Posina Venkata Rayudu

The hard problem of consciousness is explicating how moving matter becomes thinking matter. Harder yet is the problem of spelling out the mutual determinations of individual experiences and the experiencing self. Determining how the collective social consciousness influences and is influenced by the individual selves constituting the society is the hardest problem. Drawing parallels between individual cognition and the collective knowing of mathematical science, here we present a conceptualization of the cognitive dimension of the self. Our abstraction of the relations between the physical world, biological brain, mind, intuition, consciousness, cognitive self, and the society can facilitate the construction of the conceptual repertoire required for an explicit science of the self within human society.

What is Gandhi’s Satya? How does truth entail peace? Satya or truth, for Gandhi, is experiential. The experiential truth of Gandhi does not exclude epistemological, metaphysical, or moral facets of truth, but is an unequivocal acknowledgement of the subjective basis of the pursuit of objectivity. In admitting my truth, your truth, our truth, their truth, etc., Gandhi brought into clear focus the reality of I and we—the subjects (or viewpoints) of subjective experiences (views). The totality of these subjective viewpoints, along with their mutual relationships, constitutes an objective frame of reference for reconciling or putting together seemingly irreconcilable perceptions into a unitary whole of mutual understanding and an ever more refined comprehension of reality, thereby engendering peace. Considering the generality of the basic tenet—viewpoint dependence of views—of Gandhi’s satyagraha and in view of the kinship between positive conception of peace and unity, I put forward ‘satyagraha for science’ as a method to address numerous foundational problems in various branches of science centered on unity such as the binding problem in neuroscience.

Notions such as śūnyatā, catuṣkoṭi, and Indra's net, which figure prominently in Buddhist philosophy, are difficult to readily accommodate within our ordinary thinking about everyday objects. Famous Buddhist scholar Nāgārjuna considered two levels of reality: one called conventional reality, and the other ultimate reality. Within this framework, śūnyatā refers to the claim that at the ultimate level objects are devoid of essence or "intrinsic properties", but are interdependent by virtue of their relations to other objects. Catuṣkoṭi refers to the claim that four truth values, including contradiction, are admissible in reasoning. Indra's net refers to the claim that every part of a whole is reflective of the whole. Here we present category theoretic constructions that are reminiscent of these Buddhist concepts. The universal mapping property definition of mathematical objects, wherein objects of a universe of discourse are defined not in terms of their content, but in terms of their relations to all objects of the universe is reminiscent of śūnyatā. The objective logic of perception, with perception modeled as [a category of] two sequential processes (sensation followed by interpretation), and with its truth value object of four truth values, is reminiscent of the Buddhist logic of catuṣkoṭi. The category of categories, wherein every category has a subcategory of sets with zero structure within which every category can be modeled, is reminiscent of Indra's net. Our thorough elaboration of the parallels between Buddhist philosophy and category theory can facilitate better understanding of Buddhist philosophy, and bring out the broader philosophical import of category theory beyond mathematics.

We define consciousness as the category of all conscious experiences. This immediately raises the question: What is the essence in which every conscious experience in the category of conscious experiences partakes? We consider various abstract essences of conscious experiences as theories of consciousness. They are: (i) conscious experience is an action of memory on sensation, (ii) conscious experience is experiencing a particular as an exemplar of a general, (iii) conscious experience is an interpretation of sensation, (iv) conscious experience is referring sensation to an object as its cause, and (v) conscious experience is a model of stimulus. Corresponding to each one of these theories we obtain a category of models of conscious experiences: (i) category of actions, (ii) category of idempotents, (iii) category of two sequential maps, (iv) category of brain-generalized figures, and (v) functor categories with intuition as base and conceptual repertoire as exponent, respectively. For each theory of consciousness we also calculate its truth value object and characterize the objective logic intrinsic to the corresponding category of models of consciousness experiences.