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Consciousness, Experience and Ways of Knowing Consciousness, Experience and Ways of Knowing Consciousness, Experience and Ways of Knowing Consciousness, Experience and Ways of Knowing Perspectives from Science, Philosophy & the Arts Editor Sangeetha Menon N atio n a l Institute of A dvanced Studies Bangalore, India © National Institute of Advanced Studies 2006 Published by National Institute of Advanced Studies Indian Institute of Science Campus Bangalore 560 012 Price; Rs. 180/- US$20 ISBN: 81-87663-61-8 Copies o f this publication can be ordered from : Dean, Administration National Institute of Advanced Studies Indian Institute of Science Campus Bangalore 560 012 Phone: 080-2360 4351/2360 6594 E-mail: [email protected] Cover design:- S. Muralidharan Typeset & Printed b y: Focus Conununications 140/2,8di Cross Malleshwaram Bangalore 560 003 Phone: 2334 6692 Contents Editor’s N ote......................................................................................... v Opening Remarks K. Kasturirangan..................................................................... vii Introduction Sangeetha Menon.........................................................................ix Papers 1. The Concept of Beauty in Indian Aesthetics............................. 1 Mrinalini Sarabhai 2. Science, Reality and Consciousness........................................... 6 B. V. Sreekantan 3. Denying Experience in the Physical World; Consciousness M isled............................................................... 17 C. S. Unnikrishnan 4. Consciousness and Cognitive Anomalies................................ 41 K. Ramakrishna Rao 5. The Theory of Rasa as Expounded in Indian Aesthetics, Poetics and Dramaturgy......................... 102 Shatavadhani R. Ganesh 6. The “Conscious” Bacterium.................................................. 108 S. Mahadevan 1. Neurological Narratives: A Humanistic Study of Oliver Sacks’ Narrative Medicine.................................... 115 P. Sharat Shastn 8. Meditation: Brain Activity and Cognitive Changes................................................................. 155 Narayanan Srinivasan & Shruti Baijal in 9. Attention, Awareness and Knowledge; Implications of Change Blindness....................................... 184 Farah Naaz & Narayanan Srinivasan 10. Actions, Knowledge and Consciousness............................ 201 Dilip Athreya, Sanjay Chandrasekharan & Narayanan Srinivasan 11. The Puzzle of Experiential Primacy and Consciousness.................................................. 218 Sangeetha Menon 12. Consciousness, Self and Metaphor...................................... 229 V. Harinayanan 13. Art and Archaeometallurgy of Nataraja: Exploring Visual Metaphors for Consciousness................. 242 Sharada Srinivasan A Panel Discussion on Consciousness, Experience and Ways of Knowing................................................... 254 Narayanan Srinivasan, Ramkrishna Rao, Sangeetha Menon, B. V. Sreekantan, C. S. Unnikrishnan Abstracts............................................................................................ 261 List of Contributors and Brief Biography....................................... 283 Programme......................................................................................... 302 IV Editor’s Note This volume is the proceedings of the National Conference on “Consciousness, Experience and Ways of Knowing; Perspectives from Science, Philosophy and the Arts” held at the National Institute for Advanced Studies, Bangalore from 6-7 February 2006. Many distinguished scientists, philosophers and artists spoke at the conference. The invited speakers included Mrinalini Sarabhai, B. V. Sreekantan, K. Ramakrishna Rao, S. Mahadevan, Sumantra Chattarji, Shatavadhani R. Ganesh, C. S. Unnikrishnan, Nataraja Sarma, M. Srinivasan, R. L. Kapur, Narayanan Srinivasan and Sharada Srinivasan. A hundred people, including scholars, students, engineers, doctors, et al. attended the conference. Dr. K. Kasturirangan, Director of NIAS gave the welcome and opening remarks. The Conference ended with a panel discussion. We thank all the speakers who not only took the time to come to the conference and speak but also to send in their papers for this volume in time. Our sincere thanks to the Global Perspectives on Science and Spirituality Award Program (jointly managed by the Interdisciplinary University of Paris, France, and Blon University USA, with funding from the John Templeton Foundation) for facilitating this conference. The Conference was made a lively and engaging event with the participation of several registered participants who came not only from Bangalore but also other cities of India. Thanks to Ms. V. B. Mariyammal for assisting in organizing the conference and bringing the book to this final shape. Sangeetha Menon 27 June 2006 Opening Remarks K.KASTURIRANGAN Director, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore. I welcome all distinguished speakers and participants to this two-day National Conference on “Consciousness, Experience and Ways of Knowing: Perspectives from Science, Philosophy and the Arts”. Along with nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technology, brain studies is considered to revolutionize human experience in the coming decades. The last few decades have seen tremendous achievements in not only creating new technologies and theories to understand life, nature and the universe, but also have brought back the human factor into discussions like never before. Consciousness studies is one area that has emerged as a significant one in bringing disciplines together and redefining the basic questions we ask with an emphasis on the role of experience. Today the significant role of interdisciplinarity in understanding the various facets of the human mind and brain encourages scholars to sit together and chum the foundational structures of their questions and methods. The limits of ways of knowing seem to extend with new insights into the complex nature of the human mind. The divide between the two cultures is no more a definite and rigid one. The erstwhile strict quantitative neural approaches today give significant place for more qualitative ideas on agency, memory, aesthetic experience and so on. Some time back in his famous Reith lectures to the BBC, the noted neuroscientist Dr. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, Vll Director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition at the University of California in San Diego, said that the solution to the problem of aesthetics lies in a more thorough understanding of the connections between the thirty visual centers in your brain and the emotional limbic structures. According to him, once we have achieved a clear understanding of these two connections, we will be closer to bridging the huge gulf that separates C. P. Snow’s two cultures - science on the one hand, arts, philosophy and the humanities on the other. With more of these connections getting a clear place in the way we present knowledge systems, we could be at the dawn of a new age where specialization becomes old-fashioned and a new twenty-first century version of the Renaissance man is bom. This two-day conference will present varied approaches to understand, appreciate and learn from basic human experiences with focus on specific theories of knowledge and method. The questions and issues that will be raised will include the nature of reality according to science in the light of understanding consciousness, the neurobiology of memory, the theory and experience of rasa and beauty in Indian aesthetics, consciousness and cognitive anomalies, brain and meditative experiences, the importance of experience in the world of science, etc. I welcome all of you to this exciting conference on Consciousness, Experience and Ways of Knowing. I thank the eminent scholars who have come from Bangalore and outside and agreed to speak to all of us. I am sure that this conference would be a very fruitful one and an interesting one and in Sangeetha’s words, “Let a million ideas bloom”. But I would like to cut down the million to a thousand, being a scientist. Thank you. viu Introduction SANGEETHAMENON Fellow, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore. Today often the issue that gathers focus inspite of its evasive nature, in discussions on consciousness, cognition, or even advancements in nanotechnology and biotechnology, is about Experience with a capital ‘E’. The last few decades have seen tremendous achievements in not only creating new technologies and theories to understand life, nature and universe, but also have brought back the human factor into discussions. Consciousness studies is one area that has emerged a significant one in bringing disciplines together as well as posing the challenge of the ‘binding problem’ of subjective experience. The puzzle how neural, discrete and quantitative processes give rise to consciousness that is subjective, unitary and qualitative has expanded the domain of consciousness studies to include as many different forms of human experience and ways of knowing. Do experience and the way we understand have significant roles in altering our ideas about consciousness? This is one question, which we would explore in this two-day conference. According to Thomas Kuhn, the late historian and philosopher of science, much of what we learn, including science, is by example. When we learn by example, we learn how to do something, not necessarily knowing everything that is involved in doing it. This kind of knowing was termed tacit knowledge by Michael Polanyi, where we do not fully know what it is that we know. IX So, is knowledge
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