Christof Koch is professor of cognitive and behavioural biology at the California Institute of Technology
in Pasadena in the US, and his latest book is Consciousness:
Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. He thinks "brain observatories"
may solve the puzzle of how a material nervous system can be capable of
creating an intangible world of love, colour, taste and fantasy. Or, as
he puts it, "Throughout my quest to understand consciousness, I never
lost my sense of living in a magical universe. I do believe some deep and
elemental organising principle created the universe and set it in
motion for a purpose I cannot comprehend. I grew up calling this god
—but a god much closer to Baruch Spinoza's god than the god of
Michelangelo's paintings."
Spinoza's concept of a god was that
it was a derivative interconnected with all existence. In this respect,
his philosophy was more akin to eastern mysticism in general and the
Vedantas in particular. In fact, the 19th-century German Indologist
Theodor Goldstucker was one of the first to notice the similarities
between Spinoza and the Vedanta tradition of India, to the extent that
the man was sometimes seen as the most infamous atheistheretic of
Europe.
Yet, that's exactly the kind of atheism — like the
advaitaVedic philosophy that doesn't believe in dividing and ruling —
which has always been capable of creating a magical material world out
of the substance of immaterial consciousness. So, the idea of an
organising principle has also become fundamental to all spiritual
traditions that don't necessarily subscribe in any supreme deity. Labels: Cosmic Uplink, Mukul Sharma
