The “Purusarthic Principle”:
Consciousness as Means, Consciousness as Goal.
Three Moments of Enlightenment
- I was sitting with my eyes closed in a room with several hundred
other people…. The next thing I knew, there was a kind of implosion.
Instead of being around me, the room with all its sensations and sounds
was now inside me. Then my awareness began to swell until I could feel
the earth, the sky, and even the galaxy inside me. In that moment I
understood, with a surety that was both terrifying and exhilarating,
that there is only one thing in the universe: Awareness. And that Awareness
is me. (Swami Durgananda, The Heart of Meditation, p. 3)
- In a dream the thought occurred, “Everything is empty.”
Then I realized the truth of Emptiness. It was as if the entire world
appeared before my eyes, and then in a way dissolved. It did not
exactly disappear but its nature changed to “Emptiness.”
There was a fleeting sense of strangeness amounting almost to fear,
and then the world seemed to explode into light and joy, an overwhelming
ecstasy and insight, and I began to laugh out loud. (By now I had awakened
from sleep.). After a few minutes I had the image of a huge knot of
thread—feet across—suddenly coming untied, like a shoelace,
as two tag ends were pulled from opposite sides of the tangle. As the
knot unravelled, the universe and I collapsed again into light and
joy. (Personal communication)
- It strikes unexectedly at 9:00 AM on the surface platform of the London subway system…. After the clatter of the departing train recedes, the empty platform is quiet…. Instantly the entire view acquires three qualities: Absolute Reality, Intrinsic Rightness, and Ultimate Perfection. With no transition it is all complete… And furthermore, this scene also conveys another sense. It is being viewed directly with all the cool, clinical detachment of a mirror as it witnesses a landscape bathed in moonlight…. But there is no viewer. The scene is utterly emptied of every last extension of I-Me-Mine…. [This] vision of perfect reality continues for a few seconds, perhaps as many as three to five. Then it subtly blends into a second series of lancinating insights…. This is the eternal state of affairs. It has always been just this way, remains just so, and will continue just so indefinitely. There is nothing more to do…. There is nothing whatsoever to fear. (Austin, Zen and the Brain, pp 537-538).
Physics, Psychophysiology, and Indian Philosophy
For Roger Penrose (see especially The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind) consciousness reflects the “Platonic” world of universals that forms the underlying essence of the physical world. Consciousness cannot be computational because the universals are not computable entities but rather intuited essences. Moments of consciousness are moments when the human mind accesses, expresses, and is one with some part of the Platonic world. In principle, all universals have the quality of self-luminous “truth” and are accessible to human consciousness. The aim of the microtubule/orchestrated objective reduction (orch OR) theory is to show how these insights (or “prejudices” as Penrose characterizes them) can be consistent with physical (quantum) reality.
Much of Penrose’s thinking aims to show that computation and understanding are different. Something must be added to computation to achieve understanding. Note that he does not claim that computation cannot assist understanding, or even that it might not be essential to it in practice. The point is that understanding exceeds, transcends computation. Understanding understands computation but computation can never “grasp” or justify understanding. How does the orch OR that may occur in microtubules bring about this understanding, this connection to the Platonic world?
Penrose suggests that understanding could have been selected for via Darwinian evolution. This would seem reasonable, since access to the principles (the Platonic universals) on which the world is based would presumably be of benefit to survival in the world. Hameroff claims that the “Cambrian explosion” of 500 million years ago exemplifies this selective advantage of consciousness, and that this moment corresponded to the critical mass of neuronal coherence required for a certain threshold of consciousness. Consciousness, on the Penrose-Hameroff theory is a global, coherent instance of quantum reduction, involving a group of neurons that are in some way in synchrony and that subsequently convey their informational state to larger parts of the brain. There are greater or lesser states of consciousness, all involving some connection to the Platonic world of essences, truths, qualities, and so forth. Orch OR must be only an instance, in some way a privileged instance, of OR in general, and all OR’s must involve the same connection to the Platonic world and hence some degree of “consciousness.” Penrose and Hameroff are silent about what the connection might be between quantum reduction and the Platonic world of inherently conscious essences. This is where Indian ideas such as those of Sankhya and Yoga, and perhaps even better Vedanta and Kashmiri Saivism, may help. (This paper will only discuss Sankhya and Yoga.)
Sankhya and Yoga (which are essentially the same theory) divide the world into two rather than Penrose’s three categories, but one of Sankhya/Yoga’s categories encompasses two of Penrose’s. The third Penrose category seems at first somewhat unlike Sankhya/Yoga’s second, but the difference may be more apparent than real. Recall that Penrose discusses the physical world, the mental world, and the Platonic world. Sankhya-Yoga divides things into 1. purusa and 2. prakrti. Prakrti is the psychophysical world, consisting of both physical and mental “substances,” which are thought to differ only in degree of subtlety. Purusa is pure consciousness without content. The third principle in Sankhya-Yoga, the reason consciousness and the psychophysical world are related, is “purusartha” (a compound of purusa + artha), the fact that prakrti acts always and only “for purusa’s sake.” Sankhya-Yoga further specifies that there are two aspects of purusartha. Prakrti acts 1. to give purusa enjoyment (root bhuj-) and 2. to give purusa freedom or release (root muc-). The unity of these two aims is at the heart of Indian thought generally and specifically of Sankhya and Yoga (Collins, 1991).
I want to draw a parallel between purusa and Penrose’s Platonic world. This becomes more plausible if one is familiar with Indian culture as a whole. Universals in all areas (e.g., music, dance and the other arts; grammar; medicine; etc.) are seen to participate in an Absolute, often called brahman, that is a somewhat broader way of understanding purusa. For example, all the “flavors” (rasas) of esthetic apprehension, such as love, compassion, anger, sadness, etc. lead to, or resolve in, brahman or purusa (i.e., in consciousness).
Look again at the basic principles of Sankhya-Yoga and contrast them with the world as it appears on the surface. Everything happens for the sake of enjoyment (happiness) and release. It appears, however, that we are mired in a “threefold suffering” (duhkha-traya) and that the understanding is hopelessly immersed in delusion or ignorance (avidya). Prakrti is composed of three “strands” (gunas) or constituents, namely the “essential,” the “active,” and the “heavy or dark” (sattva, rajas, and tamas respectively). The interactions of these strands are the permutations of suffering. At best we may achieve moments of enjoyment, but (as Buddhism asserts) these are paid for by lifetimes of suffering. “Release” is nowhere to be seen in the everyday world. Nevertheless, there is a way out, a process whereby purusa can be separated from its involvement with prakrti. This process is one of clarifying and purifying the basic fact of purusartha, of realizing it in a deeper and deeper way.
Without this realization, the machinations of prakrti are very much like what Penrose calls “computational;” i.e., prakrti appears deterministic and lacking in awareness. The practice of yoga involves meditation to increase coherence (samadhi) and simultaneously to raise insight (vijnana) into prakrti’s true nature as purusartha, i.e., as wholly and innately devoted to an Other, purusa, that it can never quite know but can only approximate by purifying and then denying itself.
Life, for Sankhya-Yoga, is a sort of unconscious spiritual practice, which becomes conscious in humans who practice yoga (or who otherwise reflect on purusa and its universals). Life is “for the sake of purusa,” and has always been so, but it is necessary to work to realize this. Only humans can realize it maximally. Said another way, only complex entities capable of orchestrated reduction (and gathering huge neuronal pools around certain instances of orchestrated reduction) can give purusa its freedom in an explicit and large-scale way. (Indian tradition explicitly states that only human beings can achieve enlightenment, not lower animals or even gods—though the latter is disputed.)
If we apply these ideas to the quantum world as Penrose sees it, we may view the emergence of consciousness in a somewhat different way. Purusartha suggests that the Platonic world somehow attracts the mental and physical worlds towards itself, and encourages them to work for its enjoyment and release. What could this mean? There is an old idea, found in many traditions, that men (and animals and plants) are “food for the gods.” The institution of sacrifice is based on this insight. Perhaps the Platonic world seeks exemplification or instantiation in the physical and mental realms in order to gain the satisfaction of (eventually) being brought back to itself via human consciousness. There are degrees of such return, and ordinary life only achieves relatively low levels, such as perceiving sensory qualia, somewhat selfish love, low levels of justice, the truth of the Pythagorean theorem, etc. In “mystical” experiences like those cited above, in deep insights into nature such as are embodied in relativity and quantum theory, in great art, etc., the enjoyment and release of purusa (whatever purusa may be in physical terms) is greater.
Much of life is more or less unconscious, and seems mechanical, rote, or “computational.” When we break through into understanding or insight there is always a rupture in this prakrtic existence. Life consists of ordinary time and of great moments, a fact that is institutionalized in the calendar which separates quotidian life from holidays. The big and little “eurekas” of consiousness are the essential moments of life, and sum up and understand the tracts of unconscious processing—ordinary existence—that occupy most of our time. But it is essential to realize, as Sankhya-Yoga teaches, that these ordinary moments are seen through at extraordinary moments, and are then known to be, as they always were, purusartha: unique, empty, eternally just so—and intrinsically bathed in and oriented toward consciousness. Zen Buddhism teaches that “there is no ordinary man.” Sankhya generalizes this to “no ordinary moment.”
Levels and Kinds of Consciousness and Self
One area in which Sankhya-Yoga can add to Penrose’s and Hameroff’s ideas is an understanding of the self. While Hameroff speculates on the similarity of his ideas with Buddhism (for which self is illusory), Penrose ponders the self, with its implication of free will, self-determination, and novelty. But for Sankhya-Yoga there are two meanings of “self,” and these two senses correspond to two levels or meanings of consciousness. This is where the Indian perspectives shine a light on the Penrose proposals and suggest a fundamental enlargement, or clarification of them.
Self, for Sankhya and Yoga, as for all Indian thought, is something that exists on two levels, with radically different (though related) significance. Likewise, consciousness is really two different things, though one is related to the other in the fundamental nexus of purusartha.
The prakritic world of mind and body contains various tendencies, of which the most fundamental is called sattvic. The structure of the organism, specifically of the mental (a subtly material entity) is organized in terms of tendencies or bhavas. One of the eight basic bhavas, or attitudes, is the jnana bhava, or the tendency to seek insight. This attitude eventuates in the practice of yoga (meditative yoga, not the hatha yoga better known in the West). There are a number of levels of discrimination and unification of the mind, but the highest of these is called dharma-megha-samadhi, or the state when the mind naturally flows in the direction of the higher realm of awareness and selfhood called purusa.
Penrose’s and Hameroff’s consciousness would best be identified with prakritic faculties of consciousness and knowing, vijnana, citta, and so forth. There is a hierarchy among these, which is quite consistent with the model, though for Indian thought the lowest levels of sentience are probably more primitive than Penrose and Hameroff would allow (“from Brahma to a blade of grass,” in a famous formulation). Purusa, the Platonic level of essences and pure consciousness, is not readily assimilated to the orch OR idea, and it is not clear that Penrose tries to do this. Instead, there is an innate orientation toward this level (purusartha) that makes possible an asymptotic approach in likeness to it. This is why Sankhya’s prakriti, imagined as a dancing girl performing to show purusha himself, becomes in the end “indistinguishable” from purusha and attains a state of “pure, solitary knowledge” (visuddham kevalam…jnanam, SK 64).
What in quantum physics could correspond to the purusa idea, or for that matter to Penrose’s Platonic realm? Other branches of Indian thought might suggest an answer. Kashmiri Shaivism, and some forms of Vedanta, posit a gnostic-like descent of a spiritual principle into matter and then its return, via the process of enlightenment or moksha. Could the relationship between the wave function and its reduction be seen in this way? If so, we would have to look at what happens after, as well as before, the quantum reduction. The “classical” world of our conscious mind (essentially classical, as Penrose-Hameroff would have it) would have to be surrounded by the quantum world on both sides, and its orientation towards its origin would imply its destination. It is because we think on our origins that we leave them and return to them. In physical terms, it might be that matter in some way orients toward the quantum level. Objective reduction would seem to make such a possibility less unthinkable than more orthodox versions of quantum physics. Can objective reduction be seen as a process that occurs in some way “for the sake of” its origins and that returns to its origins in the unreduced state, moves from coherence to decoherence and back to coherence again?
The Anthropic Principle and Purusartha
Although Penrose and Hameroff do not endorse it, it would appear that some version of the anthropic principle is implied by their Orch OR/consciousness ideas. Penrose’s tripartite diagram of physical world, mind, and Platonic world, with their interconnections, suggests this strongly. Some sort of protoconsciousness is inherent to matter, and this is magnified in neuronal consciousness, maximally in humans. Here the Indian thought discussed above suggests what may be a superior version of the anthropic principle. Rather than existing for the sake of humans (anthropos) the world might exist for the sake of awareness (purusa). Moreover, the point of it would not be merely so that humans could experience or enjoy the world but crucially so that they might achieve enlightenment and release (moksa) through understanding their experience correctly. Records such as the three cited above suggest what this enlightenment is like, but they cannot convey its full reality. Yet the very fact that these experiences exist, and can be remembered to some extent and set down on paper, at least suggests that they might be taken seriously by a physics, like Penrose’s, that has a place for consciousness and that finds the human position in the cosmos to be interesting and important.
What could this “purusarthic principle” (to give it a name), with its emphasis on higher states and enlightenment, add to the anthropic principle? Crucially, could it overcome some of the objections that have been made to the anthropic principle, especially the most obvious (almost unanswerable) one, that the universe would surely not have labored so mightily only to bring forth so trivial a mouse as man. Of course debates in artificial intelligence (if Penrose is wrong) raise the hope or specter of machine intelligence and consciousness far outstripping ours, so by extrapolation the anthropic principle might be translated into an “androidic” principle. But with the prospect that machine intelligence might lead to the triumph of “gray goo” perhaps this is not an answer to the objection.
Adding enlightenment—moksa or kaivalya or nirvana—to the anthropic principle, however, might change things fundamentally. Specifically, purusartha does not orient the universe towards humans but rather toward what would be humans’ ultimate aim, and that aim might be something that the universe seeks for its own sake, not particularly for ours. Here I will touch on a central conundrum of Yoga philosophy, namely the question of whether there is one purusa or many. On the surface the answer is clear: there are many purusas, perhaps exactly one for every human and certain gods and other divine beings. On the other hand, psychophysical matter (prakrti) acts solely for purusa, and prakrti is one unified whole. How does she split herself into service of such a large number of centers of awareness? An idea of the physicist Peter Pesic (in his book Seeing Double) may suggest a way out of the paradox. He notes that a fundamental implication of quantum physics is “identicality,” i.e., the principle that elementary particles like the electron are absolutely indistinguishable from one another in all ways, even in their “identity” (which has no meaning on this level). Purusas are identical to other purusas because they are all nothing but awareness. As such, they have no name, no place, no qualities whatsoever. Like electrons, they are identical. In acting for the sake of purusas prakrti would act “for purusa” (not exactly singular, but identical).
The purusarthic principle, then, does not see the universe existing for the sake of humans qua human but for the sake of the awareness that we occasionally attain, at those states of enlightenment that William James showed to be less uncommon than many have thought. Perhaps this insight might stimulate further developments in physic.