Epilogue

Determinism and Free Will

The space-time events in a living being which correspond to the activity of its mind, to its self-conscious or any other actions, are statistico-deterministic.

To the physicist I wish to emphasize that in my opinion, and contrary to the opinion upheld in some quarters,

Quantum indeterminacy plays no biologically relevant role in them, except by enhancing their purely accidental character in events like:

• meiosis
• natural and X-ray-induced mutation and so on

Declaring oneself as a pure mechanism contradicts Free Will.

But I argue in 2 premises that there is no contradiction:

1. My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature

2. Yet I know that I am directing the motions of my own body

I control the ‘motion of the atoms’ according to the Laws of Nature.

The Upanishads recognize ATHMAN = BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self).

The mystics independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (like the particles in an ideal gas) have described the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God).

To Western ideology this thought is strange, in spite of Schopenhauer and others who stood for it.

Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular.

Even in split consciousness or double personality, the 2 persons alternate.

• They never manifest simultaneously.

In a dream we do perform several characters at the same time, but not indiscriminately.

We are one of them; in him we act and speak directly, while we often eagerly await the answer or response of another person, unaware of the fact that it is we who control his movements and his speech just as much as our own.

How does the idea of plurality (so emphatically opposed by the Upanishad writers) arise at all?

Consciousness finds itself intimately connected with, and dependent on, the physical state of a limited region of matter, the body.

(Consider the changes of mind during the development of the body, as puberty, ageing, dotage, etc., or consider the effects of fever, intoxication, narcosis, lesion of the brain and so on.)

There is a great plurality of similar bodies.

Hence the pluralization of consciousnesses or minds seems a very suggestive hypothesis.

Probably all simple, ingenuous people, as well as the great majority of Western philosophers, have accepted it.

It leads almost immediately to the invention of souls, as many as there are bodies, and to the question whether they are mortal as the body is or whether they are immortal and capable of existing by themselves.

The former alternative is distasteful, while the latter frankly forgets, ignores or disowns the facts upon which the plurality hypothesis rests.

Much sillier ques- tions have been asked: Do animals also have souls? It has even been questioned whether women, or only men, have souls.

Such consequences, even if only tentative, must make us suspicious of the plurality hypothesis, which is common to all official Western creeds.

Are we not inclining to much greater nonsense, if in discarding their gross superstitions we retain their naIve idea of plurality of souls, but ‘remedy’ it by declar- ing the souls to be perishable, to be annihilated with the respective bodies?

The only possible alternative is simply to keep to the immediate experience that:

• consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown
• there is only 1 thing
• what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this 1 thing, produced by a deception (the Indian Maya)

The same illusion is produced in a gallery of mirrors, and in the same way Gaurisankar and Mt Everest turned out to be the same peak seen from different valleys.

There are elaborate ghost-stories fixed in our minds to hamper our acceptance of such simple recognition.

E.g. it has been said that there is a tree there outside my window but I do not really see the tree.

By some cunning device of which only the initial, relatively simple steps are explored, the real tree throws an image of itself into my consciousness, and that is what I perceive. If you stand by my side and look at the same tree, the latter manages to throw an image into your soul as well.

I see my tree and you see yours (remarkably like mine), and what the tree in itselfis we do not know. For this extravagance Kant is responsible.

In the order of ideas which regards consciousness as a singulare tanturn it is conveniently replaced by the statement that there is obviously only one tree and all the image business is a ghost-story. Yet each of us has the indisputable impression that the sum total of his own experience and memory forms a unit, quite distinct from that of any other person.

He refers to it as ‘I’.

What is this ‘I’?

If you analyse it closely you will, I think, find that it is just a little bit more than a collection of single data (experiences and memories), namely the canvas upon which they are collected.

What you really mean by ‘I’ is that ground-stuff on which they are collected.

You may come to a distant country, lose sight of all your friends, may all but forget them; you acquire new friends, you share life with them as intensely as you ever did with your old ones. Less and less important will become the fact that, while living your new life, you still recollect the old one.

‘The youth that was I’, you may come to speak of him in the third person, indeed the protagonist of the novel you are reading is go probably nearer to your heart, certainly more intensely alive and better known to you. Yet there has been no intermediate break, no death.

Even if a skilled hypnotist succeeded in blotting out entirely all your earlier reminiscences, you would not find that he had killed you. In no case is there a loss of personal existence to deplore.

Nor will there ever be.