) projects the manifested world in accordance with the collective past karmas of individual beings. An individual within this collective perceives that part of the manifested universe that his past karma entails him or her to experience. The physical body is the seat of this experience, and the regulated uncovering of the veil of maya -the veil of sleep under which the individual being transmigrates, determines that part of the world the individual being will experience.
The Law of Causation does not violate the nature of objects. It is the nature of fire to burn and water to flow; and these natures are part of the law. The unfolding of the manifested world therefore does not violate the physical laws that operate between objects by virtue of their physical natures (dharmas). The causal force of Dharma Chakra acts as an unseen ordering force that determines the boundary conditions of the objects of the world. This is the overarching Law of Causation that the Indian tradition espouses; and it comes from sabda-pramana, the means of knowledge by which the reality beyond the realm of the senses may be known.
The Sole Cause and The Bestowed Cause
In Western philosophy, we have the concept of the First Cause. Thomas Aquinas argued that the universe must be by something that is itself uncaused, and that this Uncaused Cause is God. Vedanta accepts this argument but it goes further still. Firstly, it holds this First Cause to be formless and immutable. It remaining immovable while impelling the universe into motion is the sign of its omnipotence; for its power is such that it effortlessly creates, sustains, and dissolves the universe by its mere proximity. Secondly, it holds the First Cause is also the Sole Cause of the universe.
The premise that the natures of those physical things themselves can explain all physical things drives the empirical sciences. This Charvaka principle used in contemporary science came from the Epicureans of Greece and later by Francis Bacon. It was based on these foundations that Newton and others gave birth to the natural sciences grounded purely in the physical natures of things. While many of these thinkers and scientists spoke of God, such speech was no more than mere lip service as God had no role in the scheme of scientific explanations.
There is an inability to grasp how Ishvara may be the controller of a world in which the natural laws of causality operate. The physical sciences are adequate without invoking God. Western world has never been able to reconcile God with the natural laws of the universe. Many modern Theists of the Western hemisphere tend towards Deism, the philosophical position which holds that God does not intervene in the operations of the world, once created. This position allows one to incorporate one’s belief in God in one’s worldview without having to discard one’s allegiance to empirical science.
In the Indian tradition, Ishvara, the Sole Efficient Cause of the entire universe, controls every aspect of it including the operation of the physical laws. How does Ishvara do it? In what way may we consider the apparently independent existences of objects of the world as dependent existences on Ishvara who is the sole Independent Existence? The closest example cited to illustrate dependent-existence is the case of a reflection in a mirror. The reflection has no existence without the existence of the object of which it is a reflection. Indeed, in both Advaita and Dvaita, this very analogy illustrates the relation between Brahman and the world; and it is the relation of Bimba-Pratibimba, the object and its reflection.
There is a common misconception arising about the ontological (reality) status of the reflection seen in the mirror. The reflection of an object, say of a flower, which seen in the mirror, is unreal because the reflected object is not a real flower. However, the object called ‘image of a flower’ is real because the reflection is truly an image of a flower. In other words, the object is not true to the name ‘flower’ but it is true to the name ‘image of a flower’.
In this world comprising various objects, all these objects may be the reflections (pratibimbas) of Ishvara but they are true to the names they are known by. Hence, they are real. The world objects are all pratibimbas, having no existences by themselves but with their existences derived from, and entirely dependent on, the Bimba, which is Ishvara, the Supreme and Sole Independent Existence. Without Ishvara, the universe and its objects have no capacity to exist, just as in a mirror the reflections have no capacity to exist without there being objects.
It is Ishvara who, through His Absolute Will, presents the various objects as causes and effects without being dependent at any time on any of these things to unfold. Yet the causality seen in the world is not arbitrary or dependent on the whims of a capricious God. This is because they are determined by the natures of the objects themselves as they exist signified by words in their para stage, identical with Brahman.
Ishvara creates the universe out of His knowledge alone, and all the things of the created universe suspend on the veneer of His knowledge alone, having no existence by themselves but being reflections of His omniscience. In Advaita Vedanta, the ultimate relationship between Brahman and the world is indescribable because the world being no other than Brahman, there is no relation between them. But within the sphere of the duality contingent upon the appearance of creation, the Bimba-Pratibimba relationship offers the closest analogy to explicate Brahman’s controllership of the entire universe as its sole Efficient Cause.
The Embodied Self as An Actor and The Arrows of Causality
The division of all things into these two basic categories, the seen and the seer, also called prakriti and purusha, is fundamental to the Indian tradition. Ishvara projects this universe in accordance with the collective adrshtas of beings to confer upon them the fruits of their past actions. The purpose of creation is for seeing and experiencing it. Contemporary philosophy firmly rejects all teleological causes (purpose) in the universe. The universe has no purpose, it screams. It has only operating laws devoid of any larger purpose.
In the Indian tradition, however, the stand is different. Prakriti, being inert, has no purpose by itself. Purpose can exist only in a conscious agent having the power of sentience, intentionality and will. So, ascribing purpose to nature, or holding that the telos of a thing resides in nature itself, is unwarranted going against the nature of prakriti. In the Indian tradition, it requires the presence of purusha for the ascription of a cause in the teleological sense.
And more importantly, the telos (purpose) as conceived in the Indian tradition does not violate the laws of nature because the locus of telos and the locus of the natural laws are two different loci. According to Vedanta however, Ishvara’s creation does not proceed through an assembly of physical parts, as in the case of the production of things by ordinary mortals, but proceeds effortlessly from His omniscience through speech. The Indian tradition holds the appearance of telos to be contextual and not an unconditional truth. Brahman or Ishvara does not create the universe for fulfilling a Divine purpose; for the Divine Being is ever full and there is nothing lacking in His plenitude that He should have a desire and want to fulfill it by creating the universe. The telos of the world arises only in the context of the adrshtas of individual beings. It has no other purpose than the conferment of experiences on individual beings, that is, on the purushas that carry with them the baggage of adrshtas.
Adrshta is then the central thread around which the telos or purpose of the world revolves. Ishvara projects the universe for individual beings to experience the fruits of their past actions. But mere projection of the universe would not result in an engagement-experience; for it would be a mere witnessing of the universe. That is, it will not have the capacity to bring about an engagement of the individual being as an actor in the theatre of the universe. In order that the self may be an actor in the theater, it would have to be an embodied being participating in the events of the universe from within it as an actor. And it is the self’s embodiment, which confers upon the self the status of an actor or being-in-the-world.
It is by an erroneous cognitive condition that the self sees itself as embodied. By its true nature, the self, being all-pervasive, has no containment. The presence of this erroneous cognition generates a certain psycho-physical bodily structure. This is just as an object seen through a prism or an uneven mirror presents a certain skewed form of the object which is not its true form but which persists so long as the object is present. And when the erroneous cognition dispels, one is set free from the shackles of bondage (to the body) and to the cycles of birth and death. This is the idea of embodiment and liberation that is central to the Indian tradition. When there is knowledge of the Self as the underlying reality of the universe, this entire structure gets dissolved though its appearance may persist for some time due to the momentum of the effects of past actions.
In the Indian tradition, the primal obstruction to cognition of the self is a kind of sleep. The unobstructed Self, which appears as the individual self in each being, is the Ground of the Universe and the Sole Efficient Cause of creation as well as sustenance of the universe. But the obstruction that prevents the nature of the Self from being known and causes the phenomenon of embodiment to arise, also hides the nature of the Self as the Sole Cause. In this predicament that the embodied being finds itself in, it not only mistakes the body to be the self but, consequent to the mistaken cognition it considers the causal influences that the objects of the world exert on its body as pertaining to its self.
Thus, the self sees itself as affected by the physical objects of the world. And it also sees itself as possessed of a free-will by which it may exert causal influence on the world through the employment of its motor organs. Thus, the Sole Cause of the universe appears, through the prism of ignorance of an embodied being, as a bi-directional arrow of causality.
The Instruments of Perception
Advaita Vedanta’s theory of perception speaks about a perceptual process in which perception is by the sense organs contacting the object. In Sanskrit, the sense-organs are jnanendriyas. The faculty of perceiving the gross universe cannot be a gross object of the universe because it would make the perceived quality into a representation of the quality existent in the object and not the actual quality of the object itself; and this would generate the logical conundrums of a reality-divide. In the Indian tradition, each sense-organ can sense a substance by means of the distinctive quality; sound in akasha (ether), touch in air, form in fire, taste in water, and odour in earth. These five substances – ether, air, fire, water, and earth – are the five classical elements that find mention in most cultures of the world. The case of judging the elemental status of the five classical elements becomes a classic case of incommensurability between two paradigms.
The mixing and aggregation of the five elements is panchikaranam (quintuplication). According to Indian tradition, only the pure intellect apprehends the pure elements. These pure elements are the tanmatras, which aggregate to form the mahabhutas. The pancha-mahabhutas retain their names as ether, air, fire, water, and earth on account of the predominance of the respective elements in them. The five elements cannot be known through empirical science for they are abstractions as beheld by an unimpeded consciousness.
These five classical elements are commensurate with the five senses, and everything perceived in the universe must be by means of them. And this is true even with respect to our mental conceptions of objects; for an object of mental conception and its corresponding object in the universe are the same object appearing in a different condition of its existence. The Indian tradition would thus hold the so-called elements of the Periodic Table to be not elements in the true sense but as compounds of the five classical elements that compose all objects of the universe.
So, what are the sense organs? The covering of sleep and the consequent phenomenon of embodiment brings about a sense of a limited self. A distance appears between the self (subject) and the object. The internal instruments or the sense-organs are part of the body-spectrum that generates by the erroneous cognition that brings about embodiment. Each sense-organ is a subtle part of the element with which it is commensurate. This is because the sense-organ is nothing but the element itself as it appears split up through the prism of the erroneous-cognition. Thus, the ear is the subtle-part of ether, the skin of the subtle-part of air, the eye of the subtle part of fire, the tongue of the subtle-part of water and the nose of the subtle-part of earth. The sense-organ is no other than the element that stands revealed during perception, so its operation of reaching out to the object is only a notional inferred sense. This notional sense persists in every perceptual act in the state of embodiment.
Thus, perception displays a transparency to the world notwithstanding the presence of the body in between the subject and the object. The body does not stand in between the subject and object but only appears to be so due to the erroneous cognition that causes embodiment and the spectrum of internal senses that it generates. In the scheme of embodiment, the gross physical sense organs are the seats of the subtle sense organs. During this state, the individual being attributes the power of sensing objects to the gross physical sense organs instead of to the subtler senses. The instruments of perception comprise not just the five sense organs but also the mind. For, if the sense-organs reach out to an object but the mind is attentive to some other object, perception of the object does not occur. It requires the mind too to reach out to the object, along with the respective sense organs, for perception of the object to occur.
PART 3
The Indian philosophy of perception- the contact theory or Direct Realism intimately links to the tenets of embodiment and liberation that form an inseparable part of the Indian tradition. This is hardly a theme in the Western tradition of philosophy. The main problem with the stimulus-response theory of perception is, in effect, the problem of consciousness. It is impossible to perceive an object without there being consciousness of the object. All the problems of Representationalism and the stimulus-response theory of perception translate into the problem of consciousness. As a logical consequence of assuming a stimulus-response model of perception, consciousness would logically belong to the sphere of noumena which is a delusional non-existent realm, as we have seen earlier. Contact theory overcomes the logical conundrums of representation systems.
Principles of Contact Theory or Direct Realism
The first principle is that the self is a primary substance with consciousness as its essential attribute. This primary subject has the subjective notion of ‘self-awareness’. An empirical criterion cannot verify the existence of a substance- incognizable by its nature. In Indian tradition, the knowledge of the existence of the self comes from Sabda-pramana; so, there is no necessity to look for another proof. Sabda pramana is knowledge conferred by verbal authority. In the Indian tradition, the Veda is held to be the highest source of knowledge and any knowledge that derives out of the Veda is treated as unquestionable and as an impersonal truth.
Once the self, having the attribute of consciousness, becomes a distinct substance it paves the way for resolving the two perplexing problems in establishing a coherent ontology (reality) of the world. First, it explains how it may be possible to perceive real objects on recognition that consciousness is a ‘revealer’ of objects, that is, that the self is effulgent and of the nature of conscious light; and that just as light reveals objects by its mere presence so does consciousness. In the Indian tradition, this self-effulgence is ‘jnana-shakti’. It is not the eye that sees but the Consciousness behind the eye- the self, that sees. Secondly, it explains the correlations between brain-processes and our perceptions of the world without logical conundrums when Consciousness appears in us as embodied consciousness.
The second principle of Direct Realism of Indian philosophy is that among the various causes that operate to produce an effect, only one of them is the primary cause. Thus, there the two kinds of entities involved in perception- the self and the physical organs of the body, in their respective roles as primary cause and occasioning cause. The physical processes of the body do not cause transformations in the percept. When thus considered, it solves a bewildering problem since Aristotle: How would it be possible for us to perceive objects in their true natures when an intervening physical medium in the form of the body along with its sense organs, brain, etc. should be present between the objects and our sensorium?
The third principle clear in all Indian traditions is that all objects are namable and knowable. This leads to the dissolution of artificial reality-divide, in the form of the divide between primary qualities and secondary qualities, or between the phenomenal and the noumenal.
Entities are fundamentally of two kinds: sentient purusha and inert prakriti. This fourth principle clears the confusion with respect to the meanings of the three terms used in philosophical discourse: ‘soul’, ‘mind’ and ‘matter’. The sentient purusha is the soul; prakriti has two forms-mind and matter.
The fifth principle is that mind and matter is the same thing appearing in two different conditions or two different modes of presentations. This explains the correspondences between concepts appearing in the mind and objects appearing in the physical world in a lucid manner without resorting to reduction of one to the other.
The sixth principle is that the object that appears in the mind is a universal while the object appearing in the world is an individual object. Most importantly, there is non-difference of the individual object from the universal. This maintains the reference of a word under all conditions. The word eternally connects to its object both in its manifest and unmanifest state. For, when we refer to Devadatta, for example, what exists in the mind as the referent of the name ‘Devadatta’ is the universal Devadattahood; and it is for this reason that even though Devadatta changes in time from being a child to a youth to a toothless old man, the name would not fail to refer to the same person.
Objects of the world are mind-independent because their existence is not determined by the individual self and because they are public and not private. An independent object manifests in the world independently of the individual being’s powers of determinations and that it should be available for perception and interaction by other individual beings. The criterion provides the condition for distinguishing a valid perception from an illusion or hallucination.
The Perceptual Process
At the most primal level, perception is by the removal of the covering of maya over the individual self. In Advaita Vedanta, the covering of maya over the self is avidya or nescience. The removal of the nescience to allow the conscious light of the self to reveal external objects constitutes perception. In the Indian tradition, perception is an active process in which the Self, as the Inner Controller, drives the senses towards their objects in accordance with the individual’s adrshta. On the removal of nescience, the self’s conscious light streams out to the object and envelopes it.
In this process, the mind assumes the form of the target object of cognition during a conceptual act. The form that the mind assumes in presenting an object to cognition is a vrtti. The mind forms a vrtti both when it constructs an object purely as a mental phenomenon as well as when it contacts an external object and envelopes it and assumes the form of the object. Perception is thus a composite process in which the self, the mind and the sense organs together participate to establish a contact with the object. The Nyaya text Tarka Samgraha explains it as follows: The self (atman) contacts with the mind (manas), the mind with the organ (indriya), and the organ with the object (visaya), and then perceptual knowledge takes place. This is a direct perception of the object and its quality too.
In Indian tradition, the attributes perceived of objects, such as color, taste are not subjective qualities but are objective qualities inhering in the objects themselves. This is in sharp contrast to the viewpoint of Contemporary Western tradition wherein they are subjective phenomenal qualities. In the Indian theory of perception, there is no transformation of the object in the process of presentation. Once the mind and sense organs contact the object and assume the form of the object by forming a vrtti, there would be conjunction of the mind, the sense organ, and the object at the very location of the object. There would be nothing in between the self and the object to hinder the conscious luminosity of the self from revealing the object in its true form.
The contingency of the mind and sense organs as distorting filters arise only when they have a defect hindering it from assuming the form of the object. When such defects of the sense organs or the mind are absent, there would be nothing present in between the self and the object that can prevent the perception from revealing the object in a transparent and true manner. The perception of an object is in the actual spatial location where it exists.
In the case of touch, taste and smell, the (subtle) organs do not move out of the body, so the perception takes place at the location of the physical sense organs themselves when the objects come into contact with the physical sense organs of the gross body; whereas in the case of visual and auditory perceptions, the indriyas move out of the physical body to make contact with the object in external space.
While there are minor variations between the darshanas about the technicalities of perception, all the darshanas hold that perception takes place due to the contact of the (subtle) sense organs with the object. There is uniformity regarding perception being direct and revealing the object in its actual form through the contact of the consciousness with the object through the instrumentality of the sense organs and mind. Such contact is instantaneous since the consciousness that appears within the body is the same Consciousness that exists without the limiting adjuncts of the body and which is in conjunction with all objects. Hence, perception is nothing more than the removal of the covering of maya over the individual consciousness to reveal the conjunction that already exists with the object.
Physical Body
The gross physical body does not figure in the contact theory of perception, at least when the perception is free from defects. The exclusion of the gross body from the perceptual process may seem like an omission, but it is in fact the greatest strength of the theory; for, it is due to the absence of the involvement of the physical body that the perception is capable of revealing the object in its true form.
The embodiment of the self comes about not through a physical process but through a cognitive condition. The cognitive condition which brings about the persistent notion of embodiment also presents in the cognitive field a causal nexus between the bodily functions. This gives an appearance of the self as affected by the body processes. The Self however is unchanging and immutable; for it is a pure witness. The self’s affections resulting from bodily functions are a simulacrum; they are not causal connections between the self and the body but a cognitive conditioning that sees a parallelism between the bodily functions and the affections of the embodied self. What appear to be affections of the self are affections of the inner layers of the body, that is, of the constituents of the subtle body. The latter, because of their proximity to the conscious self, display the properties of being conscious. This is just as the light reflected off an object makes it partake of the properties of light and appear lit.
A misapprehension in perception is primarily due to an adverse state of the individual being’s adrshta. This reflects either as a defect in the instruments of perception or in the generation of a situation preventing unhindered perception. The former appears as an internal defect of the perceptual instrument and the latter as an external defect in the form of unsuitable environmental conditions.
The defect of the physical organ is thus not the direct cause of the defective perception but is a simulacrum, a bestowed cause merely. The body is the seat of experience through which an individual being experiences the fruits of its past karma. There is a correlation between the processes in the physical body and our perceptions of the world but these correlations are not direct causal connections. They are reflections of an unseen cause and are not prime causes by themselves.
The role of the physical body is to serve as a seat of experience for the self to takes its place in the theater of the universe as an actor. It is also to experience the fruits of its past karma as well as to perform karma with the window of free will. The state of equipoise is a state wherein the body is transparent to perception. Thus, bringing the body back to a state of equipoise through surgery, etc., would also constitute a recovery of the transparency. Those philosophers and scientists that take a physicalist view of the universe tend to see these correlations as constituting a causal chain in the perceptual process and thereby lend themselves for entrapment in the quagmire of representationalism with all its attendant problems. Indian philosophy is clear in that the correlations are not part of a direct causal chain of the perceptual process; they are simulacrums displaying a parallelism with the effect due to the operation of a deeper cause.
But Advaita Says Nothing is Real
There are some proponents of Advaita Vedanta opposing Direct Realism. Chittaranjan Naik says that the locution of jagan-mithya that arises in Advaita Vedanta is always in coordination with the locution of brahma-sathya so that the complete expression is brahma-sathya jagan mithya. Advaita Vedanta is Para Vidya; its subject matter is Brahman and not the world. In Advaita therefore jagan-mithya is not an isolated proposition but always in coordination with brahma-sathya.
But when the world has a discussion within a specific context that excludes Brahman, then, in such a context, the world is sathya. This is because the world is no other than Brahman and to deny the sathya of the world when the context of the discussion has excluded Brahman from the discussion reduces to a kind of Nihilism. It is for this reason alone that when Shankaracharya goes about refuting Vijnanavada and other Idealist schools of Buddhism that deny the existence of Brahman, he takes the position that the world is real. This is a vital point often overlooked by modern proponents of Advaita Vedanta, so this note of explanation is not only necessary and important. The principles of Advaita Vedanta mentioned above is a response to Idealist philosophies in a similar manner that Shankaracharya has responded to the Bauddhas.
Replies to Objections to Direct Perception
The author now lists the objections to Direct Perception and gives his replies in a logical manner. Given a long and complex causal series from the object to the brain, physical objects or events cannot be immediate or direct objects of perception. This is the important objection to Direct perception. The author says that the physical body does not really participate in the perceptual process but belongs to the realm of the perceived world. Regarding the observed processes, such as complex series of physiological processes in the eye and the brain, they are processes that may display correlations with our perceptions of objects. Moreover, the descriptions of the physical processes are theory-laden descriptions arising out of the symbolic framework of science. We have no compulsive reason to believe that the descriptions offered by science conform faithfully to the actual physical processes that occur. And finally, the ‘observed’ processes are simulacrums, being the outer reflections of the individual being’s adrshta. The adrshta is the primary determining factor that determines how the individual being perceives the objects of the external world.
The second argument comes from the most important time-lag phenomenon. We perceive physical objects when light reflected or emitted from them enters our visual system. Light travels at a finite velocity, and so there is always some time interval between the reflection or emission of light from a physical object or event and the light’s reaching our eyes. In the case of a distant star, the time interval may be so considerable that, by the time the light reaches our eyes, the star may no longer exist. If something no longer exists, we cannot now perceive it, let alone directly perceive it. Since we perceive something, the object of perception must be something other than physical objects or events. Hence, the conclusion is that Direct Realism is false. We do not directly perceive physical objects and events.
In reply, the author says that all the premises are theory-laden with the assumptions of the theoretical framework of science, namely that (i) light travels with respect to an observer, and (ii) we perceive objects because of a stimulus-response process. The arguments therefore suffer from the fault of stating propositions that are in the question. The putative time lag between the occurrence of an event in space and its observation by a human observer is a myth. No such time-lag exists. The time lags that have been observed in the scientific experiments carried out so far are the time intervals for light to travel from one observed object, namely the source of light, to another observed object, namely the object illuminated by the source of light, and not for light to travel from the object to the observer. The author suggests an experiment called ‘The Simultaneity Experiment’ for a more detailed analysis of the phenomenon. The Simultaneity Experiment paper proposes a new experiment to validate whether there truly exists a time interval for light to travel with respect to a human observer.
Another argument against Direct perception is on the partial character of perception. To perceive a physical object, we must be able to perceive all its parts at once. But we are not able to perceive all a physical object’s parts at once. At best, we can perceive a spatial part of it. The author says that the premise is false because the whole is not the sum of the parts but is a distinct object different from the sum of the parts. Thus, it is not the perception of the totality of all the parts that will amount to perception of the object. Secondly, one perceives an object when the universal (of which the object is a particular) comes into perception. To perceive the object cow, the jati or universal ‘cowness’ is important. The assumption of perception of all parts of the object would lead to an infinite regress. Each part will have more parts to perceive and so on ad infinitum.
In most arguments against direct perception, the opponent or the purva-pakshin fails to appreciate that without universals there will be no recognition of objects, be they attributes or substances. If there is no admission of the universals, it would call for a different name for every individual object. The result would be a dysfunctional language. Universals are a necessary structural element of objects. Only then, it resolves the problem of correct identification regarding both the attribute appearing in one’s immediate awareness as well as the attributes not in one’s immediate awareness.
The Perceptual Illusion Argument against direct perception uses the example of a stick submerged in water as appearing bent. We do not directly perceive the straight stick; but we are aware of it by a prior awareness of a bent stick. Naik calls this argument fallacious because the conclusion does not follow from the premises. The only valid conclusion drawn from the premises is that we do not directly perceive objects in a perceptual illusion. The knowledge of an unbent stick obtains not from perception but from an inference based on the vypati based on past perceptions of such cases. The knowledge of a bent stick being not so is an inferential knowledge and not a perceptual knowledge.
Hallucinations are again an argument against Direct Realism. The author replies by saying that it is wrong to say that the objects perceived in hallucinations are indistinguishable from real objects because the reality or unreality of these objects is verifiable without resorting to complicated arguments. The objects seen in hallucinations appear to be indistinguishable from real objects only to the person seeing the hallucination. But, being unreal objects, they do not possess all the attributes that real objects do. It would be like a person who argues that one may quench one’s thirst by drinking the water seen in a mirage.
The Dubitability Argument argues that when one perceives a physical object, there is much that one can doubt. For instance, when one sees a tomato, one can doubt whether it is a tomato or a cleverly painted piece of wax, whether it is a reflection or a hologram, or whether one is suffering a hallucination. If something is indubitably present to one’s consciousness, it cannot be identical to anything that is not indubitably present to one’s consciousness. There is never a doubt in Direct Realism about the nature of the object. Because, this does not happen, Direct Realism is false. Naik says that this fails to make a distinction between a veridical (true) perception and a non-veridical perception and takes all perceptions to be non-veridical. Consequently, the conclusion drawn is applicable only to objects seen in non-veridical perceptions and not to objects seen in veridical perceptions.
A veridical perception of a tomato, for example, would be only after dispelling all doubts regarding the identity of the object; consequently, there would be no scope to doubt that the object one perceives is a tomato. The conclusion is false for an object seen in a veridical perception and it cannot therefore be used against Direct Realism which holds that only those objects presented faithfully to our sensorium by means of veridical perceptions are to be considered as the objects that actually exist in the external world.
Finally, the Objective Feature Argument says that there is no objective feature of physical objects or events we can be directly aware of; and if Direct Realism is true, we can be directly aware of at least one objective feature of physical objects or events. Hence, Direct Realism is false. The premise suffers from the fault of presenting the proposition for proof as the premises. We can reject this argument without further ado, says Naik.
Experiments to prove the Indian traditional thinking
The author in the second part of the book offers an ingenious experiment called the ‘Simultaneity Experiment’ to address the one major objection of time-lag against direct perception. The author says that the finite velocity of light leads to certain paradoxes like the maximum speed attainable by any object, the shrinking of size of an object, and the stretching of time at speeds approaching that of light. Infinities come into existence when an object reaches the speed of light, even as its ageing slows down. It is a huge paradox to understand that though it takes billions of years for light to travel from a distant star to a measuring telescope; for the particle of light, the travel has been instantaneous. If Consciousness is like light itself, then the immediate perception also may become more understandable.
The author says that the speed of light has always been from the source of light to another object, but it has never measured the speed from the source of light to the sentient observer. A sentient observer would observe the light instantaneously. A nuclear explosion at 44,000 miles or so from Earth, instruments for measuring the speed of light from the event to a space station above Earth, and sentient observers recording the event on their watches on the same station are the paraphernalia for the experiment. The author says that if the Indian thinking is correct, the sentient observer would detect the nuclear explosion much earlier than the instruments used for detecting the event. Present day science may find it difficult to set up such an experiment, but the author throws the gauntlet for any future experiments challenging the present scientific and philosophical paradigms.
In the final section, the author also addresses the phenomenon of lightening where there is a lag between the visual and auditory perception of the event from the Indian perspective.
Conclusion
All perception is thus direct and real. Whatever we see or hear is what exists in the outside world in its true and real form. There is no transformation of datum and there are no representations or constructions in our brain. Perception involves a transparency between the self and the object and contact between the two. There is no time-lag in perception clearly. The physical organs are only to enable this transparency and work as seats of experience too. Indian philosophy thus places the Self or Consciousness as a Primary sentient entity (purusha) and Nature as insentient (prakriti). Both mind and matter belong to the realm of prakriti with individual qualities. The Self is ever free, but only appears embodied by an erroneous mental cognition. The erasure of this cognition leads to Self-realization and freedom. A freedom which was always there, but hidden in the layers of the body because of ignorance or maya or avidya. The potential for freedom exists in every individual irrespective of time and place. It is accessible to any person irrespective of sex, religion, caste, creed, ethnicity, culture, or any personal identity. The words of a realized soul look so remarkably similar despite great distances in time and place that one must accept that the Unity reached by a Nisargadatta is no different from that of a Ramakrishna. And the means are only self-effort. The Universe has a purpose; and this is to help the individual attain liberation. It is thus easy to see that the paradigm of Indian philosophy directly challenges western thought and its aligned contemporary science.
The most amazing aspect of Indian arts, sciences, cultures, and philosophies is an intense ‘spiritualization’ of its activities. Every single route, be it music, poetry, science, or philosophy, can be a means to liberation. Philosophy is never a bare intellectual exercise, but deeply embeds, as we have seen, with the principles of embodiment and liberation. This is clearly missing in western thought. As seen earlier, even Grammar can be a route to freedom! The author rues (in personal communication) that most traditional Indian scholars are simply indifferent to outside philosophies. Despite having a deep knowledge, they do not either acknowledge western systems or do not understand them because of unconnected terminologies. Many concepts of western philosophy do not make sense to Indian philosophers, and yet, the latter choose to keep quiet. And this is unfortunate, feels the author, because Indian philosophy can seriously mount a challenge and give answers to many questions plaguing western philosophy. In a vital Constitutional debate, Sanskrit as a medium of instruction across the country lost by a single vote to English when tied at 50-50. It is nice to speculate now how differently our country might have evolved had Sanskrit won. The colonials left, but the ‘colonial consciousness’ persisted in all our departments, especially humanities, as Dr SN Balagangadhara says. The English language played its major part here undoubtedly, as we think, speak, and write in English. The western narratives in philosophy remain unchallenged as we automatically take the latter to be true. Maybe, if the west cannot learn Sanskrit to understand us, our traditional scholars can learn western philosophies to challenge and counter them, says the author.
This book aims to reinstate perception as a valid means of obtaining knowledge regarding the objects of the senses. In the Indian tradition, perception is the Jyeshta pramana, the eldest of the pramanas. Naik says that no philosopher or scholar has so far attempted to re-instate the contact theory of perception in the contemporary world, except fleetingly by Swami Satprakashananda, in his book ‘Methods of Knowledge’. There is a hope of a larger enterprise by Indian scholars for engaging the Siddhantas of the Indian tradition with the ideas and theories of the contemporary world. This author is of the firm conviction that such an enterprise will not only be a precursor to a change in thinking in the sciences but also serve to reinvigorate the Indian tradition. This would also allow it to reclaim its rightful place in the contemporary world. Even more importantly, it will serve as a step taken towards reinstating knowledge of dharma in the context of today’s world. Our philosophies stood silently, serenely, and strongly transcending all other philosophies for centuries as the latter struggled and fought trapped in a maze of inconsistencies and confusions. Perhaps it is time for them to look up and, as a first step, realize that there is an alternative narrative. This treatise deserves a place of pride in the book collection of any person with an inkling of interest in philosophy.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN INDIC TODAY
Natural Realism And The Contact Theory Of Perception – Part I
RANDOM MUSINGS 