It's a small world after all...

In the last post, we saw how the concept of consciousness has some fundamental differences between Indian thought, and Western thought that is now the mainstream method of scientific inquiry.  In this post, let us look at how the concept of perception, or our interaction with the world outside, is modelled in Indian thought and in Western science.  In Cognitive Science today, perception is defined as the process by which we segment raw signals received by our sense organs into semantic objects and relationships between them. Sometimes, perception is distinguished from cognition  in the following way: perception is a recognition process where we identify objects and relationships, while cognition is a process of sense making  where we try to interpret what we have perceived.  For example, suppose we see something like the following picture:  Image Source: Google image search Our perception mechanism recognises a dog in the picture, standing up behind a fence, and looking somewhat sad.

One of the fundamental differences between Indian and Western thought is about the nature of consciousness.  In Western thought, consciousness is seen as an attribute of a physical ensemble that manifests when the ensemble is sufficiently complex and capable.  In contrast, in Indian philosophy, consciousness is seen as the basic building block of the universe, and the universe is said to be pervaded with consciousness. Here, humans and other living beings don't "have" consciousness-- they "tune into" or are able to "reflect" the universal consciousness to different extents. The ultimate "purpose of life" is indeed regarded as being able to reflect the universal consciousness to the fullest extent possible.  Recently, I was watching a talk on Vedanta, where the speaker clarified this difference further. Suppose a person is in deep sleep, with no dreams. In such a case, a Western scientist would say that the person is "unconscious" or