UG was a ‘free man’ or a ‘natural man’, freed from the vicious grip of
thought or culture thanks to his ‘death and
resurrection’ (he described it as a calamity)
on his 49th birthday.
UG’s calamity
was akin to the accidental pushing of a ‘reset’ button that flushed
out his entire cultural past, the collective human learning from his system. This
was like the strike of a lightning bolt that completely reset his life, pushing
his entire physiology back into the default ‘factory mode’ or the natural mode. This involved major changes in his
cognitive apparatus including vision, touch, smell etc.
Freed from the vicious grip of thought or culture,
his physiology slipped into a natural rhythm resonating with life all around. For
him, thought was a pure ‘on demand’ phenomenon, appearing only when there was a
need, freeing him of the constant clutter or chatter that hijacks our tryst
with the ‘now’ or the ‘present’.
“The only difference between you
and me is that you are preoccupied (all the time) and I am not!” - UG
It took years before UG could recover from the aftershocks
of the ‘calamity’ but eventually he began to settle down into the new normal. He slowly
and steadily bounced back into the mainstream of life and started sharing his explosive
observations on life with friends and the public.
UG’s life offers the much-needed counter factual giving
us an opportunity to see the natural operation of life as opposed to life under
the grip of culture.
Thought or culture has completely hijacked our
lives by taking control of all our actions and behaviours. Only someone like UG
functioning naturally, free from the tyranny of culture, can hold a mirror for
us to really see the real, corrosive nature of thought. No other way!
Coming from the very depths of life, UG’s startling
revelations are quite novel, very refreshing and invigorating. They are some of
the rarest pointers to reality, life,
and its workings.
UG comes across as a unique individual who spent
decades travelling across the globe and speaking tirelessly to people
everywhere about the many distortions, falsehoods and traps of the psychological
or spiritual kind.
He dismissed the ideas of eternal happiness, God, enlightenment
etc. as pure cultural fabrications. And hammered home the truth about the utter
futility of chasing after all such fictitious goals, warning us about the many threats
or dangers lurking in the spiritual bazaar.
In his journey extraordinaire, UG met up with all
kinds of folks – the seekers, scientists, sages, reformers, politicians, artists,
technologists, philosophers etc. and held candid discussions on an array of
topics.
Some of the commonly discussed subjects included
the likes of human intellect, the phenomenon of understanding, the workings of
life, of culture, the mechanics of thinking, the myth of mind or self or I etc.
In the unquenchable thirst of the philosopher for reality,
or that of the seeker for God, or the scientist for the God-particle – we see extraordinary
sincerity, intensity and commitment. Each of these journeys delights us when they
throw up common truths about life or reality.
Here is an attempt to highlight some striking
parallels between UG’s take on life vis-à-vis the learnings from the far-flung
fields of neuroscience, cognitive science and
artificial intelligence (AI).
We shall begin with the very tool that is at play
here – the human intellect. Getting a handle on intellect is to get a scoop on everything
that is significant or consequential in our lives – thought, knowledge, culture
etc.
UG on ‘Intellect’
UG referred to the
stubborn problems of love & hate, greed, jealousy, envy, anger, fear etc. as
‘problems of living’. And repeatedly emphasized
that the problems of human relationships cannot be resolved by the intellect, our
‘go to’ instrument
for understanding or solving problems.
For us, intellect is the king, our de facto ‘problem
solver’. It is an incredible instrument - the promoter of all knowledge and the
driver of science, technology, medicine etc. All our individual accomplishments,
education, career etc. are a grand testimony to its capabilities.
Then, UG comes along, faulting it, calling it futile,
ineffective, and incapable of resolving human problems.
He trashes the notion of intellectual
understanding, especially in dealing with problems
of living or the problems of hate, jealousy, or greed.
This is where are all stuck. Our immense faith in
intellectual understanding cannot be easily dismissed.
For UG, intellectual
understanding of anger or jealousy is plain hogwash. Anger or
hate or any other emotion is a tremendous burst of life energy. And
understanding cannot capture or control life energy.
Understanding only promotes or provokes ‘thinking’, resulting in ‘knowledge dump’ adding
to the existing clutter of knowledge.
UG added that intellectual understanding is useful
and needed only in dealing with technical problems or transactional issues.
Otherwise ‘knowledge is garbage’ and is
utterly worthless in solving living problems.
UG’s exposé on
intellect is indeed an eye opener and a breath of fresh air.
At first glance, UG’s dismissal of intellectual inadequacy seems incomprehensible
and irreconcilable. But given his sagacity and clarity on matters of life, it merits
a deep dive.
****
Intelligence and Intellect
Questions on life
or consciousness or intelligence continue to confound scientists, philosophers,
and commoners alike.
Some form of intelligence,
of course, is evident across the entire sentient kingdom. Tiny creatures
including ants, worms, bees etc. exhibit extraordinarily intelligent behaviors while
they hunt for food, or look for a mate, or a nest.
On the other hand, intellect,
the higher form of intelligence, can be seen only in a handful of species.
Intellect, here, refers to higher order cognitive
abilities like language-processing, vocabulary, logic, learning, reasoning, judgement,
discretion, planning & predicting, analysis etc.
Human intellect is a social
intellect or socially conditioned intellect, tailor made,
culturally programmed for community living.
Social intellect, of course, is not a human legacy.
Other primates, wolves, dolphins, elephants, dogs, pigs, rats, parrots, crows,
and ravens etc. too display various aspects of social
intellect.
****
Biology of intellect
Firstly, is there any biological basis for
the intellect? What size or complexity of the brain
tissue qualifies for a true intellectual
processor?
Science has no definitive answers yet on this
question!
The research so far suggests that the intellectual gear in humans (all mammals) is actually
a sophisticated piece of brain tissue called the new
brain or the neocortex (weighing
~500 grams in humans). Some scientists humorously refer to it as the ‘VR headset’ similar
to those used in games or Virtual Reality.
In ‘bird brains’ as in crows or ravens, this hardware
is a teeny-weeny piece of cortical tissue,
roughly the size of a nut (~8 -14 grams). But surprisingly this small tissue is
capable of formidable intellectual capabilities.
Neocortex forms 90% of gray
matter (cerebral cortex), about 2-4 mm thick, made of six-layers, weighing
nearly half a kilo, made of nearly 10-14 billion neurons, spanning more than 70%
of the entire volume of the human brain, with a surface area almost equal to
that of a A3-sized paper, crumpled into the human skull (reason for wrinkles)
squeezed atop the old brain as shown in the graphic.
(source: multiple internet sources)
Neocortex could very well be the seat of human intellect, thanks to various studies
both by neuroscientists and the medical
experts well versed in brain pathology.
Many of the neurological disorders, the likes of intellectual disability, social deficit, autism, schizophrenia etc.[1]
are directly mapped on to distinct patches of flawed tissue in the neocortex.
For example, we might lose speech if the left brain
(temporal lobe) is damaged (exactly what happened to my dad) or lose eyesight
if the hind brain (occipital lobe) is damaged and so on.
So, when you drive out next time, don’t forget to
don your helmet, or put on your seat belt!
Every inch of the brain tissue is matchless and priceless!
****
Intellect and Social Environment
Yes, human intellect is right at the top of the
pecking order. It is the most versatile and capable instrument on the planet.
The old brain (consisting of
the limbic and reptilian
brain) is hardwired by nature over millions of years to regulate all
critical bodily functions and to handle various threats in the physical
environment.
The new brain is more a cultural or intellectual apparatus
based off the neocortex. It gets continuously
wired and re-wired to enable us to live
and function in a constantly changing social
environment.
Yes, you heard that right!
Various neural
pathways are constantly created and modified
every time there is some learning or experience.
This physical flexibility
of the brain to shape or reshape or make
or modify neural connections or pathways is known as the plasticity of the brain.
Neocortex & Culture
Did neocortex play a role in development of
culture? Or did culture bring about the development of neocortex in the brain to
facilitate cultural adaptation?
‘Which came first - culture or the
neocortex?’ This is
the ‘chicken or egg’ question for neuro-anthropologists.
In a way, humans are ‘sentenced’ to live,
function, and die within the confines of a complex and sophisticated cultural
environment.
There is no choice for the human intellect but to continually
‘learn’ and ‘adapt’ to the ever-changing landscape of culture.
Culture adds a new layer of reality during our
lifetime that is forever difficult to shake off.
“This superimposed reality is the
only reality we have, and there is no other reality!” – UG
Merely possessing the best intellectual apparatus (hardware)
will not be enough in this superimposed reality. We also need to invest years
of ‘training’ or ‘conditioning’ (software) to build up a capable and formidable
intellect with premium skillsets to adapt to, and take on the various challenges
of society.
Adaptation is complex and cumbersome and there is
a huge price to pay!
In the animal world, only we humans go to schools
and colleges as education is the legitimized form of systematic social or
cultural programming.
The early stint in school or college ‘conditions’
and ‘trains’ the intellect to a certain extent to handle a variety of complex tasks
to prepare the individual to fit into society, earn a livelihood, to raise a
family. The skilling includes social tasks like organizing or community service, technical tasks like
programming or flying, or transactional tasks like banking or shopping etc.
Education refines and impacts the intellect and influences what we pursue or who we become.
****
The Burden of Intellect
Routine or undemanding tasks like driving,
cooking, washing, or shopping may not tax our brain tissue. But engaging in
demanding tasks like learning, collaboration, communication, organization etc.
places a huge cognitive load on the brain tissue.
Hi-tec jobs and environments cause huge stresses
on the gray matter inducing disorders in the cognitive apparatus. Cyber-psychiatric disorders
are common among techies or geeks.
Brain scientists too agree:
We human mammals are the victims of a recurrent dispute: a
tussle between the old reptilian brain, which unconsciously runs the survival
machine, and the mammalian neocortex sitting in a kind of driver’s seat atop
it.
– Jeff Hawkins (A Thousand Brains)
It is true that because of constant ‘learning’ our
intellectual faculties including the sensory apparatus get culturally ‘soaked’
or ‘conditioned’ in the social environment.
The ancient Upanishads describe cultural
conditioning as a kind of ‘contamination’.
Brihadaranyaka
Upanishad explicates this aspect of ‘cultural conditioning’ through a wonderful
story. The short summary is that all the five sense organs get ‘contaminated’
due to environmental learning or ‘acquired knowledge’ and ‘experience’. They
carry the impressions left behind by the experiences of touch, sight, sound,
taste, and smell. Therefore, the senses cannot simply experience anything new.
“There is no such thing as a new experience” –
UG.
The Upanishad concludes that only
the “life force’ (‘Prana’) remains untouched by the environment. Life force is
beyond the bounds of all experience.
“You cannot
touch or capture life” - UG.
The ‘pulse and beat’ of life is beyond any learning or knowledge or experience.
UG’s calamity
rid his sensory apparatus of all cultural contamination.
****
Social conditioning vs Machine Learning (AI)
Social conditioning is comparable to ‘machine learning (ML)’
in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).
AI has become ubiquitous, has been around for
quite some time. When we type into our phones, the ‘next
word’ suggestions pop up to auto-complete
our sentences. This is the simplest form of artificial
or machine intelligence.
Take the case of Conversational
AI or ChatGPT. It is the ‘wordsmith’
or the ‘text master’. It makes use of powerful processors (hardware) and algorithms and statistics
(software). It is then ‘exposed to’ (‘trained
on’) tons of books, articles, or writings (machine
learning) to acquire the knowledge about a particular language, say
English.
Once the training is complete, the Chat GPT is
ready to spit out essays, blogs, reports, letters, scripts etc.
A conversational (listening
or talking) AI is much like Siri or Alexa. It is a game changer. It
is also called the NLP or Natural Language Processor
as it responds to our voice commands given in natural or day-to-day language.
Going forward, ChatGPT or NLP interfaces would eventually
become the default UI (or User Interface) for all kinds of technologies. This means that today’s
buttons, levers, switches, keypads, and consoles will all disappear. Instead, we
could ‘speak’ into our Digital Assistants telling them to drive the car, cook
food, to shop, to pull medical or legal or tax records, to build or print 3D homes
etc. in the not-so-distant future.
As you can see, AI surely is a job killer. Experts
believe that AI can kill all routine and replaceable jobs, in millions. Those who
are skilled in AI will get to keep their jobs in the future, as there will still
be a huge demand to build more and more AI interfaces, devices and apps.
Professionals like lawyers, engineers, physicians etc.
get to keep their jobs and careers but will begin to use more and more AI apps to
save time and effort, to stay laser-focused on core domain issues.
Child, Crow, and Artificial Intelligence
At the time of this writing, AI is still a ‘single-task
master’ excelling only in a single area of expertise. That’s right. Today’s AI
machines can excel only in particular task.
That means we need different AI machines for doing different things - one for playing
chess (ChessGPT), another to compose an image (DrawGPT), yet another to write
an essay (Chat GPT) etc.
Given this serious limitation, today’s AI capabilities
are no match to that of a child or a parrot or a crow.
A child or a crow can instantly tell a real pizza
from a fake 3D-printed pizza. Bees will avoid plastic flowers and flock to real
flowers in the garden.
Yes, today’s AI is no match to the intelligence of
a child or a bird.
Even the best AI ‘image-reader’ of today using the
most powerful camera, trained using hundreds of millions of objects, shapes, contours,
textures, colors etc. cannot tell a real mango or a pizza or a flower from its fake.
It cannot say whether the mango is sweet or sour, or the pizza is hot or cold, or
the flower is fragrant or odorless.
AI cannot ‘feel’ or ‘experience’ anything, it might
never know what ‘thirst’ or ‘hunger’ or ‘pain’ is.
No wonder AI or machine
intelligence cannot come anywhere close
to human intelligence or even animal intelligence.
The artificial machine touted to mimic some form
of human intelligence is AGI or artificial general
intelligence, still a few technological milestones away.
****
AI is only a tool, humans are the tool-users
A well-designed AI could be a ‘tool’ or even a ‘tool maker’ depending
on how the programmers rig it up, but humans are
the ultimate ‘tool users.’
We decide what kind of tool we wish to make; in
other words, we determine the use for the AI. Herein lies too its utility or danger.
While beneficial AI technologies like Med-PaLM 2
could bring great healthcare benefits to humans, tons of addictive algorithms could
turn us en masse into slaves of digital games and apps.
AI can solve many serious humanitarian challenges
or it could pose a threat to the balance, order and harmony of society.
AI has already gained enough notoriety for its
potential abuse.
AI’s content creation capability is a double-edged
sword. It is easy-breezy to create misleading deepfake videos or images and plant suspicion,
disbelief, dissent, or resentment in the minds of billions, instantly!
The Father of AI, Geoffrey Hinton thinks that given
the current trends in technology, AI could become faster, more efficient, more
powerful in processing information and therefore capable of churning out what
he calls the ‘superintelligence’.
Machine Intelligence could be programmed to cheat, deceive, defraud or
scam people. It beats the human hands down as a superior scammer or fraudster
or manipulator.
“As soon as you manipulate
(AI), then you can get done what you like.”
– Geoffrey Hinton
Through the spread of misinformation and
disinformation, AI could prove a deadly tool in the hands of sinister minds to
inflict cultural wars or conflicts, further dividing peoples and nations.
****
UG on Artificial Intelligence
UG spoke of dangers of computers (AI was still in
its infancy at the time). He cautioned against introducing cultural filters through
selectivity and censorship that could bias the machine intelligence to act in a
certain way dictated by vested interests. UG always warned that all cutting
edge research and development ultimately
ends up with the regime or the authorities.
“We are not different from computers, but this is (human
intelligence) something extraordinary, you can’t imagine the human computer.
This is what I am telling all
those experts who come and brag what wonderful computers are, and how it’s
going to be of great help to us all, I tell them the moment you put selectivity
and censorship in the computers (cultural prejudice or bias), there usefulness
will be finished.
They will be used the way
society and the leaders of mankind are using our thinking mechanism which is
nothing but ‘selectivity and censorship’ and destroy that or use them to
destroy everything. Their usefulness will be finished.” - UG
AI, without proper guard rails, could disrupt or destroy
long standing social systems like democracies and well-established institutions
like banking etc. causing havoc.
****
****
‘Self’ vs ‘Intellect’
Does the social
intellect fall under the same rubric
as the ‘self’ or ego?
Whereas intellect has the aspect of physicality, the
‘Self’ or ‘I’ is more of a socially engineered
reality.
Intellect has its correlates in the cortical tissue
or neural circuitry whereas ‘self’ or ‘I’ has no biological basis. It is a pure
psychological identity.
But there is one thing common to both the ‘intellect’
and the ‘self’, it is the ‘knowledge and experience.’
UG often spoke of the ‘experiencing
structure’, that resonates with the idea of biologically wired intellect. But he and Sri
Ramana summarily dismissed the idea of ‘self’ or ‘I’ as unreal.
In one of his talks, UG tells Mahesh Bhatt,
“What
you call ‘Mahesh’ is only a fictitious entity put ‘in there’ by your parents.”
A harmless name or label given by parents marks the
psychological underpinning of the ‘self’. All subsequent ‘learning’ or ‘gathering of knowledge and experience’ further
reinforces the idea of the ‘self’.
UG and many Eastern thinkers aver that the ‘I’ or
‘self’ is a pure psychological beast, fabricated through social and cultural
algorithms.
Even the scientists completely brush aside the
reality of the ‘self’ or ‘I’, or ‘ghost in the machine’. They find absolutely no
basis to support this hypothesis.
The famous Cognitive Scientist Daniel Dennett
ridicules the illusion of ‘self’, as a
tiny human (homunculus), sitting inside the brain, acting like an ‘observer’
witnessing the ‘show of life’ projected on a screen inside the skull,
dismissing it as ‘Cartesian Theatre’.
UG relentlessly hammered home the fact
that ‘there is nothing there except knowledge.’ He referred to the collective human knowledge and experience as the
‘thought sphere’.
All our knowledge is primarily siphoned off from
this collective.
****
‘Self’ is the movement of knowledge
Based on his observation, UG explicated that the ‘self’ or ‘I’ (or thinker) is just an illusion
created by ‘the movement of
knowledge’ (or thinking).
Tom and Jerry Spring to life only in the rapid
movement of the projector but collapse into plain images upon slowing down.
UG’s position resonates with findings of some
neuroscientists based on observations in the laboratory:
“Thinking is a form of moving
(or movement)” – Jeff Hawkins (A Thousand Brains)
Hawkins says that thinking
is movement of knowledge, a continuous process of
association and prediction.
Hawkins concludes that
thinking is a form of ‘movement of knowledge’ almost echoing UG’s
observation about the ‘self’.
Hawkins explains that we are constantly associating
objects and people in our environment (office or living room or kitchen or
garden or town) with those stored memories from our past experience (past
knowledge). This association helps us to make predictions about what we should see
or experience in the next second or the next time frame. This is the psychological security mechanism at play. If we do not see what we expect to see, the
alarm goes off that something is amiss, alerting us!
To instantiate, as soon as you reach home, thinking
tells you that the family dog will be at the gate waiting for you, and as you
open the door, thinking continues on to the next
frame, now projecting the familiar settings or furniture in the room
that you expect to see and on and on, ad infinitum. If there is a mismatch
between your previous knowledge about a thing and its current status, there is
an immediate alert!
Thinking is ‘analog’ or continuous in all of us. But UG spoke of his thinking as somewhat ‘digital’ i.e. from frame to frame and complete absence of continuity.
****
The ‘Binding Problem’ of Consciousness
The experience of a mango or an orange or a tennis
ball involves multiple sensations or the sensory
modalities of sound, color, touch, taste, smell etc.
How do these various sensations get ‘linked’ or ‘bound’ or ‘integrated’ into the unitary experience of the mango?
This is the famous binding
problem (or linking problem) of consciousness of the cognitive
scientist. In the absence of ‘I’ or ‘observer’ or any agency, how could all the
sensory channels come together?
The ‘binding problem’ remains the ‘hard problem’
of consciousness.
So, the question is ‘who’ really undergoes the
‘experience’? Or who is the ‘experiencer’?
The scientists aver that there is ‘no ghost in the
machine.’ And UG and other sages too dismiss the existence of any ‘I’ or ‘self.’
Then how does the experiencing
of the mango come about?
The jury is still out, and the problem humbles the
best and the noblest of minds to this day.
In this context, sometimes we refer to yet another
phenomenon of ‘awareness’.
‘Being aware’ or ‘being conscious’ sometimes
reinforces the idea of ‘self’ that is ‘aware’ muddying the waters.
But UG made it clear that awareness is
nothing mysterious but only a functional aspect of the brain. And he added the
rider that this is not something unique to humans, “even the cow on the
street looks at you with choiceless awareness.”
Some gurus and philosophers have made a big deal
of it and spun this natural functionality of the brain into a technique, awareness
meditation, to achieve some spiritual state.
UG rubbished the whole idea as bunkum.
****
Here there is no Agent, only Action- UG
Finally, here is UG’s masterful
summary on life recorded by Dr. Ramakrishna Rao, a professor and an Advaita philosopher
from Mysore:
‘There is nothing here
called the Atman (soul), but there is Witnesshood. Here there is no
agent, but all that (there is) is action. There is no subject here, but every
object creates it. There is no immortality, but nowhere there is birth or
death. There is no mind, and if there is one, it is not different from the
body. The mind divides life, but if it unites with life, ‘it illumines and
makes it dynamic.’
****
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