“Intelligent Design and Super Consciousness” (SB 3.9.3)
In a historical survey of Western science, Thompson appraises four analytical paradigms: (1) the clockwork universe of Newton and Leibnitz; (2) the cosmos as a dull mechanism contemplated by Darwinian theorists; (3) quantum mechanics as an analytic form of idealism; and (4) variations on artificial intelligence that consider mind as part of the machine with little autonomous existence beyond that. While considering these perspectives, Thompson wonders if the Western intellectual experience suggests that the attempt to secure a definitive explanation of ultimate causation could well lead to a belief in something potentially inconceivable.
TRANSCRIPT: Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, Canto 3, Chapter 9, Text 3. “Intelligent Design and Super Consciousness.” Alachua – August 15, 1995 / (078)
[Text 3]:
O my Lord, I do not see a form superior to Your present form of eternal bliss and knowledge. In Your impersonal Brahman effulgence in the spiritual sky, there is no occasional change and no deterioration of internal potency. I surrender unto You because whereas I am proud of my material body and senses, Your Lordship is the cause of the cosmic manifestation and yet You are untouched by matter.
Purport by Śrīla Prabhupāda:
As stated in Bhagavad-gītā (18.55), bhaktyā mām abhijānāti yāvān yaś cāsmi tattvataḥ: the Supreme Personality of Godhead can only be partially known, and only by the process of devotional service to the Lord. Lord Brahmā became aware that the Supreme Lord Kṛṣṇa has many, many eternal, blissful forms of knowledge. He has described such expansions of the Supreme Lord, Govinda, in his Brahmā-saṁhitā (5.33), as follows:
advaitam acyutam anādim ananta-rūpam
ādyaṁ purāṇa-puruṣaṁ nava-yauvanaṁ ca
vedeṣu durlabham adurlabham ātma-bhaktau
govindam ādi-puruṣaṁ tam ahaṁ bhajāmi
“I worship Govinda, the primeval Lord, who is nondual and infallible. He is the original cause of all causes, even though He expands in many, many forms. Although He is the oldest personality, He is ever youthful, unaffected by old age. The Supreme Personality of Godhead cannot be known by the academic wisdom of the Vedas; one has to approach the devotee of the Lord to understand Him.”
The only way to understand the Lord as He is, is by devotional service to the Lord, or by approaching the devotee of the Lord who always has the Lord in his heart. By devotional perfection one can understand that the impersonal brahmajyoti is only a partial representation of the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Lord Kṛṣṇa, and that the three puruṣa expansions in the material creation are His plenary portions. In the spiritual sky of the brahmajyoti there is no change of various kalpas or millenniums, and there are no creative activities in the Vaikuṇṭha worlds. The influence of time is conspicuous by its absence. The rays of the transcendental body of the Lord, the unlimited brahmajyoti, are undeterred by the influence of material energy. In the material world also, the initial creator is the Lord Himself. He brings about the creation of Brahmā, who becomes the subsequent creator, empowered by the Lord.
Translation:
Oh my Lord. I do not see a form superior to your present form of eternal bliss and knowledge. In your impersonal Brahman effulgence in the spiritual sky, there is no occasional change and no deterioration of internal potency. I surrender unto you because whereas I am proud of my material body and senses, Your Lordship is the cause of the cosmic manifestation and yet you are untouched by matter.
So, Lord Brahmā is offering prayers to Garbhodaka-śāyī Viṣṇu and describing his realization of the Supreme Personality of Godhead. So, the situation of the conditioned soul in the material world is that the conditioned soul is seeing everything through material senses, even though the soul is actually transcendental to the material domain. And so for this reason, the soul is not able to directly see the Supreme Personality of Godhead because Kṛṣṇa, the Supreme Person is transcendental to the material energy. So if your senses are channeled through the material energy then it's not possible to directly see Kṛṣṇa. However, you can attain information of Kṛṣṇa by Kṛṣṇa's grace, because Kṛṣṇa's the controller of the material energy. And so if he wants to transmit information into the material world then he can do that. And if you can directly please Kṛṣṇa through devotional service and Kṛṣṇa may personally directly reveal himself. In this way, it is possible to have some knowledge of the Supreme Personality of Godhead. Otherwise it's not possible to do that if one is within the material energy.
[5:19]
So Śrīla Prabhupāda is describing here how the... And the verse is also mentioning in the spiritual world, there is no passage of time and there's no deterioration. Whereas these things are present in the material world. So, in the domain of the material energy, you have the three processes of creation, maintenance, and annihilation, which correspond to the three modes of material nature. So the mode of passion corresponds to creation, then the mood of goodness corresponds to maintenance, and the mood of ignorance corresponds to annihilation. So, with these three modes operating under the influence of eternal time, you have a continual process in which the future is not yet manifest. Then briefly, it becomes manifest and you have the present situation. But then very quickly the present situation passes away and goes irretrievably into the past.
In the spiritual world, however, this process of creation, annihilation, and destruction does not take place. For example, Śrīla Prabhupāda said here that there are no creative activities in the Vaikuṇṭha worlds. So there everything is eternally present. And this is difficult to understand because we're completely conditioned by this idea of past, present, and future. So, there's some interesting analogies that you can make to illustrate these ideas, and these analogies are becoming more prominent with some recent developments in science. So, I thought I'd mentioned a little bit about that.
If you go back to the beginning of modern science, you find that the metaphoric clock was used to describe the universe. It seems that in different eras, different material objects become useful as metaphors to enable one to understand everything. And this has a very great role to play in the thinking of the scientists. Back in the early days of modern science, the metaphorical image was that of the clock. Clocks became very popular in those days; they were the most advanced machines that existed, and people began thinking of the entire universe as a great clock. So, the nature of a clock is that it works with great precision; and once you build it and start it, set it in motion, then if it's a good clock you just let it go and it just operates by itself keeping very accurate time. So, this imagery became very popular, and it led to the idea that the universe is like a clock. God built it in the first place, set it in motion, and just let it run. But then God did not continue to have any involvement with the universe.
Actually back in those days Isaac Newton, who's famous for contributing a lot to the clockwork concept of the universe, argued that God would have to intervene from time to time to adjust the actions of the material elements that were moving according to strict mechanical laws. But the philosopher Leibniz argued that: Well, Newton is saying that God is a bad clock maker. He's made a clock that He has to constantly adjust. So, this is sacrilegious actually. He's accusing God of poor craftsmanship. So, actually God has created a clock that can run perfectly without any further intervention.
This sounded like a good argument, but unfortunately it totally eliminated what you could call practical religion. Because practical religion, wherever you find it in human society involves people praying to God for one thing or another. Either they're praying for material things or they're praying for freedom from material things, or they may pray for ultimate transcendental understanding or service. But still they're approaching God for something.
[10:14]
But if God has just left the universe to run automatically, then how can you approach God for anything? It comes a little bit difficult unless you say that God set it up in the first place, knowing everything that you would approach Him for. And in this way, everything was pre-programmed. That would be okay for the materialist, who approaches God for material goods. But for the spiritually inclined person, it wouldn't really be too satisfying. You're just approaching the machine that God made in order to get things.
Subsequently this clockwork universe idea was amended to the next phase, which was what you could call the unintelligent machine. Actually, the clock metaphor was used by a scientist named Richard Dawkins in a book that he called The Blind Watchmaker. So the idea is, instead of a God who created the clock, now you have a clock that just sort of comes together by itself by a process of evolution, and there's no intelligence behind it. So that's the evolutionary picture of matter in motion.
Then the next development that occurred in the 20th century, it seems there were some revolutions in physics and something called quantum mechanics came up. And this led to introduction of a sort of philosophy of idealism in physics. Unfortunately, quantum mechanics is plagued with some fundamental conceptual problems. At the bottom it's essentially an incoherent theory. So, these ideas never could be explained very clearly, but people basically came around to the idea that somehow or another, everything depends on consciousness and observation. And the world instead of being made of matter is in some sense made of ideas or at least it's idea-like. So, this is the development that came up in quantum mechanics, and very large numbers of prominent physicists have presented this kind of idea.
Generally speaking, though, the biologists haven't caught up with this. They're still sticking with the old unintelligent machine concept. So, this concept of idealism... In philosophy, idealism is said to be the theory that everything is made of mind, or of ideas, and matter simply consists of ideas in the mind. So in one sense, actually our philosophy, the philosophy of Kṛṣṇa Consciousness, is similar to idealism, because we're saying actually that the material creation is coming about from Kṛṣṇa who is pure spirit, pure consciousness. In fact, we even have the idea that Mahā-Viṣṇu goes into his yoga-nidrā sleep, and He basically dreams the universe or all of the universes. So, in that sense matter does not really exist independently of pure spirit. There's the principle of acintya-bhedābheda-tattva, which says that Kṛṣṇa is simultaneously one and different from His energies. So, this is somewhat similar to the concept of idealism, although there are differences there. So, that concept shows up in an imperfect way in this theory of quantum mechanics.
The next development that occurred in science is the development of the computer. So, the computer immediately became a metaphor for the mind. Many different metaphors have been used to explain the mind before computers became popular – it was the telephone switchboard. But telephone switchboards are pretty limited. Actually back in the days of Newton, the mill was a very common metaphor for the mind because in those days mills were very impressive, complicated machines, especially in Holland, where you can still see the windmills. So anyway, the computer became popular, and you have the development of the artificial intelligence movement. So, the people in that movement, who could be called the artificial intelligencia, and the idea that a computer can think if only you can program it properly. It has to be a very powerful computer, you need lots of RAM and many mega flops of instructions.
[15:29]
But if you could make the computer powerful enough, it could completely duplicate the human mind. And in that case it would have a mind; it would be able to think and be conscious just as we're able to do these things. So this is the basic idea of the computer science… well, of the artificial intelligence people. Not everyone in computer science thinks this way.
This goes back to the completely materialistic picture of reality. It says that really there's nothing but matter. And if you can organize matter in the right pattern, then you have consciousness. So, the idealistic philosophy on the other hand would say that really there's no such thing as matter. Ultimately, there's only consciousness. This is a lot closer to Kṛṣṇa Consciousness. So according to that then, when consciousness manifests certain patterns, then that constitutes the material world. There tends to be confusion there, though, as to what this consciousness is that manifests the different patterns.
There's a concept that's referred to as solipsism, which is that really nothing exists except my consciousness. Everything is within my consciousness. So, actually the only person who would be entitled to be a solipsist would have to be Kṛṣṇa, because everything is within the consciousness of Kṛṣṇa. So the concept of idealism makes sense if you have a supreme consciousness who is generating everything, including the material manifestation.
In recent years, cosmology has also become very popular. There was a time in science where the scientists did not want to talk about the universe and the origin of the universe. They thought that this would be getting a little bit too speculative. However, recently it seems they've become quite a bit more confident than they used to be. Actually there was even a time when scientists said: We can't talk about the origin of life because that would be too speculative. But they got over that sort of feeling of insecurity, and now they're plunging ahead.
What happens when you apply computer science to the universe as a whole? Well, there are scientists who have done this, and what they do is they come up with the idea of a computer which would have unlimited capacity. This is usually based on some concept of evolution because the scientists are still very much attracted to evolution. So they say: In the future, as light spreads through the universe and evolves, ultimately a supreme computer will come about within the universe. Quite a number of scientists have contemplated this kind of idea.
For example, one of them is Freeman Dyson, who's a physicist at the Princeton University. So his idea is that the universe will gradually cool off, but matter will be organized into a computer, which will calculate at slower and slower pace as the universe cools off. But it will be able to keep on going forever. And in this way, it will be able to execute infinitely many instructions. It also will gradually build up an infinite memory capacity. And if it can do that, then it's able to do an infinite amount of calculation and thus simulate the entire universe. So, when the universe cools off, this computer can recreate the entire universe through simulation. And since Dyson is thinking from a materialistic platform, he thinks that a material simulation of the universe is as good as the universe. So in this way, everything will be created again. So, this is the concept.
[19:52]
Recently, another scientist named Tipler wrote an entire book on this and specifically brought in Christian religious concepts. He identified this recreation of the universe by the computer with the resurrection of the dead as predicted in Christian theology. This is specifically the... you could say the theory of “them bones,” expressed within a very sophisticated scientific context. So in any case, in Tipler's theory, the universe doesn't cool off. Instead, it collapses into what is called the big crunch. But while it is crunching together, the universe heats up and this enables the universe to organize into a computer that runs faster and faster and it increases its rate in such a way that it can carry out infinitely many instructions before the crunch. So, this again gives it infinite capacity and it's able to recreate the universe, which is the resurrection. So, there are all these ideas; various other physicists have proposed similar ideas.
There is a physicist named John Wheeler, and also from Princeton University, who brings in the quantum mechanical idealistic notion. But he brings it in in a rather curious way. In his theory, life also spreads throughout the universe. He also has a big crunch in his model. So, toward the end of the universe, just before the big crunch, the rate of information transfer accelerates to an incredible degree. But according to him, looking at it from the quantum mechanical perspective… well basically, there's a sort of confusion there between matter and consciousness. So, he sees the transfer of information within this ultimate computer as conscious observations, which in fact bring about the universe. And in fact, they do so in a way that is beyond time. So, he postulates a loop in which the observers at the end of the universe, through their observations, bring about the universe, which in turn evolves to become those observers. So, this is what John Wheeler is able to come up with.
These are different gropings of the scientists, but they indicate a sort of interesting trend of thought. Namely, the idea of some kind of ultimate intelligence that has the capacity to create the universe, and which in Wheeler's case has something to do with consciousness, although he's quite confused really about how consciousness comes into the picture. Nonetheless, you have scientists these days talking about universal intelligence and universal computers that can create everything. So, it's an interesting trend.
Wheeler made the point that he really has to adopt his closed loop theory of causation because the only alternative would be either an infinite regress in which you say: A is caused by B and B is caused by C and C is caused by D and it just goes on forever. Or you would have to have an ultimate mystery, which you say: A is caused by B, B is caused by C and at some point you stop and you say: And then we have a cause, which we ultimately cannot understand. It is mysterious. So, he said those are the only two alternatives to his approach. But the approach he offers is that A is caused by B, B as caused by C and C in turn is caused by A, and it goes around in a loop. And this also is a bit of a problem – somehow in logic this just isn't allowed.
In fact, you can say that you're being logical, but if you introduce a loop like this, actually you're violating logic. So what is the use of being logical up to that point and then throwing out logic. So, I would suggest that actually the better option is to say: you have A caused by B, B caused by C, and at a certain point you do have in fact an ultimate cause, which you're not going to be able to fully understand. That's the way it is. So according to the Bhāgavatam, actually the ultimate cause is Kṛṣṇa who is the supreme cause of all causes.
[24:54]
Wheeler, by the way, has an interesting way to put the infinite regress model. He calls this the “tower of turtles.” It seems that once somebody was giving a lecture on the origin or the nature of the universe, and a lady in the audience spoke up and said, "Sir, actually the explanation for the universe is that the world is resting on the back of a gigantic turtle." So he replied by very intelligently saying, "Ah, but what is the turtle standing on?" And the lady said, "It's no use Mr. It's turtles all the way down." So this is the Tower of Turtles model.
In any case, you can see some parallels between the gropings of the scientists and the Kṛṣṇa model because you have Kṛṣṇa expanding himself into Mahā-Viṣṇu and basically manifesting the material energy. He then organizes this material energy to create the body of Brahmā, and Brahmā then has the potency to create everything else within the material universe. So if a computer is a material, organized system that exhibits intelligence, then you could say that the body of Brahmā is like that. Of course, the Bhagavad-gītā says that the body of a living being is a machine made of māyā, yantrārūḍhāni māyayā. So, this machine concept is there, but of course there also has to be consciousness in order for this machine to really function intelligently. We see, in fact, in our experience with computers that computers don't just evolve, but they have to be programmed. Ultimately, there has to be an intelligent programmer behind the computer. So, Kṛṣṇa is the intelligent programmer behind the body of Brahmā. And of course, the soul of Brahmā is also there within that body. And so you have consciousness directing the material machine. And from that, the creation of the universe comes about.
In one sense you can say that some ideas in modern science are sort of moving in a very imperfect way in that direction. By the way, this book by this fellow Tipler has become a bestseller in Europe, I'm told, for quite some period of time, and many scientists are lamenting about that. Let's see, in one review of his book, the statement was made that: Most cosmologists accuse Tipler of the direst crime of perpetrating a hoax on the level of the piltdown man. So anyway, these are some developments in science. Are there any questions? Comments? Yeah.
Question: This is a question from last time that we had. We wanted to, we wanted to ask you, but you weren't here.
Answer: Okay.
Q: It had to do with what do the scientists think about time and how does that relate to the Vedic conception of time?
A: For scientists, time actually is quite a mystery. That's actually something relevant to this verse also. The scientists, well from Newton onward, have time as simply a parameter. It's just like a number. And this is sort of a very imperfect concept because you imagine the number moving forward along a line, which you could call a timeline. But of course, if the number is moving, then that means you already have time. So you really haven't explained time at all. All you've done is thought of a pointer that is moving, which is sort of like the hand of a clock. That's the way they represent time. So that's the Newtonian concept of absolute time.
Then, Einstein came along and threw the whole thing into a real state of confusion by introducing a theory of physics in which time and space are interchangeable and you can map time into space and space into time. So, this implied that all of time is laid out: past, present, and future. It's all there, just as space is all there. And Einstein decided he was going to be consistent about this, and he simply accepted that it's all there and that the passage of time is an illusion. In fact, he had a friend named Beso who died at a certain point, and he consoled Beso's widow by telling her that actually the passage of time is an illusion, he said for the convinced physicist. So, everything is there: past, present, and future.
[30:20]
Of course this is interesting because from the Vedic point of view, you can say: Well, it's possible for realized souls to see past, present, and future. So doesn't that tell us that past, present, and future are laid out like a map; and then it's just a question of being able to see what is there. And then that leads to the question of: Well, what about free will and responsibility? So we can get into lots of different topics.
Another development in physics was that it was observed that certain processes are irreversible. And that's where past, present, and future comes in, in physics. Because just like… imagine a glass of water falling off the edge of a table. A point was made fairly recently by a couple of scientists. One of them is named Charles Dennett, and that is that the key to irreversibility is forgetfulness, which is intriguing. If you retain all information in a transformation, then it's reversible. So the laws of physics, in their fundamental level, in fact retain all information during transformation. So they're reversible.
But when you go to thermodynamics, a change is made in the equations, actually, so that things get erased. And that's why you have irreversibility. But it's interesting to look at that from the point of view of the material world and the spiritual world because, of course, Kṛṣṇa never loses anything, and there is no passage of time in the spiritual world in which things are lost. So in that sense you have, so to speak, perfect reversibility, past, present, and future – the distinctions don't really exist. But in the material world you have creation, maintenance, and annihilation. And the key thing there is annihilation. So therefore you have irreversible time in the material world. So, that's a parallel that you can draw there. So yeah?
Q: [unclear]
A: Well, psychology contains many different theoretical viewpoints. There's the old view point of behaviorism. There the idea was that we simply refuse to talk about the mind. We just look at the person in terms of stimulus and response. The stimulus goes in, the response comes out, and we're just interested in the correlation between the two. So, they didn't want to talk about mind at all. So, naturally they could never explain what the mind is because they've ruled out the very idea of explaining it in the beginning.
Then there's what is called functionalism, which is very popular nowadays. According to that model, you regard the mind as a computer, and basically that's the artificial intelligence approach. The idea is we'll understand the mind by seeing how the brain works as a computer, but they cannot deal with consciousness. Then there are other systems of thought in psychology, which are considered to be less scientific, in which they do want to talk about consciousness. And they even bring in, generally, impersonal philosophy in different forms – from basically different forms of Māyāvādī philosophy. So, you have a variety of things going on in psychology. Ultimately Kṛṣṇa consciousness should be the deepest science of psychology. Yeah?
Q: [unclear]
[35:18]
A: Well, there does seem to be some transcendental passion also. As far as I can understand from a philosophical point of view, the difference there would be that everything…. Well, you see, ultimately I think you have to go back to the principle of acintya-bhedābheda-tattva because in the spiritual world, everything is tied together. So, when something is created in that sense, in the spiritual world, it's also already there in Kṛṣṇa. In the material world, when something is created, it's also coming from Kṛṣṇa, but it's manifesting in the realm of matter. So, from the point of view of the realm of matter, it's something new.
In fact, that's interesting if you go back to this idea in thermodynamics, because what you see in thermodynamics is things that are so tiny that you can't measure them are constantly being magnified, so that they have an observable effect. And then they're constantly being reduced down, so that even though they're still there, they no longer have an observable effect. So if you are able to see the things that are unmeasurably small, then you have perfect reversibility. But because of your limit in perception – that you can only see the things that are on a big scale – you have creation, or the things are being expanded; and you have annihilation, when the things are being contracted to the point of unobservability. So you can make an analogy there to the situation with the spiritual world: from Kṛṣṇa's point of view, it's all there; and He expands it and manifests it. If your senses are limited so you only see the manifestation, then it seems to be created. And then He unmanifests it when He wishes, and then it seems to be annihilated. But from Kṛṣṇa's point of view in the spiritual state in which He sees everything, then it's all there. So, that's an analogy. Yeah?
Q: [unclear] We say that the manifestation of Viṣṇu, Śiva, and Brahmā in the different modes is kind of like pure modes, as opposed to the modes and the reactions we experience here at this level?
A: Oh, that's an analogy. Obviously the consciousness of Brahmā is exceedingly exalted compared to that of lesser persons within the universe. It is said that he is influenced by the mood of passion however. For example, there's that story in which Bhrigu Muni was trying to find out who is the real Supreme Personality of Godhead using the experimental method. So he first went and slighted Lord Brahmā by not using proper etiquette in approaching him. And Lord Brahmā became angry. So this was a manifestation of the mode of passion. Then he proceeded to directly insult Lord Śiva. And Lord Śiva was about ready to annihilate him, which was a manifestation of the mood of ignorance. But then he went even further and he assaulted Lord Viṣṇu. But Lord Viṣṇu was perfectly forgiving and in no way agitated by any sort of anger. So that story is there. So it would appear that Brahmā can be under the influence of passion but Lord Kṛṣṇa is very much looking after him. And of course, the Brahmā in our universe finally attains the level of a pure devotee. That's another aspect that doesn't have to happen though, as I understand. You could have a Brahmā who's not a pure devotee.
Q: [unclear]
A: Yeah.
Q: [unclear]
A: Okay. All glories to Śrīla Prabhupāda.