Welcome to our ongoing question and answer series.
Our first question today is from Srikant, who lives in Pune, India.
He asks, "I understand that all living things have an underlying consciousness.
These living things are made up of billions of living cells.
Do all these cells have their own consciousness?
If so, is the consciousness we experience the result of their combined consciousness?"
Those are great questions.
Several philosophical and spiritual traditions say that all living things are endowed with
consciousness.
If that's true, then trees, plants, and even living cells are sentient, conscious beings,
even though they lack the powerful faculties that you and I have.
To explore this topic, we begin by asking, "How can living things, made of cells, water,
minerals, and other stuff, possibly become conscious?"
First of all, what is a living thing?
Dictionaries say it's a self-replicating entity that interacts with its environment.
For example, an amoeba, a single celled organism, can reproduce through cell division, and it
can interact with its environment by moving towards and consuming organic matter that's
nearby.
Your body is composed of other kinds of living cells, about 30 trillion of them, including
blood cells, muscle cells, skin cells, and so on.
All these cells interact and work together symbiotically to support the functions of
your body.
Your brain is also composed of cells, primarily nerve cells called neurons.
The function and interaction of those neurons enables you to think, to remember, to feel
happy or sad, and to perceive sensations collected by your eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin.
Now, consider this.
All the cells in your body, including the neurons in your brain, are physical things.
Each has a particular shape, size, location, and so on.
But what about your thoughts, emotions, and sensations?
They have no size, weight, or location because they're not physical things.
They're non-physical things, mental things.
So, in addition to experiencing physical objects in the world around you, you also experience
the non-physical thoughts, emotions, and sensations that arise in your mind.
Those non-physical, mental objects were described by the rishis of ancient India as being sukshma
or subtle, that is, not a perceptible material or substance.
For example, your brain weighs about two and a half pounds, but your thoughts, emotions
and sensations weigh nothing at all.
Similarly, inside a computer are memory chips that weigh less than a gram.
But, whether those chips are filled with data or if they've been completely erased, they
weigh exactly the same.
Like your thoughts, emotions, and sensations are not physical things, the same is true
for ideas, information, and data.
The data stored in a computer's memory chips is retrieved and manipulated by a special
chip called a CPU or central processing unit, the so-called digital brain of an electronic
device.
There's a CPU inside the device you're using right now to watch this video.
When the CPU retrieves the particular data that represents my image or the sound of my
voice, it displays the image for you to see, and plays the sound for you to hear.
But, the CPU doesn't see me or hear me like you do.
It doesn't perceive the orangeness of my robes or sense the inflections of my voice.
The CPU has no thoughts, emotions, or perceptions; it only has data, ones and zeros, binary information.
You, on the other hand, have a powerful mind in which the my image and sound of my voice
are experienced by you right now.
When those images and sounds arise in your in your mind, they become known to you.
You become conscious or aware of them because, fundamentally speaking, you are a sentient
conscious being, a conscious being who knows or observes all the activities of your mind.
So far, we have discussed three different things.
First, physical things like your brain and its neurons.
Second, non-physical things like the thoughts, emotions, and sensations that arise in your
mind.
And third is you, the conscious being who observes the thoughts, emotions and sensations
in your mind.
According to Advaita Vedanta, consciousness is your essential nature, your true self,
atma.
That consciousness is formless and limitless, infinitely vast like space.
For this reason, it can't be stuck inside your body or exclusively associated with your
brain.
Like space, consciousness has no specific size or location, nor does it have any boundaries
or partitions.
And since consciousness is indivisible and all-pervasive, there can only be one consciousness.
The ancient rishis discovered that a single, undivided, limitless consciousness is simultaneously
present in every living being, becoming manifest or reflected in the minds of those beings.
That means, the consciousness by which my thoughts, emotions, and sensations are known
is the same as your consciousness and that of every other living being.
Our experiences are completely different only because our brains and minds are different,
not because consciousness is different.
Wow!
That's a really heavy discussion, but we need all that to address Srikant's questions.
He asked, "Do cells have consciousness?"
Well, if consciousness is indeed limitless and it pervades the entire universe, then
it's present everywhere, all the time, including in animals, insects, plants and cells.
For this reason, consciousness is equally present in you and in an amoeba.
What makes you so different is the fact that you have a complex, powerful mind, and the
amoeba doesn t.
The thoughts, emotions and sensations in your mind are known to you; they're experienced
by you.
A simple amoeba, on the other hand, has no thoughts, emotions or sensations to experience,
even though consciousness is present in it.
And further, if consciousness is all-pervasive, then it's not only present in living things.
It's also present in inert, non-living things as well.
Consciousness is present in metal, in plastic, and in silicon, the materials from which CPU
chips are manufactured.
So we can ask, "Are CPU chips conscious?"
Well, even though consciousness is present in a CPU chip, the chip has no mind, no thoughts,
emotions or sensations like we do.
A CPU chip is like a human brain in a state of deep coma.
The second question Srikant asked is, "If cells have their own consciousness, is the
consciousness we experience the result of the combined consciousness of those cells?"
This idea happens to be one of the many theories devised by researchers in the field of neuroscience.
For several decades now, those scientists and philosophers have struggled unsuccessfully
to explain how consciousness can emerge from a material substance, in particular, from
the combined function of the brain's 100 billion neurons.
Even today, they are unable to explain how the brain, a physical object, can produce
conscious, subjective experience, like the perception of orangeness or the feeling of
contentment.
Those researchers have failed to bridge the gap between consciousness and matter, between
subject and object, between knower and known.
According to Advaita Vedanta, it's impossible for consciousness to somehow arise from physical
objects like neurons.
Consciousness is a reality completely independent of physical, material reality.
This perspective is held, not only by the ancient rishis, but even by some contemporary
Western philosophers, scholars like David Chalmers.
Chalmers is well-known for coining the expression, "the hard problem of consciousness," which
implies that it's logically impossible for subjective, conscious experience to be produced
by physical objects like brain cells.
Chalmers embraces a concept called panpsychism which claims that consciousness is individually
present in every atom, molecule, and cell.
Yet, proponents of panpsychism are not able to explain how the consciousness of individual
brain cells could possibly combine to form human consciousness, as Srikant suggested.
This problem never perplexed the ancient rishis, because for them, cells don t have individual
consciousness.
If consciousness is one and all-pervasive, then it's simultaneously present in every
neuron of your brain.
There's nothing to be combined.
Here's a related question from Mauro, who lives in Mexico City.
He asks, "How does Advaita Vedanta explain the different degrees of consciousness among
sentient beings like insects, dogs, chimpanzees, and humans?"
Well, according to Advaita Vedanta, one indivisible consciousness pervades the universe and is
equally present in every insect, dog, chimpanzee, and human.
That consciousness itself has no different levels or degrees.
So, what differentiates various living beings is not consciousness, but rather, their different
levels of sentiency, levels that are due to differences of their bodies and minds.
For example, human beings have much more complex and powerful minds than chimpanzees and dogs
have.
Even an insect must have some kind of rudimentary mind, capable enough to navigate, to find
food, and so on.
A metaphor often used in Vedanta compares the manifestation of consciousness in living
beings to the reflection of sunlight by various objects.
For instance, the sun's reflection in a tiny drop of water represents the manifestation
of consciousness in an insect, whereas the sun's reflection in a large pond represents
the manifestation of consciousness in a human being.
The sun, of course, represents the one, indivisible consciousness that pervades the universe and
becomes manifest or reflected in every living being.
If you'd like to submit a question for a future video like this one, please send it to me
at the email address shown at the end.
Be sure to indicate Video Question in the subject line.