Hard Problems of Consciousness

Hard Problems of Consciousness

Abstract

Modern scientific research of consciousness has evolved into an interdisciplinary effort involving both physical and social disciplines, such as neuroscience, biophysics, quantum physics, cognitive science, computer science and even eastern and western philosophies.  As yet, no consensus has been reached about a solution to the “mind-body problem”.  In this article, we point out some of the difficult questions which modern consciousness researchers are attempting to answer.  Consciousness, the mind, the body, and their relations were thoroughly analyzed in the Indian philosophy (Vedanta) of ancient times.  We will describe how each of these questions is dealt with in Vedanta and find that Vedanta contains many concepts which can lead to scientific answers to these questions.  

1.     Introduction

Modern scientific research of consciousness has evolved into an interdisciplinary effort involving both physical and social disciplines, such as neuroscience, biophysics, quantum physics, cognitive science, computer science and even eastern and western philosophies. There has been an explosion of research and results in neuroscience over the last three decades with emphasis on understanding and explaining consciousness. Some neuroscientists believe that the “hard problem” (Chalmers 1996) is not hard any longer and some computer scientists believe that they are very close to building a conscious computer.  In spite of the many seminal and outstanding accomplishments in this field, it seems that there remain some fundamental questions which need to be addressed when one tries to provide a scientific explanation of consciousness.  

Consciousness, the mind, the body, and their relations were thoroughly analyzed in the Indian philosophy (Vedanta) of ancient times.  In this article, we suggest that Vedanta contains concepts which can lead to answers to some of the questions which modern researchers who try to explain consciousness in scientific terms are wrestling with. Vedanta asserts the existence of a Supreme Consciousness (God) that is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent and the association of every living being with its own soul (Jiva) which is a part of that infinite Consciousness. Being part of the eternal Consciousness, the soul is eternal also and survives the death of the physical body.  The soul is said to be distinct also from the mind which is a collective name for cognitive, psychological, and behavioral aspects such as ego, intellect, thoughts, desires, and experiences of living beings.  According to Vedanta, the mind, although subtler than the body, is also part of the insentient Nature (called Prakriti) and not conscious just like lifeless matter. A major difference of Vedanta from Western philosophies is the principle of reincarnation which states that some of the subtler contents of the mind survive physical death and are carried by the individual soul (jiva) into another life.  Although these views are seemingly counterintuitive, in this article, we suggest that Vedanta’s descriptions of Consciousness, mind, and body can throw light on answers to some of the difficult questions that modern scientists pursuing consciousness research are concerned with.  

2.     Brief summary of what Vedanta says about Consciousness, the mind, the body, and their relations

Bhagavadgita (BG) says that God is the Ultimate Consciousness and the Ultimate Personality.  He is omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, and a great ocean of infinite, immeasurable, mercy and compassion. By His own will He manifests Himself as innumerable cosmic universes by projection in the material substratum.  He is the Self (Atma) and Consciousness seated in the hearts of all living beings.  Gita describes jiva, the embodied being and the individual soul, as an infinitesimal spark from God Himself and therefore eternal as well.  Jiva draws to itself the senses and the mind that are constituents of prakriti, the insentient Nature. Being eternal, jiva survives physical death. The Self which is confined to the body-mind complex is sometimes called Jivatma to distinguish it from the unattached and unbounded Self which is called Paramatma. Chapter 13 of BG called Shetra Shetrajna Vibhaga Yoga describes the distinctions between the body mind complex and the one who ‘knows’ them (shetrajna).  The Field of activity (shetra) consists of the five elements, the ten organs, sense objects, the ego (ahankara), desires, aversion, emotions, experiences (manas and chitta), and intellect (buddhi). The five elements are the earth, water, fire, air and the sky. The five objects of the senses are sound, touch, form and color, taste, and smell.  All contents of the Field, namely, the body, its environment, and the mind are not conscious.  Mind is called the eleventh sense (five senses of cognition: seeing, hearing, touch, taste, and smell and five senses of action: speech, grasping or working, moving, excretion, reproduction). The knower of the Field is Consciousness who has projected Himself and assumed this function within this body.  As to the interaction of the body and the mind, in the chapter called Karma Yoga, Gita says that the senses influence the body, and manas and chitta influence the senses; buddhi influences the manas and chitta, and jiva influences buddhi. 

If the mind is not conscious, how is it that we have conscious experiences in our lives? Vedanta’s answer to this question is a phenomenon called chidabhasa meaning “appearance of consciousness” and explains it by means of the following analogy: When sun light falls in a pot containing water, the light is reflected by the water creating an image of the sun. The image has some brightness but its origin is in the sun light and not in the pot nor in the water. If the pot is broken, water is scattered, the reflection is gone but the sun and his rays are all still there. In this analogy, a living being is a body with a mind and similar to a pot containing water; the mind is like water and the body is like the pot. The consciousness appearing in a living being is like the image of the sun in water. If there are more than one pot with water, images of the sun appear in all the different pots. The Supreme knower, the Ultimate Consciousness who manifests Himself as consciousness of each individual living being is like the sun light; sun light is just one but the reflections are many and distinct. One may say that the finite knower, the soul situated within the higher whole is like the beam of rays which fall in a single pot.  Just as there is no reflection in an empty pot, there is no appearance of consciousness in lifeless matter but only in living beings because they have minds. Again, just as the water needs a pot to hold it, and the reflection is gone if the pot is broken, the mind cannot exhibit the apparently conscious behavior after the death of the physical body although some of the subtler contents of the mind may still survive like the scattered water. Vedanta says that the subtlest aspects of the mind, the accumulated latent impressions of all past experiences, and desires called vasanas are carried by Jiva who survives the death of the physical body and enters into another physical body for fulfilment of desires.  The new life gives vasanas another chance for expression.

                    

3.     Defining consciousness in modern science

Science as it is understood today, does not postulate the existence of the Supreme Consciousness as Vedanta does, but scientists want to explain the perception of consciousness in living beings (which Vedanta is able to do as described earlier). Since science requires precise definitions, they would like to define consciousness but find that it is not easy.  The modern philosopher Chalmers (1996) puts it: “consciousness is an ambiguous term, referring to many different phenomena”.  Chalmers (1997) points out that experience is central to consciousness but “trying to define conscious experience in terms of more primitive notions is fruitless”. Acknowledging the difficulty of arriving at a scientific definition, another modern philosopher Searle (2000) recommends working with a “common sense definition” sufficient to identify the target of the investigation.  A few examples from our daily experiences can show how confused our “common sense” can be about what consciousness is.  We think that rocks and all other lifeless things are not conscious. We think that birds, animals, and other living beings have various degrees of intelligence and of course, that a human being is more intelligent than all the other species because for example, people do arithmetic whereas animals usually cannot. Interestingly, our packet calculators can do arithmetic always accurately and much faster than we can. However, we do not think calculators are intelligent! At the same time, if a person does arithmetic like a calculator (and we hear about such people occasionally), he/she would be called a genius! Do we know what we mean by intelligence or consciousness?

In fact, because of the same confused common sense, unscientific thought sometimes seems to inadvertently creep into scientific analysis by even well-known researchers.  An example is the argument of Crick and Koch (2001) that consciousness is a puzzling state-dependent property of certain types of complex, adaptive systems and that the best example is a healthy and attentive human brain because consciousness ceases if the brain is anaesthetized.  However, it looks like a healthy brain (or some other living being) is the only example. Can anybody name a complex and adaptive lifeless system that exhibits consciousness? In other words, being adaptive does not imply the ability to produce consciousness. Another example of unscientific common sense is the following statement by McFadden (2006; p.390), who developed an Electromagnetic theory of consciousness: “an unconscious mind cannot read, write, or do arithmetic”; of course this is our daily experience because for example, we cannot do arithmetic while sleeping. The implication of his statement is that these functions require consciousness.  However, as seen earlier, the calculator, which does not even have a mind, clearly does it all!  So why does the brain require consciousness to do them?  It does not.  That is exactly why the calculator is able to do them. While sitting by the side of a lake and enjoying the sight of birds flying over the quiet waters, one may express admiration saying "how full of life these little birds are" because the thought that a dead bird cannot fly is also there in the back of one’s mind.  However, not only birds, but an airplane can fly too; so flying is not something that distinguishes life from lifeless matter.  In this age of robots, the so-called drones fly in enemy territories without human pilots. Nowadays, machines can see, hear, talk, walk, and even solve mathematical problems! They play music as well! Herbert Simon's statement that there are no discernible limits to the range of things that computers can be programmed to do (Simon, 1983) has come true. So, today's machines perform many activities of intelligent and conscious human (living) beings but of course, the machines are not conscious.  If so, what is consciousness?

We are able to prepare a computer to PRETEND such intelligence because information residing in our brains (at least some of it) can be mapped into languages, then words can be mapped into the states of some hardware units, and therefore mappings of information from the brain can be stored in the computer’s memory. The computer is then able to carry out all the operations of receiving input data, storing, retrieving, and processing them, and finally giving some answers to questions, solutions to problems, results, or judgments but none of these activities clearly requires consciousness because the machine does them all!  Sometimes, the computer’s abilities to do these functions are collectively referred to as “intelligence” (short for “machine intelligence”), in the computer science, artificial intelligence, and engineering disciplines. The above examples show that an intelligent behavior of human beings such as reading, writing, doing arithmetic, learning, etc. has two components:  one that does not involve consciousness and the other, which does. The computer performs the former. The latter component has two aspects: (1) initiating the whole process, which is done by an external command in the case of a computer but by the brain itself (by its mind) in the case of a wakeful brain, and (2) create the experience of accomplishing the task (Hari 2012). 

Hence without actually defining consciousness, researchers assume that consciousness is something associated with various mental activities such as experiencing, paying attention, executive control of action (free will), and sense of self.  Interestingly, although it is difficult to define consciousness, it is possible to precisely define awareness of an object (physical or mental); we will do so in a subsequent section. 

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4.     Is information or meaning inseparable from the means of its storage or communication, or is it identical with the means?

Chalmers (1996) and Searle (1980) answered the above question eloquently, each in his own way.  The answer can be seen from the following observations:  A word in any language is not identical with its meaning because the same meaning may be conveyed by different words in different languages. Sometimes language is not even used to communicate information. For example, a right signal flashing from a car is an indication to others that it is about to make a right turn. Animals also convey some feelings by making sounds or movement of their bodies. Thus information can be conveyed in many ways: in the form of words, sounds, electrical signals, and so on, but in any means of communication, meaning or information is assigned by human (living) beings to structures of matter or material energy.  A language is a mapping of information into words (symbols) which become sound energy when pronounced, particles of matter when written on paper, and become electrical energy when transmitted over a telephone line, and so on. A computer stores only a mapping of some information that exists in the programmer’s head. The digital computer has a bunch of memory cells, each of which can exist in either of two states denoted by '0' and '1'.  What information is represented by bytes of '0's and '1's is decided by the programmer and not by the computer.  In a quantum computer, the representation is in terms of states of qubits which are quantum objects; still, meaning is assigned to the qubit states '0' and '1' by the computer programmer.  Thus, information is different from the language or energy signals that are used for its storage and communication just like water is different from its container without which it cannot be taken from place to place.  Note that this is the same analogy quoted earlier from Vedanta explaining Consciousness-mind-body relations.  It works here because mind is nothing but an accumulation of thoughts, meanings, experiences, or “real information” called “phenomenal information” by Chalmers (1996).

Being accustomed and forced to use physical means to communicate information, often, we only recognize the inseparability but not the distinction between the meaning and its vehicle of exchange.  There is often an inclination to confuse inseparability with identity as seen from the following excerpt from Bohm (1989): “Meaning is inseparably connected with information. The Operative notion here is that information has to do with form.  Literally, 'to inform' means ‘to put form into' something.  First, information has to be held in some form, which is carried either in a material system (e.g. a printed page) or in some energy (e.g., a radio wave). - - - - what is essential for a form to constitute information is that it shall have a meaning. For example, words in a language that we cannot read have no meaning, and therefore convey no information to us.”  - Not quite. A Chinese word conveys meaning to a person who understands Chinese although it does not convey any meaning to others who do not know Chinese.  In the minds of the latter, looking at the word creates the thought “I do not know what this pattern of symbols means”, which is the meaning of the word, nonsense.  Does it not?  In the above quote, the unknown word is unable to convey a meaning which is already known to the reader.  Once the reader is told what that word means to a Chinese person, the same reader will get the correct meaning of the Chinese word whenever he/she reads it again. Thought is only in the brain of the reader.  No form of matter or energy outside the brain (or living being) has meaning when it is created. We assign some meaning to it.  Even then the meaning does not become a part of the form used to convey the meaning.

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5.     The Hard Problem named by Chalmers

That the mental and the physical are inseparable although distinct is the basic axiom of the so called dual-aspect theories in modern consciousness research. The dual aspect theory of the well-known physicist Bohm says that the brain is a quantum system and that thought and the brain’s quantum potential are dual aspects of one reality like for example, a quantum particle and its associated wave are. Bohm (1990) proposed: “the quantum potential is active information that is simultaneously physical and mental in nature …. These two sides are inseparable, in the sense that information contained in thought, which we feel to be on the 'mental' side, is at the same time a related neurophysiological, chemical, and physical activity (which is clearly what is meant by the 'material' side of this thought)”. This proposal however, does not address the question: there is no mental aspect in any physical process in which the brain (a living being) is not involved. There is no mental aspect in any lifeless quantum system as the dual aspect of its quantum potential. Why should there be a mental activity inseparable from its physical activity in the brain? Why does the brain’s physical activity not require somebody else to assign some meaning to it? Another dual-aspect theory is that of well-known neuropsychologist Pribram who claims (Pribram 2004): “Gabor function provides a good description of the architecture of activity in cortical dendritic fields to sensory stimulation. Thus, the same mathematical formulation describes an elementary psychological process, communication, and an elementary material process in the brain.  The Gabor quantum can, therefore, serve the same function for the wetware/mind relationship that the bit serves for the hardware/software relation.” - It is true that the bit in a digital computer or the qubit states in a quantum computer are both software elements and they are both mapped to hardware units in the respective computers but we already saw that they are not the same as their meaning in the programmer’s head because the programmer assigns meaning to the bit/qubit.  Similarly, in the brain, the Gabor quantum may be associated with an elementary wetware process but that does not necessarily imply that the elementary wetware process is the same as an elementary psychological process.  For example, in the design of an optical hologram, Gabor function describes a material process but it does not describe any psychological process and there is none in the optical hologram.  Hence the Pribram’s theory does not answer the question: why does a Gabor description of dendritic activity in the brain have a corresponding a psychological activity? 

Chalmers (1996) sums up the existing inability of science to answer questions such as mentioned above in a single phrase and calls it “the hard problem”.   Although he recognizes that consciousness is an ambiguous term, referring to many different phenomena, he thinks that experience is central to consciousness and conscious experience is a primitive notion which cannot be defined in terms of more primitive notions. Hence his clarification (clearly not a definition) is that “An organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state” implying that conscious experience is subjective. Conscious experience of one is not known to others and not accessible to others by any physical means. Chalmers asked: “How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?” Chalmers called this problem the ‘hard problem’. 

In an earlier section we saw that there is a certain component of a human being’s intelligent or talented behavior which does not involve consciousness and another which does.  The latter is experience, desire to do things, initiating appropriate action, and awareness of doing them besides simply doing them. Today’s machines can realize the former component, which is to perform actions but not the latter. Chalmers recognizes this distinction between performance of a function and the accompanying experience. (However, he does not talk about initiation of the performance).  He then coins the term ‘awareness’ as being different from ‘consciousness’ by introducing ‘easy problems’ as opposed to the ‘hard problem’. Easy problems of consciousness are those in which the phenomenon being investigated is usually associated with consciousness but can be explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms.  So what is awareness?  Chalmers says that awareness is a functional notion different from subjective experience but it is nevertheless intimately linked to subjective experience.  Actually, what is explained in the ‘easy problems’ of a phenomenon by means of neural and computational mechanisms turns out to be its functional aspect whereas why subjective experience accompanies that/those function/s is the ‘hard problem’ and not solved.  Since one experiences something only when one is aware of that something, below, we define ‘AWARENESS OF AN OBJECT (PHYSICAL OR MENTAL)’ IN TERMS OF THE SPECIFIC FUNCTION OF CREATION OF PHYSICAL AND MENTAL RECORDS OF INFORMATION. What does to be aware of something or to know something whether physical or mental, or briefly, awareness of that object mean? Nowadays, while working with computers we often use expressions like "the computer knows", or “it does not know”, “it remembers”, "it understands", "it thinks", etc.  In fact, we can precisely define what we mean when we say any of these expressions.

A computer behaves as if it knows an object (a data item or a program instruction), when a representation of that object exists in its memory as bytes of "0"s and "1"s in a digital computer or qubit states in a quantum computer, in other words, as a sequence of states of some hardware elements (let us call it the hardware correlate of the object).

Once such a mapping is entered into a computer's memory, the computer can do almost anything that a person can do with that object and behave as though it "knows" the object without really knowing the meaning of anything it stores or it does!  On the other hand, whenever it receives a sensory input, the brain not only creates a neural record in its memory but also creates a meaning associated with that neural record.  Hence we expect the brain to be aware of an object according to the following definition:

The mind-brain system is aware of an object (which may be a physical object, or a past event, or a sensory experience in the present, or a future goal) when a physical representation (neural correlate) of that object and its associated "meaning" reportable to the outside world, both exist in its memory.

This definition implies that for any conscious experience to occur, whether it is awareness of a sensory stimulus or of a thought, emotion, desire, etc. both a neural record or activity (a pot) representing the object, and the corresponding mental record or meaning (water in the pot) should be present in the brain-mind system.  Indeed, in the sensory-stimulus-and-response experiments by Libet et. al (1979), experience of stimulus required acquisition of neuronal adequacy representing the stimulus.  In the case of volitional acts, cerebral activity started at least 350 msec before the conscious wish to act appeared (Libet, 1999), again suggesting that neuronal adequacy representing the intention needs to be achieved for awareness of intention to appear.  Thus these findings are consistent with the above definition of “awareness of an object” and with Vedanta.  While the brain/body uses sensory inputs to create the neural representation of an external object, for awareness of the object to occur, the mind should be paying attention (to create corresponding mental representation).  Paying attention involves what Vedanta describes as mind’s influence on the senses.

6.     Action of the mind on the brain

Actions of human beings are often initiated by desires, purposes, needs, and goals, which are all closely associated with future states in our lives. (Activities of other living beings have purposes too). As Baars (2010) puts it, “The transition from mostly reactive to mostly proactive behavior is among the central themes of the evolution of the nervous system. We are able to form goals, our visions of the future. Then we act according to our goals. But, in order to guide our behavior in a sustained fashion, these mental images of the future must become the content of our memory; thus the ‘memories of the future’ are formed. Human cognition is forward-looking, proactive rather than reactive. It is driven by goals, plans, hopes, ambitions, and dreams, all of which pertain to the future and not to the past. These cognitive powers depend on the frontal lobes and evolve with them. The frontal lobes endow the organism with the ability to create neural models as a prerequisite for making things happen, models of something that, as of yet, does not exist but which you want to bring into existence.” Neuroscience (Libet et.al. 1983, Haggard 2001) confirms that in goal-achieving processes, a neural record of the goal is actually created in the brain followed by an action plan and then executed.

Prior to taking an action, one first thinks about what one wants (called volition, passion, desire, etc.) and then figures out how to get it by reasoning.  The search for an appropriate course of action and the action itself depend upon some information pertaining to a future state; for example, if I want to go to New York (NY) I will take a bus to New York but not to Philadelphia. Therefore, action at present depends upon information belonging to a future state. Note that the goal in my al in my present imagination is not the same as the future physical state of my body because I am not in NY yet. The imagined goal is a mapping of the future physical state (different from the present physical state, otherwise no action happens), into my present memory. So, the present memory content does depend on a not yet realized physical state.  How does the brain create in its present memory, a mapping of a possible future physical state (PFS) of itself? – “possible future state” because the goal may not be achieved if something happens before completion of the action. In goal oriented actions such as taking a bus to NY to be in NY, our perception is that the future state of being in NY is the reason or cause for taking the bus earlier because we would not take the bus if we do not want to go to NY.  Some argue that the physical state of actually being in NY is not the cause for the action but only the goal of being in NY in our imagination is the cause of the action.  To support their argument they would modify the example as follows:  I did not take the bus but drove in my own car.  On the way, I got a call from home because of some emergency.  So I turned back. They argue that the already existing neural correlate (NC) of the PFS that is, being in NY later is the cause of my leaving home but not the PFS itself. True. Still, how did the brain get the information to build the NC of the PFS? If I had already seen or even heard about NY, then the information could come from the past memory (called episodic memory). Even if this is the case, still, the following question remains unanswered: how does the brain assign to the NC the label “future state” as opposed to “past” or “present”? 

Our computers simulate goal-oriented behaviors very well. A chess playing program for example, plays chess very cleverly and beats most chess players. It chooses every move from a set of moves available at the time in order to beat its opponent. To choose a move, it needs to remember the positions of all king, queen, rook, etc. of both players as well as its goal and it does that. It also figures out a strategy in each step until the game ends.  The program is able to do it all because the required information, namely, the definition of the goal and rules specifying how to choose the moves are all already present in the computer.  Somebody outside of it has already entered the required information into it and initiated the program to pass from its present state to the future goal state. When the opponent's move is entered and go-button hit, it causes execution of some stored instructions and the program generates a strategy for win. It is as though the go-hit has told the program that its goal (future state) is to win and take action accordingly and immediately. The program would not have run without the go-hit; the chess playing program makes no move by itself. In the case of the brain-mind system, the physical brain is made up of matter (though organic matter unlike an electronic computer); therefore, how does the required information enter into its memory, who tells it what its future state should be? Who provokes the material system to move towards the future state? Whoever does it is called the mind. Since the mind is inaccessible to the physical senses (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting), is it unphysical?  If so, how can it act upon the physical matter without violating the physical laws such as conservation of energy? These are all hard problems which modern scientists from various fields have not found solutions yet.

What does Vedanta say about the above questions?  The sunlight-and-pots-with-water example does not model the interaction between the mind and the body. But let us recall the roles of the soul, the mind components (manas, chitta, buddhi, and ahankara), the senses, the body, and the outside world in the life of a living being summarized in the very beginning of this article. They suggest the following analogy: A living being is similar to a computer whose hardware is the physical body. The body is made up of matter. The mind, being an accumulation of experiences, desires, etc. i.e., an accumulation of information like a computer memory containing data and programs. Just like a computer's hardware and software do not know what they are doing, their own existence, and the meaning of their memory contents, both the body and the mind of a living being also do not “really know” anything but there is a certain Consciousness (apart from the mind mentioned above) that "knows". Consciousness is like the computer operator, as it were, and the one who "really knows" everything that is going on in the living being’s life. A thinking process is an interaction of the mind with the body’s matter and is similar to a running computer program as opposed to a program residing in the memory in a passive state. For a program to run in the machine and produce an output, it needs to be activated by an external agent which may be an input entered by the computer operator or another program. Similarly, any thinking process needs to be initiated by an external agent, which is often, a desire/purpose (thoughts), or sensory inputs but the soul being a part of the omnipotent Consciousness can also intervene just like a computer operator can intervene in the operations of the computer.  Thus action of mind on the body is accepted in Vedanta.

Vedantic theory of the mind is interactive dualism but NOT Cartesian Dualism; it is similar to that of Sir John Eccles (1994) who argued that there is a mental world in addition to the material world and that our mind or self is involved in the functioning of the brain at a basic level. What Eccles calls self may however, sometimes be equivalent to ego and sometimes to Jiva in Vedanta.  This philosophy is not Cartesian dualism because it affirms the existence of supreme Consciousness and an individual Jiva who are immaterial and beyond the mind and its ego (the I-feeling called ahankara), which is not conscious. It asserts that not only the individual soul (Jiva) but the subtle mind also survives physical death.  Hence neither Jiva nor the ego is the ‘I’ of Descartes who presumes that the mind, the ‘I’, and soul are more or less the same thing and that it is conscious.  Moreover, not only does Vedanta accept mind’s action upon the body as said earlier, but Vedanta accepts also the converse that the brain/body creates experience; Sankhyakarika verse 40 (Swami 1995) states that the world can be experienced only when both sthula and sukshma sarira are present.  Further, Vedanta claims that the senses and the mind cannot perceive Consciousness, and no scientific theory can describe Him (Kenopanishad), and therefore no scientific experiments can detect Him either. The same thing is true about jiva, the individualized Consciousness.

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