Through an extensive study of the intro sections of Wikipedia pages and watered-down video essays, I have procured enough knowledge to deceive myself into believing that I understand the basics of Existential and Indic philosophies. What follows is an attempt to organize what I understand and fill in the gaps that emerge. The flow of topics will follow roughly the order in which I came across them. (Un)surprisingly, several of my friends also came across these subjects in a similar order. All declarative statements are to be taken as my subjective opinions.
My childhood and early adolescent years were spent being religious. Once I started reading things on my own, and got some encouragement to think independently and question things, skepticism seeped in. After reading some classic non-fiction books and elementary high school physics (it didn’t take a lot to convince me), I became as ardent of an atheist as I was a theist a few short months back. The next few months were spent reading the standard palette of arguments against the existence of any kind of supernatural entity. After a while I realized that this is hopeless. No one can prove or disprove the existence of God, and I settled on being an agnostic who behaved as if there was no God. My love for rationalism went hand-in-hand. I encountered some atheistic Indian schools of thought like Charvak and Ajivika, which gave me some validation. Embracing Nihilism was a natural consequence, since till then the meaning and purpose of my life was being derived from religion.1 Faith, the crutch that I used to deal with typical hardships of life was no longer available, and a replacement was urgently needed. Perhaps, a stronger man would not need a crutch. Perhaps, merely realizing the randomness of outcomes, accepting the lack of agency, staring at the meaninglessness of life would be enough to keep him happy. But I am no Sisyphus. In fact, I think there aren’t many Sisyphi roaming around in this world.
These basic realizations, although they might seem logical and obvious, lack two things which are essential for the meek amongst us to live a blissful life:2 a concrete, well defined purpose; and a robust framework to move towards the said purpose, in a way that isn’t regretted later in life. The underprivileged do not have the luxury for this pursuit: there’s no time for such musings when one’s basic needs aren’t met.3 When you have mouths to feed, acquiring food itself becomes life’s purpose.4 5 A few fortunate ones have these needs met innately, their purpose comes naturally to them—they need not do anything more. Many prefer to not think a lot,6 and discretely cope with the situations they encounter on the go. Unless one’s life takes some wild turns, this is sustainable enough to go through life without much suffering. On top of this, most people I’ve come across also use faith/religion in some way to cope, and often turn to different magnitudes of superstitions in the face of hardships. Rationalists try to find their purpose in arts and sciences. Some find their escape in drugs, by looking for aliens or making an unnatural number of trips to see the Northern Lights. Those of us for whom none of these methods play well, are left rifling through the scriptures.7
But, how does trying to reading philosophy help reduce suffering in day to day life? How does reading abstract ideas about Existentialism, Vedanta or Salvation give us a way to deal with our daily lives and make decisions?
Reading philosophy can act as a type of cognitive therapy that can help regulate distressing emotions by changing evaluative judgements. We learn to identify our belief-patterns that lead to distress and reevaluate/reframe them for good. Further, it gives us a framework to answer and organize central questions about the meaning of life, definition of success, death etc. It helps us straighten our priorities and morals. This leads to less rumination and firmer decision making.8 In simple words, it helps us upgrade our internal model of the world, helps us to decide what matters and what is in our control, and tells us what to do when we suffer. All of this has a trickle-down effect in our day-to-day life. When decisions are made using such stable principles and framework, we cease to suffer from regret regardless of the outcomes.
A persistent difficulty in philosophy of mind is explaining how first-person experience fits into an otherwise third-person, empirical description of the world. That tension shows up across cultures and centuries: classical Indian traditions developed sophisticated metaphysical and introspective frameworks, while modern philosophy of mind frames the issue as the “hard problem of consciousness”,9 which asks why do we have a subjective experience.
One illustration of how far purely third-person description may go without fully closing the gap is the family of arguments about qualia.10 A couple of millennia ago, Vaisheshika11 posited that all matter must be made up of some fundamental indivisible building block. Of course, there were no tools available to verify such a claim, but even without any tools, the idea of a fundamental building block doesn’t seem too far fetched. However, even if we knew everything about the physical traits of these supposed atoms, how do we reconcile with it the existence of our conscious experience? Fast forward to the current age, we have developed a significant insight into the material world through cutting edge technology and use advanced mathematical to predict and model the behavior of everything from quarks to black holes. Still, the philosophical enquiry about the nature of our existence remain unanswered. Even if a science-fiction neuroscience gave a complete structural/functional model of my visual system, know about every particle that it is composed of, track when and how every neuron is fired and empirically figure out how consciousness emerges, it’s not obvious that this would enable you to know what it feels like when I see the color red.12
This is not a knock science. The scientific method is optimized to provide reproducible, objectively verifiable answers about public phenomena. It is natural that such a method would fall short when we start inquiring about qualia, which is inherently subjective in nature. The natural next move is not to abandon science, but to complement it with disciplined first-person methodologies. One influential modern proposal is neurophenomenology: combine careful phenomenological reports with cognitive science/neuroscience to constrain theories of consciousness.
On that view, some Indian traditions, especially strands of Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta are worth taking seriously. They are long-running, systematic attempts to analyze experience from the inside. By and large, they do not (or rather, should not) contradict science. If they do, they need to be revised. These traditions often aimed to construct coherent metaphysical models of reality through logical analysis and introspection. Hence, some of their concepts parallel ideas that modern physics later explored through empirical methods. This is probably the reason why some major physicists interested in philosophy and spirituality were attracted to these traditions. Furthermore, both Advaita/Buddhism and modern neuroscience reject naive realism and emphasize that our experience of the world is mediated by cognitive structures. Similarly, many Indian philosophical traditions developed sophisticated analyses of cognition, emotion, and suffering through introspective methods. Modern psychology has arrived at several compatible insights using experimental techniques. However, these parallels reflect convergent investigation of the human mind rather than direct scientific validation of ancient doctrines.
This brings me to my biggest pet peeve, which is people conflating ideas from physics to legitimize eastern philosophies. A little bit of stretching of the eastern thought could lead to very strong parallels with whatever is trending in pop science. Haphazardly throwing buzzwords from physics into philosophical discourse to sound intelligent, selective mischaracterization of scientific research to vaguely justify non-scientific claims, stretching well established scientific principles and claiming that they were already known to the ancients etc is becoming increasingly common among the self-proclaimed (sadh)gurus of our age. It not only dilutes the essence of the philosophy but also repels the curious minds away from it. Likewise, invoking “energy,” “vibrations,” “entropy,” or “entanglement” as if they directly validate scriptural metaphysics is usually a category mistake: these terms have precise technical roles in physics, and loose metaphorical borrowing creates confusion.
“Heisenberg’s principle proves that consciousness collapses the wave function.” “Existence of Higgs Boson proves our age old idea of Brahman.” “Nasadiya Sukta already talked about dark matter.”
None of these follow, logically or scientifically, from the cited physics.
Having addressed the “why” and the “how”, let us start our discussion.
This is precisely what Nietzsche predicted would happen with the advancement of science. He called this a disease. ↩
Dharma Lecture 1: How Responsibility and Purpose Help With Suffering - YouTube ↩
Asking Hunter-Gatherers Life’s Toughest Questions - YouTube ↩
OSHO: You Have Everything but You Don’t Have Yourself - YouTube ↩
Ishopnishad calls this Atmahana (slaying one’s Atman/Soul). Camus terms this intellectual suicide in The Myth of Sisyphus. ↩
In reality, people don’t fit nicely into these separate well-defined boxes, but use a combination of these approaches. Am I missing any other ways? ↩
Nussbaum, Martha C. “The therapy of desire: Theory and practie in Hellenistic ethics.” (2013): 1-584. ↩
The hard problem of consciousness was introduced by David Chalmers in his seminal paper FACING UP TO THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS. Also see Mind–body problem - Wikipedia ↩
Qualia: The Knowledge Argument (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) ↩
Vaisheshika is one of the six orthodox schools of Indian Philosophy (Darshanas). While Atomism is a part of Vaisheshika, sits inside a broader metaphysics. Along with closely related Nyaya Darshana, it forms the basis of Indian logic used by most other schools for philosophical discourse. ↩
What Is It Like to Be A Bat, Thomas Nagel (1974); Materialism and qualia the explanatory gap by Joseph Levin; Epiphenomenal Qualia, Frank Jackson (1982) ↩