Roy Abraham Varghese

Roy A. Varghese is the author and/or editor of various books on the interface of science, philosophy, and religion. His book Cosmos, Bios, Theos, included contributions from 24 Nobel Prize-winning scientists. Time magazine called Cosmos “the year’s most intriguing book about God.” Cosmic Beginnings and Human Ends, a subsequent work, won a Templeton Book Prize for “Outstanding Books in Science and Natural Theology.” Varghese’s The Wonder of the World – A Journey from Modern Science to the Mind of God was the subject of an Associated Press story and was endorsed by leading thinkers include two Nobelists, one of whom invented the laser and another who consolidated the Big Bang Theory. He co-authored There is a God – How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind with Antony Flew, at that time the most influential atheist in the English-speaking world; the book was endorsed by various thinkers including the Chairman of the US National Institutes of Health. He subsequently edited The Missing Link, a study of consciousness, thought and the human self that included contributions from three Nobel Prize winners and scientists from Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Yale. His most recent work is Metaverse of Mind – the Cosmic Social Network. The interview with him is published in the two coming issues of Light of Truth.

I am aware that I am simply flesh and matter, but then how I become conscious of myself and others, how does physics explain this my experience?

Before we get to physics, let us start with the everyday experience of which each one of us is certain.

We encounter five realities every day:

• matter/energy. We live in a physical world. Everything physical is basically energy. Matter is condensed energy.
• life, i.e., autonomous agency, the capability of acting on your own and being the source of your actions. All living beings exhibit intentional or goal-seeking action, a propensity to seek goals be it nourishment or reproduction
• consciousness, sensory awareness of the environment via physical organs
• conceptual thought, the capability of “understanding,” of decoding and encoding, of “seeing meaning” via non-physical concepts (e.g., justice or travel) especially as expressed in language
• selfhood, the I or you that gives you a first-person perspective and that remains the same even as the physical contents of your neurons constantly change

Here’s what physics can and cannot tell us about these five realities:

Ø  Energy – we know that everything physical is energy. What is energy? Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman said, “In physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is.” Where did energy come from? Science, as such, has no answer to this question. And, even as we think through this, trillions of photons are traveling here and through us at 186,000 miles an hour as they have been for billions of years from the time of the Big Bang.

Ø  Agency – All living beings are agents, beings that are capable of purposive autonomous action. We know the chemical ingredients of living beings but science has no idea how a piece of matter can become an autonomous purpose-driven agent.

Ø  Consciousness – the ability to be aware of our environment. This is not a power that is found in the laws of matter.

Ø  Conceptual thought – processing meaning using concepts that do not refer to a specific physical object (we can think of the idea of a dog without thinking of a specific dog). This is not something found in the laws of matter: neither can it be produced by consciousness as Einstein pointed out.

Ø  The self, the “I”, “me” – it is the self that is the experiencer: it cannot be reduced to its experiences and it certainly cannot be identified with the ever-changing bio-electrical storm we call the brain.

In responding to your specific questions, Let me add a little more on consciousness, thought and the self.

The non-physical nature of consciousness is immediately evident in our experience. For instance, in seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching, a mechanical stimulus is transformed into a nerve signal that is sent to the brain and then converted into a conscious state. Decades of scientific study have helped us understand the network of proteins, ions, signals and cellular structures involved. But, despite all these advances, the bridge between these two worlds, the external stimulus and the corresponding sense-perception, remains as much a mystery today as ever.

On the one hand, we have an efficient chain of precise physical processes that monitor, transmit and respond to an immense variety of sensory inputs. On the other, we have a mysterious and radical conversion: the merely physical becomes something of which we are conscious, something in which we “participate”.

Consciousness, by which we mean awareness of our environment, is a fundamental reality that cannot be described or explained in physical terms. It is supra-physical.

“The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.”

Secondly, there is conceptual thought. We experience this constantly in our use of language. But the origin of language remains as much a mystery today as it was in Darwin’s days. Richard Dawkins, a prominent Darwinian, says, : “There doesn’t seem to be anything like syntax in non-human animals and it is hard to imagine evolutionary forerunners of it. Equally obscure is the origin of semantics, of words and their meanings.” Evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser noted in Scientific American that “Charles Darwin argued in his 1871 book The Descent of Man that the difference between human and nonhuman minds is ‘one of degree and not of kind.’ … Mounting evidence indicates that, in contrast to Darwin’s theory of a continuity of mind between humans and other species, a profound gap separates our intellect from the animal kind. …Our mind is very different from that of even our closest primate relatives and … we do not know much about how that difference came to be.”

Finally, we turn to the self.

Your brain is made up of 80 billion neurons. Each neuron is made up of some 100,000 molecules and is mostly water. As neuroscientist Mario Beauregard notes, these molecules change about 10,000 times over the course of your life. And yet you remain the same at two months old, two years old, 20 years old and all the way to now. Of course, you grow and learn and change but it is the same “you” that undergoes these changes. So what is it that stays the same?

It is clearly not something physical because the physical, as, for instance, your neurons, is in a constant state of flux. You could not even complete a sentence if you were entirely physical. Indubitably, then, there is something about you that is non-physical.

Where did this non-physical dimension come from? It could not have emerged from the physical for two reasons. All the cells in your body, and not just your neurons, are constantly changing. So they cannot serve as the basis of a continuing identity. Secondly, the laws of physics have no room for the creation of the non-physical from the physical. So the non-physical “you” must come from something that is itself non-physical. And where did this non-physical reality come from? It must always have existed without limitation. This is the Ultimate Reality we know as God.

Elemental force which is brute force is in man and nature, but moral force is found in man, how is brute force related to moral power?

Can we build a morality from science? The idea is laughable.

Einstein said, “science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be.” He went on to say, “I have never obtained any ethical value from my scientific work.”

Mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology are accessed through equations and experiments. “Right” and “wrong” cannot be quantified using the scientific method. Science cannot tell us if an action is right or wrong. And since the Enlightenment steadfastly renounced and denounced moral absolutes, it left a vacuum where once there was a divinely grounded configuration of good and evil. The rest is history – a history of utopias that became living hells, weapons that can wipe out the planet several times over, the implosion of the family.

As humanity recognized from the beginning, there is a divine moral order in the Universe. And we humans have breached it. Hence we have the universal practice of sacrifice in atonement and expiation.

Sciences speak in Mathematics, languages speak of grammar, and man speaks of order, what is between grammar, order and maths?

What is common in all of them is what we might call “mind.”

Science has shown us that all energy involves intelligent information processing driven by mathematically precise laws. And as such it is a manifestation of mind. This was highlighted by the Nobel Prize winner Eugene Wigner (whom I knew and who contributed a paper to one of my books) in his famous paper The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences:

The statement that the laws of nature are written in the language of mathematics was properly made three hundred years ago. it is now more true than ever before. In order to show the importance which mathematical concepts possess in the formulation of the laws of physics, let us recall, as an example, the axioms of quantum mechanics. (…)

It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human mind can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions, or to the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind’s capacity to divine them. (…)

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.

Mind is anything that

• processes information
• causes effects by acting either on its own or through ordered laws of nature
• moves toward a goal going from point A to point B
• adapts to its environment
• interacts with other entities

Metaverse of Mind

There are five “kinds of minds” – mind platforms – that appear in a sequence in cosmic history, each an advancement on the one before and seven “kingdoms” of mind. They make up the Metaverse of Mind. The mind platforms of the Metaverse (Minds 1 through 5) may be compared to the various domains of the tree of life (archaea, bacteria and eukarya). As in the tree of life where kingdoms fall under domains (monera, protista, fungi, plantae, animalia), there are kingdoms of mind under its domains.

The Metaverse of Mind forms the infrastructure of the cosmos.

We speak of the intelligence of the computer and artificial intelligence, can a computer write a poem or a novel like the Karamazov Brothers?

Today, machine learning, natural language, deep learning, neural networks, semantic search, large language models, generative AI, products like Chat GPT and the new intelligent technologies that are constantly being developed have entirely changed the face of AI.

Meaning-processing is what is critical to the human use of language: we understand: we process meaning with concepts. Computers are not capable of meaning-processing: they perform computations with the output of symbols being determined by the input of symbols: it is entirely a matter of 1s and 0s: there is no understanding or seeing of meaning involved. Further, language inevitably involves concepts. Concepts cannot be physically stored or retrieved. Computers or brains only involve pulses and ions – not symbols, universals or meanings.

Equally important, even AI experts recognize that the kind of data-processing and query responses taking place in today’s AI systems are entirely different from the cognitive processing of humans. Software programs have been trained in pattern recognition of various kinds by their human creators. Such recognition is made possible through machine learning algorithms (created by humans). Layer after digital layer of nodes modeled on the human brain are “trained” to find patterns with methods like “back propagation.” These algorithms automatically “recognize” patterns, connections and regularities in data of various kinds be they textual or visual or something else.

Such “recognition” should not be confused with the conscious, conceptual recognition found in humans. We understand and connect using both concepts and the data received by our senses. AI systems use algorithms (created by us) to detect patterns in digitized representations of huge datasets (uploaded by us). The system itself is made up of hardware and software elements. On the one hand, you have sophisticated processing circuits, sometimes multiple circuits working in parallel, that are capable of working on billions of data elements to find patterns. On the other hand, you have the data mining, machine learning, natural language processing, neural network and other software programs that churn through the data to find connections and take actions.

The AI system operates in a digitized artificial world created by us to perform functions on our behalf using mathematical symbols. We live in the real world of events, experiences, people and think and act on the basis of our conceptual and perceptual processing.