What is consciousness? Vedanta faces off with neuroscience, physics, and AI

A washerman finds a diamond and starts using it to scrub fabric, not knowing what he holds in his hands. That image opens Swami Sarvapriyananda's talk at the India Today Conclave, a debate event hosted by Indian media. The diamond, he says, is consciousness: everyone uses it all the time, and few know what it is.

Sarvapriyananda is a monk of the Ramakrishna Order and a teacher of Advaita Vedanta, the Indian school that teaches the unity of the self and ultimate reality. In the talk, he puts that tradition face to face with neuroscience, quantum physics, and artificial intelligence. The underlying question, what consciousness is, still has no consensus answer in science, and Vedanta's position is one possible philosophical answer, not a laboratory result.

What Vedanta calls consciousness

For Advaita Vedanta, consciousness is what is always present behind any experience: seeing, hearing, thinking, dreaming, suffering, or remembering. In Sanskrit, the classical definition is anidam chaitanyam. The swami interprets it this way: consciousness is that which is never an object, but makes possible the experience of every object.

Hence the distinction between mind and consciousness. The mind is what passes: thoughts and emotions that come and go. Consciousness would be the witness, a silent observer that never changes. Many Western theories, he says, still conflate the two.

The hard problem

He takes on the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness, formulated by philosopher David Chalmers: how do subjective experiences, qualia, arise from physical phenomena like neurons and synapses? Qualia is the term for the felt character of an experience, such as the redness one sees or the pain one feels.

The swami criticizes two influential theories, global workspace theory and integrated information theory. In his assessment, both make an unjustified leap from the objective to the subjective, without explaining the passage from matter to mind. The critique reflects a real debate in the field, where no theory holds consensus.

Consciousness and death

When someone dies, the body disappears, but that doesn't prove, the monk argues, that consciousness ends. He notes that every religion agrees that something survives. In Vedanta, consciousness is neither born nor dies. Reincarnating would be like changing clothes, and the essential being would remain intact. The goal, in this view, isn't some future heaven, but realizing that the person already is the infinite.

Science has no established evidence either for or against the survival of consciousness after death. It's an open question.

Psychedelics, AI, and quantum physics

The swami mentions mystical experiences induced by psychedelics, but warns they don't prove a genuine spiritual awakening. True self-knowledge would come from directly observing one's own mind and emotions, not from altered states.

On AI, he argues it can simulate every function of the human mind, from writing poems to composing music, except consciousness. The reason, he says, is that consciousness isn't an algorithm, it's presence, and no engineer today knows where to even begin reproducing genuine self-awareness.

Finally, he sees echoes of Vedanta in quantum physics, especially in the idea that an object's properties are only defined once observed, as in the collapse of the wave function, and cites Carlo Rovelli and Erwin Schrödinger as scientists who drew close to Indian philosophy. For him, reality would be a construction that depends on consciousness. This is a philosophical and controversial reading: among physicists there's no agreement on the role of consciousness in quantum measurement, and many reject that interpretation.

Four questions

The talk closes with four questions that, for him, Vedanta still answers well: who am I, what comes after death, what truly exists, and whether science accounts for everything. The invitation is to turn inward and discover that consciousness is the foundation of everything, and coincides with the one asking the question. Science, for its part, keeps asking from the outside.