Existence of Life and Consciousness in Spectrum of Entity

The consciousness has been a non-trivial problem for the scientists of modern time. Not very long, since around last 30 years or so the problem has gained a serious attention from neuro-biologists. Not only the neuro-science, the computer science and quantum physics has also started to investigate the problem. And, of course the philosophy is involved since long. The interesting development is the integration of science and spirituality in search for a new science to address different problems of consciousness. The approach of synthesizing the science and spirituality has been invented and applied by H H Bhaktiswarupa Damodara Maharaj in search for the answers to the question of consciousness study. One of problem of consciousness is whether consciousness is limited to human being alone? Or in other words does the other creatures such as trees, plants, microbes etc poses consciousness? 

The problem stated has been investigated by Sir J C Bose long back in the year of 1900 (the history of this research goes back to 1848 by German philosopher Gustav Fechner). Sir J C Bose has demonstrated using an interesting experimental setup that plants are sentient. The plant do respond consciously to the external stimuli. The result has indicated that plant has some mechanism of being able to communicate the feelings of pain, suffering and happiness. (Well, here we may need to appropriately define what we mean by feelings. This subject we will discuss further.) Taking it from here, recently a work has been published in a book "Finding the Mother Tree" authored by Suzzane Simard which investigates the problem of plant consciousness. The work provides a set of evidences based on the authors examination of a Mother tree in a deep forest where the author studies the behavior of those trees that seems to be exactly like a mother in human being. The way they communicate about their survival, their food, friends and foe, health etc reveals a different kind of phenomena underneath in the forest society. These studies and observations lay a foundation for plant consciousness.

Reference: 

   1. https://www.the-scientist.com/reading-frames/book-excerpt-from-finding-the-mother-tree-68727

Jaynarayan, Bangalore, India

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