Topic 1:
Sorry Darwin: Chemistry Never Made the Transition to Biology
(Refer for the full paper of the talk:: http://scienceandscientist.org/biology)
By: Bhakti Niskama Shanta, Ph.D.
(Resume: http://scienceandscientist.org/biology/bns.html)
Topic 2:
Information, Knowledge and Life in 21st Century
(Refer for the full paper of the talk:: http://scienceandscientist.org/papers/BVMuni_Information.pdf)
By: Bhakti Vijnana Muni, Ph.D.
(Resume: http://scienceandscientist.org/papers/BVMuni.pdf)
The two speakers are from Sri Chaitanya Saraswat Math, Siliguri (mahaprabhu.net/scsmath.siliguri). Under the guidance of Sripad Bhakti Madhava Puri Maharaja, Ph.D. (Director, Bhakti Vedanta Institute of Spiritual Culture and Science, 20 Nassau St., #116 Princeton, NJ 08542, USA: bviscs.org) they are regularly travelling to various leading universities and colleges to deliver talks on these fundamental topics. A brief introductory article "Is Life Fundamental?" is attached.
Day & Date: TUESDAY, the 19th March 2013
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Start Time: 5:00 pm
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Venue: GARGI / MAITRI Auditorium, IIT Kharagpur
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All interested are cordially invited to attend the same …
By Prof N R Mandal
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A BRIEF OF THE TALKS
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Is Life Fundamental?
By
Sripad Bhakti Madhava Puri Maharaja, Ph.D.
Director, Bhakti Vedanta Institute of Spiritual Culture and Science
20 Nassau St., #116 Princeton, NJ 08542, USA
www.bviscs.org, editors@scienceandscientist.org
One of the greatest unsolved questions in science is: what is life? Is life derivative – a product of physical and chemical composition, or is it a primitive – an underived, irreducible foundation of reality? This is a crucial point that the famous German philosopher Hegel made central to his scientific system of knowledge. As he wrote: "Everything turns on understanding the Absolute as subject, as much as we may now understand it to be substance." This is similar to the principle we find enunciated in the ancient tradition of Vedanta, athatho brahma jijnasa.
Some are now beginning to realize that the scientific search for truth has led us to the same conclusion. The remarkable progress that has been made in the scientific understanding of the material world, and the study of organic life at the most fundamental cellular level has forced scientists to look at what they never thought could be an essential part of scientific knowledge – life, consciousness, the scientist himself. Yet 20th century quantum mechanics has inextricably woven consciousness into whatever measurement we can make of the material world. The many world interpretation claims to avoid this solution, but it presents a picture of reality that surreal beyond anything science could ever deal with, by positing an ad hoc infinity of worlds at every point of determination, such that everything is possible and thus nothing is explained. In other words, it is not science. Therefore the role of consciousness in physics has taken a firm position, and this is something that has been embraced quite boldly by the pioneers in this field. Max Planck, the father of quantum physics, emphasized the principle quite clearly,
"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness." -- The Observer (25 January 1931)
Schrodinger, who formulated the wave principle of quantum mechanics, said, "Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else."
Yet, not only in the sub-microscopic quantum world but in the telescopic macro cosmic realm, the original admonitions of Isaac Newton were ignored and forgotten in the enthusiasm of Laplace, and those who came after him, to embrace a deterministic physics in which all other considerations were completely banished as unnecessary hypotheses. This arrogant bluster came to an abrupt halt just when, in the last decades of the 20th century, the tumultuous progress of scientific discovery seemed to dominate all other fields of knowledge. Chaos reigned over all. And it was the outcome of a purely deterministic conception of the universe. Determinism had undermined itself, because it lost sight of its purely idealistic origin and nature. The universe was as unpredictable as the weather! Non-linearity was one problem; the measurement problem took on a new form in the natural limitations of the observers who made the measurements; and the rounding errors that are inherent to the numerical methods we use for computation were another issue. Little assumptions here and there we thought we could safely ignore, proved to be catastrophic in the long run, even toppling the neat mechanistic picture we had constructed of our own solar system.
The linearity of equations that describe natural phenomena is inapplicable to real systems of more than two bodies. Even a three body problem resists precise calculation. Can a living cell that contains 300 trillion atoms (there are 300 billion stars in the galaxy we inhabit) stuffed in a space that is visible only under a microscope, form a deterministic system?
The massive accumulation of the biochemical details of living organisms over the past few decades has brought this question into a new light. Never before was it possible to examine the chemistry of a living cell in the way we now have available to us. The remarkable finding is that there is nothing random about life. It is now known that the cell maintains its own life by the strict, hierarchical, regulatory control of its own functions, without which it would rapidly perish. The living cell exhibits and deploys a finely tuned selective behavior with respect to its own internal monitoring as well as in its relation to the environment in which it lives. Chemical systems react, but biological systems behave in ways that can only be described as cognitive. The field of cognitive biology has arisen in this context, a concatenation of two words that would never have seemed possible in the purely molecular reductionist view of 19th and 20th century biology. Yet cognition as well as information have become integrated with biology as never before, since the Cartesian division of the cognitive and extensive features of reality that marked the beginning of the modern philosophy of scientific naturalism.
So science has come full circle – from the original infatuation with the conscious agents of the ancients, to the outward gaze into the world that forms the content of consciousness, and now seeking to understand the effective existence of consciousness in that world. India is the place where consciousness has been studied in minute detail for centuries before the recent discovery of its importance by science. Now is the time to combine that ancient wisdom with modern science and lead the scientific revolution that is taking place in that direction. To convince the theologians of the importance of science is as difficult a task as teaching the scientists the importance of theology. Yet these are not non-overlapping magesteria, as Gould would like us to think. They are interpenetrating and essential, because life is as much subject as substance.
Therefore, we have our sannyasis coming to the universities to teach what is happening at the frontiers of science. And this is really scientific. Your cooperation in this endeavor will lead to true benefit for all. So we ask you to listen, learn and apply your scientific minds to developing this science of spiritual biology, spiritual cosmology, and spiritual culture and science in general. For that reason we have established the Bhakti Vedanta Institute of Spiritual Culture and Science, by the inspiration and teachings of the great acharyas and scientists who have cultivated this knowledge before us. We are only insignificant persons in this effort, and we pray that you may make your own contribution to this great work, and become a fortunate recipient of the mercy and blessings of the magnanimous inaugurator of this revolution, Sri Krishna Chaitanya Mahaprabhu.
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Darwin Under Siege: http://scienceandscientist.org/Darwin
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