Paapaanaam vaa subhaanaam vaa
Vadhaarhaanaam plavangama
Kaaryam karunam aaryena
Na kaschit na aparaadhyati
( yuddha Kanda 116.44)
O hanuman! The noble man must show compassion towards everyone be he good or bad, or who does what deserves even capital punishment. There is none who never commits a mistake.
Sakradeva prapannaaya
Tavaasmeethi cha yaachate
Abhayam sarva bhootebhyo
Dadasmi etad vratam mama
(Ramayana yuddhakanda ch 18 v 33)
Whoever surrenders to me even once and says that he belongs to me, to such a being, be it man or animal , I would give abhaya.
This was said by Sri Rama when Vibhishana sought refuge at his feet.
The Scientific Soul
The human soul is commonly treated as a religious abstraction inconsistent with science. Here we suggest that the soul can be described scientifically and that this concept can provide guidance to artificial intelligence research and a grounding for discussions of the unique value of each individual.
Introduction
What is the soul? Traditionally the soul has been viewed as a religious concept that cannot be observed, measured or probed by scientific means. This is agreed upon by both those who believe in it and those who do not. And yet, according to many religious views, a person cannot exist without a soul, and, it contains everything necessary for continued or reconstituted existence. According to this view almost anything, if not everything, we see a person do must be an observation of their soul.
Science is about real world observations, so it seems that we should be able to identify a scientific concept about observations that is related to that of the religious concept of soul. Indeed, a number of years ago the highly regarded computer scientist Ed Fredkin and I independently [1,2] suggested that we should adopt a scientific definition of soul as the description of a person abstracted from his or her matter. The notion of “abstraction” is the key to understanding the relationship between scientific and religious concepts. In what way is a description of a person different from the person? In addition to addressing this interesting question in this paper, I have a particular point that I feel is important to emphasize which is important for science generally and essential to the concept of a religious soul. This is the importance of each individual, i.e. that individual uniqueness is important to scientific discourse. Significantly, individual uniqueness is not generally an important part of discussions in the conventional scientific approaches of psychology, brain science and artificial intelligence.
I will thus suggest that the religious concept of soul is closely related to the description of a person, which is distinct from that of other individuals. The description has to be more than a description of what the person looks like and what he or she has done, but also include a characterization of how he or she behaves in response to what happens around him or her so we can infer what he or she would do under other circumstances. The critical abstraction that we need to recognize for the discussion of how this definition is related to the religious concept of the soul is that such a description is independent of the physical existence of the person, yet embodies the essence of the person. This closely parallels the religious concept of a soul.
The soul as it can be understood by physics and artificial intelligence
The religious concept of soul suggests an abstraction of function from matter. Even when the matter of which we are formed disintegrates the soul continues to exist. This suggests that the physical matter of which we are formed is not essential to us. It is consistent with abstractions that are familiar in science and modern thought, but it might not be consistent with more primitive notions of matter, for which the specific matter of which a system is made is essential to the nature of that system.
Consider what a basic concept of matter might be. A primitive man contemplating the rocks, plants and people around him might think that rocks are made of rock-like matter, plants are made of plant-like matter and people are made of people-like matter, and they are intrinsically different from one another. Similarly, the matter of which a person is made is absolutely essential to the person. My existence is rooted in my matter; your existence is rooted in your matter. Both science and religion disagree, at least implicitly, with this primitive view.
In religion, the concept of soul most often arises in discussions of death. Death is understood to affect the physical existence, but not to destroy the soul. The soul represents the existence of a human being independent of the materials of which he or she is made. If the essence of a human being is independent of the material of which he/she is formed it may survive death and possibly be reincarnated in some other form, time or place.
Physics has a different but also very definite way to say the same thing. According to physics, the specific atoms of which the human being is formed are not necessary to his or her function. If we replaced the atoms that a person is made of with other, indistinguishable atoms the person will be unchanged; the same behavior will be found. The proportions of atom types in a human being and in a plant or rock are different, but the atoms of the same type are indistinguishable, and thus can be substituted one for the other. In the physics view, it is the specific positions of the atoms that causes a human being to be different from other matter. Moreover, physical properties are not necessarily tied to specific atom types. As a simple example, a wheel out of steel and a wheel out of wood are still both functionally wheels.
If we jump from physics all the way to artificial intelligence, we can see a similar claim: that the function/behavior of a human being can be realized using different matter, organized in some sense in the same way, i.e. built out of silicon based computer circuits rather than carbon based biological systems. Thus, remarkably enough, the concept of creating intelligence in a computer is very close to the concept of soul. To build intelligence in a computer, it must be possible to abstract the processes that comprise intelligence and embody them in a form other than that of biological beings. It is the functioning of a human being that is separable from the specific physical matter.
Thus, according to the view of science, a human being is not directly tied to the material of which he is made. If the material of which the human being is made were essential to function, then there would be no independent functional description. Also, there would be no mechanism by which we could reproduce human behavior without making use of precisely the atoms of which he or she was formed. Instead, at least conceptually, there is a functional description that can be implemented in various ways. The biological body that the human being was implemented in when we met him or her is just one possible medium.
There is, however, an essential difference between the notion of artificial intelligence and the concept of a soul. The soul is a property of a particular individual and his/her existence. We cannot replace the soul of one individual with the soul of another. Artificial intelligence as a field, however, does not clearly distinguish between the intelligence of different individuals. The idea of intelligence has a generic flavor rather than a specific one. This becomes clearer when we consider the Turing test for intelligence that is at the core of the concepts of the field of artificial intelligence.
The Generic Turing Test vs. Individuality
The field of artificial intelligence set for itself the objective of representing human intelligence within the operations of a computer. Its failure to recognize the essential uniqueness of individuals is, I believe, central to its inability to realize this objective as it was originally conceived. This is a failure of goal setting rather than of execution. It is not that the methods are essentially poor, it is the objective which prevents the advances from being usefully characterized. In order to make progress in developing computer based representations of human beings we must represent specific human beings.
We can illustrate this by considering the Turing test. The Turing test, which is the benchmark for the field of artificial intelligence, suggests that in a conversation with a computer we may not be able to distinguish it from a human being. When this happens, the computer will have captured intelligence. A key problem with this test is that it does not specify which human being. It would be quite easy to reproduce the conversation of a mute individual, or even an obsessed individual.
Which human being did Turing have in mind? Human beings are quite varied in the character of their dialog, and our interactions with them are of varied levels of intimacy. Greeting someone casually is very different from debating them on matters of mutual concern. Finally, we may also ask whether the represented human being is someone we already know, or not. Rather than fooling an interlocutor, the goal of artificial intelligence ought to be to instantiate an existing human “intelligence,” with all the ways it would react in different circumstances, in a computer program. The computer would have to represent a single human being with a name, a family history, a profession, life experiences, opinions and a personality — not an abstract notion of intelligence.
It is reasonable to assume that there are common features to the information processing of different individuals. The basic mechanisms involved in sensing light, sound and smell, as well as other processes, should illustrate these common features. However, we expect that the features characteristic of human behavior are predominantly specific to each individual rather than generic. Artificial intelligence as a mode of thinking in science has deceived us in expecting that intelligence in the abstract can be implemented quite generally. Instead, the science fiction story of a scientist who projects his identity and capabilities into a computer is far more reasonable [4]. Thus the objective of creating artificial human beings might be better described as that of manifesting the soul of an individual human.
The fundamental question many people are concerned with is: Can computers/robots replace human beings? I am not addressing this question here. My point is that there is some degree to which human beings can program computers to represent the functioning of a human being. I am suggesting that we won’t find out how far we can go in this direction unless we give up on the universal notion of intelligence and represent the patterns of thinking of a specific person.
Why are people different from each other?
Considering the concept of soul compels the question, “Why are people different from each other?” There are at least three aspects of the answer that I can only touch on briefly here. The first is through principle, the second through mechanism and the third through evolution.
The principle that gives rise to individuality is the notion of complexity. Complexity is a measure of how many possibilities there are [1,3]. A highly complex entity has many possibilities: the more complex, the more possibilities. So there are many possible types of individual human beings. This principle is not quite sufficient to answer the question, because the existence of many types in principle does not necessarily mean that they will exist in practice.
The mechanism of individuality is through the diversity of possible information processing schemes that are consistent with the way the brain is organized. The architecture of the brain is an architecture of substructure [3] — the brain is divided into parts, and those parts are divided into smaller parts. This substructure, the way information is placed into the various parts and can be recombined to create new concepts, allows a large number of possibilities that have distinctly different capabilities. This means that individual differences are fundamental to the architecture of the brain and its interactions with the world.
The possibility and the mechanism of diversity are still not sufficient to guarantee that diverse individuals actually exist. To understand this we must understand the mechanism by which human beings were created in the first place. Selection of fitter organisms by evolution can limit diversity when the environment is uniform and consistent, but it can also increase diversity in the context of diverse and variable niches.
The Value of an Individual — Human Value
I have suggested that we can bypass the fundamental controversy between science and religion regarding the presence of an immaterial soul. However, the real conflict between the approaches of science and religion resides in a different place. The conflict is in the question of the intrinsic value of a human being and his/her place in the world. The religious view, and most popular views, would like to place an importance on a human being that transcends the value of the matter of which he or she is formed. The scientific perspective can and has been understood as diminishing human worth. This is true whether it is physical scientists that view the material of which man is formed as “just” composed of the same atoms as rocks and water, or whether it is biological scientists that consider the biochemical and cellular structures as the same as, and derived evolutionarily from, animal processes.
The study of complexity presents us with an opportunity in this regard. A quantitative definition of complexity can provide a direct measure of the difference between the behaviors of a rock, an animal and a human being. We should recognize that this capability can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand it provides us with a scientific method for distinguishing man from matter, and man from animal, by recognizing that the particular arrangement of atoms in a human being, or the particular implementation of biology, achieves a functionality that is highly complex. Human beings are highly complex and therefore important as individuals. Their uniqueness makes them irreplaceable, not just by rocks or animals, but even by other human beings.
We have defined the soul as the description of a human being. This description is the essence of the unique human being in a way the particular atoms are not. Some people might ask, “How can you completely describe a human being?” This is a tricky question because the soul is often thought of as something infinite rather than finite. However, there can be ways in which something is infinite at the same time as it is finite in other ways. While we can allow the soul to be infinite in certain important ways (such as its lifetime), we can assert that the length of the description of a human being is finite. The length of the description is related to the concept of complexity of a human being. Thus, there is both an ennobling and humbling aspect of the resulting understanding.
As is often the case, the value of a number, the complexity of a human being, attains meaning though comparison. Specifically we may consider the complexity of a human being and see it as either high or low. We must have some reference point with respect to which we measure human complexity. One reference point is the complexity of animals. Estimates of human complexity imply that human beings are more complex than animals, as we might expect [1]. This result is quite reasonable but does not suggest any clear dividing line between animals and man. It turns out, however, that we can compare the complexity of a human being to the complexity of the environment in which we live. This comparison suggests that human beings are qualitatively different from animals because the complexity of most animals is approximately the same as the complexity of their environment, while human beings are more complex than their natural environment.
The idea of the biological continuity of man from animal is based upon the concept of evolution that describes consequences of the survival demands of the environment. However, when the complexity of an organism is higher than the complexity of the environment, then the environment cannot determine the properties of the organism. Instinctive behaviors that typically dominate behaviors of animals are directly linked to environmental demands, while learned ones that dominate human behavior can be adjusted to different environments and therefore are not set by a specific environmental history.
Perhaps the best developed ideas of the value of complexity are in the area of biodiversity [5]. The value we place on biodiversity is related to the uniqueness of genetic information and the losses we suffer when we are unable to recover species that become extinct. The biodiversity of a single species is related to the extent of the variation among individuals of the species, i.e. their unique genetic information. The genetic information is related to instinctive behaviors, but does not include learned behaviors and relationships. For some animal species, including higher mammals, the amount of individual information beyond the genetic may be significant, but for human beings there is a dramatic difference that is manifest in the wide range of social and cultural differences and large amount of learned information that differs among individuals. We can readily see the uniqueness of individuals among human beings that includes, but is much greater than, genetic differences.
Moreover, human beings are well distinguished from animals by the richness (complexity), and thus diversity, of their social interactions that are not uniquely related to the environment in which they live. These distinctions between man and animal are fundamental to our understanding of the context for “valuations” that we place on human beings as opposed to animals. In these matters previous scientific insights from physics, chemistry and biology about the common parts (particles or biological molecules) and processes (mechanics and evolution) that affect humans and animals have not been of great help, but the unified study of complex systems can provide a new perspective and a greater understanding.
Adivyadhi nivarana mantram
OAM
Acyutanantagovinda namoccaranabhesajat
Nasyanti sakala rogassatyam satyam vadamyaham.
Satyam satyam punassatyamuddhtya bhujamucyate
Vedacchastram param nasti na daivam kesavatparam
Sarire jarjharibhute vyadhigraste kalebare
Ausadham jahnavitoyam vaidyo narayano Hari
Alodya sarvasastrani vicarya ca puna puna
Idamekam sunispannam dhyeyo narayano Hari.
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In this course, you'll study...
Module 1: Classical Yoga
In the introduction to the course, we will have a brief discussion on some of the earliest pre-Patañjalian expressions on yoga; the definition and goal of classical Yoga.
Module 2: The Five Vrttis
In module 2, we will discuss the five vrttis and the ingredients of nirodha.
Module 3: Theism in The Sutras
Samādhi, Iśvara: the theistic element in the sūtras.
Module 4: Obstacles to Enlightenment
The module will go over the klesas – obstacles to enlightenment.
Module 5: The Cause of Suffering
In module 5, we will discuss the ultimate cause of suffering; karma and reincarnation.
Module 6: Eight Limbs of Yoga
In Module 6, we will take an in-depth look at the limbs of Patañjalian yoga: Yamas, Niyamas, Asana, Pranayama, Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana, and Samadhi.
Module 7: Mystic Powers
In this module, we will explore the third pada of the Yoga Sutras that describe the siddhis, the mystic powers that can be attained through rigorous and disciplined practice.
Module 8: Yoga’s Response to Buddhism
In the final module of this course, we will go through the fourth pada of the text and learn about yoga’s response to the Buddhist Idealist school and explore a few other concluding sūtras.
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