Introduction to this blog

Consciousness can be generated by the process of computation! This is the claim of neuroscientists and computer scientists. However, the Vedic literature provides a clear idea that conscious by its nature is not a matter and hence it cannot be generated by any kind of complex computation that is due to matter. This blog is to explore the science of consciousness from Vedic perspective.

Saturday, April 3, 2021

Living and Non-living machines

The subtle difference between living and non-living that we learn from Vedic scriptures is not very well understood by the modern scientific community. The scientific community particularly the biologists are in the process of research to learn more about What is Life? Whatever has been known so far does not give any clarity on what is living and what is dead. The current understanding which is based on the large number of assumptions states that the life could possibly be the cell itself. What is not known is how does the cell  has evolved? 

The recent research on living machines published in the paper "A cellular platform for the development of synthetic living machines" [1]  is even more interesting to note that it has been titled as Living machine. The author does states that they have created a living machine. However, the understanding is that the research is on creating an automatic self-healing machine from the living organism. Some of the critical points to be noted are that the machine has not been created from dead cells, rather it has been created from living cells which after the initial organization can further behave as a self-healing machine just like a computer. The machine has also a capability to record the past behavior of the machine. 

The relevant question to be asked is does this finding anyway helps us understand how does life has started, does this finding be useful in answering the question of machine consciousness? Will the machine ever be conscious? 


Reference:
[1] https://robotics.sciencemag.org/content/6/52/eabf1571/tab-pdf


Jaynarayan, Bangalore, India