Most of us never get this question. We always assume that the world is indeed what we perceive it as. That is our notion of reality.
Just the other day I was listening to a discussion between a western thinker and an Indian Swami. The swami with his strong faith in ancient Indian Advaita philosophy was almost saying that the world that you and I see does not even exist! And the other thinker was agreeing with him and was trying to put swami’s philosophical statements into intricate technical jargon acceptable to modern scientific community.
So, does this world really exist?
Most of our interactions with the world is based on what we perceive it to be. We perceive the world through our senses. We rarely doubt that world may not be what it appears to be. Even science assumes that whatever that exists around us can be perceived through our senses directly or indirectly. If something is not perceptible in some way, such a thing does not exist.
Let us start with our own body. Most people are very much conscious of the body, so much so, that we almost identify ourselves with it. We also talk about our mind, thoughts, feelings, experiences, and so on. But scientists tell us that all these that I just listed out, are nothing but various aspects of our body. They associate these things with our brain. They say that some neural activity in the brain is what we perceive as thoughts, feelings and so on. They assert that even our first-person experiences are in some way conjured up by the brain itself, though they are not very clear about how exactly it happens.
What is ‘a hard problem of consciousness’ for philosophers is just a yet to be explored queer phenomena for the scientists. They believe that it ultimately has to be mapped onto the brain. The reason is that science does not accept anything which is not material in nature. That way, our science has its own version of Advaita or monism 😉 It believes that there exists nothing other than the physical world, that includes each one of us.
What it implies is that we are nothing but a heap of closely knit cells! How insulting 😉
Long back, there was a research finding by one of the scientists namely Benjamin Libet. Based on some experimentation, Libet suggested that there is no such thing called ‘free will’, which all of us proudly assume. We think that it is our ‘free will’ that makes us stand apart from inanimate ‘things’. But if what Libet suggested were the truth, then each one of us is just a biological robot - yet another ‘thing’ in a vast pile of things!
Needless to say, that most scientists don’t accept the concept of soul. According to them, there cannot be something that survives even after the body decomposes or is burnt to ashes. If at all, it will be a heap of dust or ash! That is so because science believes that we are just the body and something like a soul, that cannot be perceived, cannot exist! And someone taking re-birth after the death of body is just a wishful thinking. It does not fit in the framework of science which banks heavily on sense perception and physical monism.
Asking questions like “does God exist?” is just absurd, as far as science is concerned. Something that is beyond perception, something that has no physical body, how can such a God exist? It could just be a figment of imagination by a primitive brain 😉 That is what science tells you.
Most of us are moving more and more towards this scientific view of the world. Questions like “why do we exist?”, “where did we come from?”, and so on, make no sense to us. Because we are just things, or objects with no notion of subjectivity 😉
Long back, Buddhists also started with almost similar view towards the world. Well, almost. They said that what we think as individuals is just a combination of body and mind. Both these body and mind are transient and undergo changes every moment. There is nothing that is permanent or a witness to these changes. More specifically, there is no permanent entity like soul. So, ‘I’ don’t do anything. Nor do ‘I’ experience anything. It is just that the body and the mind undergo changes giving the impression of a living entity!
It is beyond my comprehension why the Buddhists with such a faith built a complex system of practices, strict code of moral discipline, elaborate theory of mind, strong aspiration for liberation! For whose sake? Just for the sake of body and mind which keep undergoing impersonal changes!
Let us get back to our scientific view of the world which is strongly based on sense perception. Most of us, however scientific we are, assume that ‘we’ do exist, and we have our own aspirations, goals, wants, fears, love, hatred and such other emotions. Science may very well brush each of these aside as mere happenings in the brain which in turn are no more than some physical changes in the neural structures.
This world view leaves us with many open questions for which we have no answers. We build a cocoon around us by assigning our own meaning to words like ‘enjoyment’, ‘purpose of life’, ‘morality’, and so on. Most of the time we are guided or rather compelled by pre-wired instincts. We keep ourselves busy satisfying our bodily needs since that is ultimately all that we have. In fact, the word ‘we’ does not make any sense to us apart from the body!
Long back, the Charvaka philosophers of ancient India held the same view. They said “the purpose of life is to enjoy. So, enjoy as long as you live. Once you die, there is no coming back!”.
Is there anything wrong with this world view? When does some view become wrong? Probably, any view that threatens our individual existence or the existence as a whole can be termed as wrong or at least not wholesome.
Is this world view complete and self-consistent? Definitely not. But most of the times, we are too busy to look beyond this limited view. Does it at least make us peaceful? Not the least. There are far too many things that are unknown and beyond a point our existence itself seems meaningless to us. The idea of mere momentary existence threatens us.
Are there other ways to look at the world of ours? Let us discuss that in the next episode.
No comments:
Post a Comment