Is the experiential a science?

“GRAVITATING EASTWARDS.”

This article is written jointly by Deepak Loomba and Dr. Gregg Henrique.

DEEPAK LOOMBA:

Indian civilization had a tradition of verbal transfer of knowledge (called ‘shruti’) as common or in certain periods more common that in form of written records (smriti) owing to:

A) Primality of experience over objective knowledge. 

B) Preservation of the caste system in India, because verbal transfer of knowledge enabled selective knowledge transfer. Tutors were an elite guild, which  defended its turf by limiting knowledge dissemination to its own, verbally. Restricting a written word is difficult. A very methodical language of mankind, Sanskrit was not vernacular.

What were A) & B) doing to India, while James Watt was building his steam engine?

The outcome of focus on self, individualism, experiential sciences, casteism & propagation of education only among elite upper castes (more through verbal tradition) & lack of theoretically objective and written dissemination of knowledge in India was that the industrial revolution skirted us - both intellectually & culturally.

Experiential Science 

Individualism & Intent, as also Plurality naturally lead to primality of experiential sciences vis-a-vis objective.

Thinking from first principles was common in India & India traditionally advanced in experiential sciences like healthcare. It may lack in novel healthcare gadgets, but in clinical practise, which requires subjective & experiential understanding of what a patient undergoes, Indians are amongst the best in the world, whether in India or in U.K., the USA, Canada, South Africa or Australia. 

Psychology is an interesting case study in the west. It  suffered from a lack of its recognition as a science in western academic tradition of objective & exact sciences. The lack of comprehension of ‘experiential’ as science led to forced metamorphosis of many psychologists into ‘Cognitive Scientists’ at first. Thereafter cognitive science was mated with neurology to become ‘neurocognitive sciences’. To do aforementioned, the experiential was reduced to the minimum & objective gadgets (fMRIs and Electroencephalography) were introduced for objectivity. 

There is a fallacious perception in the western scientific community that experiential is faith-based. Experiential is as scientific as objectivized knowledge. As such there is nothing perfectly objective in the world. All that is termed objective is marginally subjective. 

Reasons: Two of the important postulates of ALCCO Approach (proposed by this author) are - (i) absence of perfect objectivity in a world with observer as the universe changes irrevocably owing to entropy increase by the time a measurement by the same or two separate observers is repeated & (ii) Fruitlessness of causality in a world without observer. Latter (lack of causality) makes measurement useless altogether.

Objective scientific knowledge is: “Anyone, using the described technique or art will produce foretold results. It is a state of chronospatially segregated observers & observed”; and

experiential scientific knowledge is: “Only those using the described art ‘will’ experience the foretold, heuristic results. It is a state of merger of the observer with the observed, which is  self-observation”.

Please note that in the definition of ‘experiential scientific knowledge’ the word ‘will’ is crucial because of its critical import. If ‘will’ is replaced by ‘may’, experiential scientific knowledge is reduced to experience & it loses its ‘scientific knowledge' tag immediately.

Heuristics & Experiential Sciences

Heuristic solution is one which is known to lie in a region but cannot be pinpointed. Example is recooking a food recipe, it is never exactly the same in inputs & process, but the output is closely similar, not same).

Heuristics don’t make anything unscientific, conversely, the most advanced sciences of machine learning and deep learning (AI) & quantum mechanics are based on heuristic outputs, instead of rule/law based (with zero deviation on every repetition). 

Discomfort with heuristic is the reason that the west finds quantum mechanics ‘counter-intuitive’. India, conversely, treats the heuristical as it’s comfort zone, owing to primacy of experiential sciences in previous ages, preceding the advent of objective science through British. And experiential as deduced previously is essentially heuristic. 

Learning music (experiential) is not less scientific than reading the notes. Western scientific development is in some sense faith-based knowledge dispersion (please note: I specified ‘dispersion’, not ‘generation’), while eastern is strictly experimental. I call western knowledge-dispensing faith-based because objectivized knowledge is taken for granted - on faith. All facts of science are discovered and documented by a few people whether discovery of Higgs boson or precession of mercury; a commoner has no access to tools & knowledge to undertake any of these experiments himself. But since these discoveries and inventions are repeated a few times to check for standard deviations & the papers, patents are peer-reviewed [which just means overwhelmingly voted ‘in favour of’ by the community], it is ‘considered’ objective. How large is the voting community? A few, maximum tens of people, at best; among billions, who just ‘believe’. The situation with objective knowledge becomes more grim as fake or substandard peer reviews start authenticating critical information (ironically in India referred to as ‘whatsapp university’). Journalism has lost public trust, I am afraid, the rot is spreading to academia. The higher the sources of information, the lower is the capability to review and extract worthwhile knowledge from it. I hope that technology can at least partially resolve this issue of peer reviews, making it more rigorous & democratic. Undersigned with a small team of peers is working on this problem.

Experiential knowledge on the contrary, cannot be accessed without self-experimentation & indulgence of the learner.

My aim is not to celebrate experiential by disparaging objective, but to state that both experiential and objective are scientific and have their own areas of excellence. Every such area, where rapid development is required through use, experiential is ideal, while all that needs to be disseminated as tangible or intangible is good to be objectivized. Experiential is by definition heuristic, slight deviations are expected & valued, till the overall experience is close enough. This allows & encourages easy & quick mutation.

Experiential & Transcendental 

Transcendental is experientially complex and there is no way to match what one feels in a specific state to how another feels in purportedly similar state. My understanding of transcendental is

“an unanticipated (previously never experienced) mutation in perception (a new experience).” 

It is a deviation in one’s sensory-nervous system in response to an internal (lower systemic complexity) or external (higher systemic complexity) stimuli, where newer types of signals are processed. We are in an ocean of signals, and laws of evolution determine, which of these signals are processed and interpreted and which are left unreacted to. The world one sees, emits light in practically all wavelengths but our response system is capable of interpreting only violate to red (VIBGYOR), but sometimes in a deviated (mutant) state our response system processes more signals in range or amplitude then usual, former leads to transcendental experiences, which happen in sleep, dreams, deep sleep, yoga, meditation; while the latter (recognition of substantially deviated stimuli & production of similarly, substantially deviated amplitude) leads to untethering of amplitude of response from the constraints a state common on use of psychedelics (there are tons of papers being written on psychedelics in all major science conferences). It is important to distinguish distorted experiences (deviation in amplitude) from new experiences (new range) and only the latter one is transcendental.

Can transcendental & experiential be miraculous or supranatural? 

Not at all. I reject any supranatural constitution of either transcendental or experiential. I treat it as phenomena, yet not within the reach of easy human comprehension. Probably as experiential sciences start developing, transcendental experiences will be controlled and accessed as laughter shows on television.

The resolution of the hard problem of Consciousness lies not in objectivizing the subjective, but in understanding the constituency of the subjective, it’s evolution & ways to measure it heuristically. 

DR. GREGG HENRIQUE:

I have, indeed, been tilting Eastward. I humbly confess woeful ignorance of Indian tradition. My limited experience of Indian culture suggests to me that it is a beautiful tapestry of many diverse strands of being and thought that have deep roots in honorable wisdom traditions stretching back to the very beginnings of human civilization.  

I am socialized and trained as an American psychologist. I say this with a mixture of feelings, as I have a “love/hate” relationship with my professional home. My ambivalent attitude stems from the fact that the field both has done some brilliant things and at the same time is a bit schizophrenic. I believe it is misguided in its current fragmented, empirical identity. That is, American psychology is fractured and confused and has a multitude of voices that will never be reconciled into a coherent frame of understanding simply via applying the methods of empirical science. In 2011, I wrote A New Unified Theory of Psychology, where I argued a new set of foundational concepts is needed to bring out its full potential and effectively define the science of psychology and generate a more unified approach to psychotherapy.

Deepak Loomba’s analysis of experience & the difference between the subjective & objective, are rightly the conundrums that have always haunted the field. Modern scientific tradition that emerges in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries was anchored to a fundamental shift in how knowledge is justified. Specifically, scientists like Galileo hated metaphysics and believed that the best map of the world was to be achieved via logic, mathematics & the measurement & experimentation of matter in motion. Aristotle believed that knowledge was justified if perception and logic effectively gripped and cohered with reality to create a shared understanding. However, the presupposition that this formula is sufficient was blown up by the revelation by Copernicus and Galileo’s heliocentric model of the solar system. Subjective perception, even if agreed upon by the group to be reasonable and consistently coherent, was shown to be potentially flawed. Empirical observation from the third person exterior vantage point and grounded in measurement, mathematical analysis, and experimentation was then seen to be the way objective knowledge was justified. (See here for a wonderful transcript of a lecture summarizing these issues).

Of course, if one’s subject matter is the experiencing self, this requirement of data being anchored to the exterior point of view is a bit of a problem. Psychology faced what I call an “epistemological gap”. As Deepak notes, because of the way experience has been treated in India, this was not the case in that tradition. To deal with this gap and scientifically study the mind (which, BTW, might mean cognition or consciousness, depending on the paradigm), psychologists invented the concept “behavior”; which refers to observing how an animal exhibits awareness and functional response from the exterior. It turns out to be a very interesting concept. As this recent academic paper argues, I think psychologists are confused about how to think about it. I shift the traditional focus and differentiate “mental behavior” from behavior in general. I argue that the latter can serve as a unifying construct for “objective” science writ large. That is, I have come to see modern empirical natural science as being the systematic analysis of the structure and the processes (i.e., behaviors) of the universe across the scales, levels, and dimensions of existence. The Tree of Knowledge System provides a map of this view, depicting cosmic evolution as an unfolding wave of behavior across four different dimensions (Matter, Life, Mind, and Culture), mapped by four different domains of science (Physical, Biological, Psychological, and Social). My theoretical work has been on showing how this frame of matching these dimensions of reality to these domains of science can resolve psychology’s problems with being fragmented and poorly defined and we can generate a much more coherent identity.

Appreciation for major therapy approaches drove me to wonder about why these insights were not tied to the science of human psychology. It was through asking this question and diving into the literature that it dawned on me just how fragmented psychology was at the basic theoretical level. This fascinated me. Why did physicists and chemists and biologists have such strong, consensual agreement about their subject matter, but psychologists had nothing of the sort? 

This awareness of what I came to call “the problem of psychology” led me down several rabbit holes and, I believe, some new insights. First, I believe that psychology’s problems stem from what I call the “Enlightenment Gap”. This refers to the fact that the Enlightenment (perhaps, unlike India) failed to generate a proper understanding of the relationship between matter and mind and between social and scientific understanding. Lacking such a frame, the science of psychology was doomed to be inadequately or incompletely framed at their foundation. 

It also resulted in my generating the “Unified Theory of Knowledge” (UTOK). I believe the UTOK carries the needed insights for bridging and resolving the Enlightenment Gap and solving the problem of psychology. It is named in reference to the influential book by E. O. Wilson. In Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, he called for a vision of knowledge that could bridge the natural and social sciences with the humanities. I argue the problem of psychology is at the very center of the fractured divisions between the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. By developing a system that offers the proper relations between matter and mind and social and scientific knowledge, the UTOK solves the problem of psychology, fills the Enlightenment Gap, and affords us a new, more holistic vision of both reality and scientific knowledge. 

It has also allowed me to break out of some of the confines in the traditions that I grew up with. This, in turn, has opened me to explore other traditions and drawn me in new directions. For example, Deepak’s ALCCO Approach (in Book titled “Awareness & Consciousness, Distinction, Discovery & Evolution. The New Upanishad”) seems powerful and comprehensive, and I look forward to learning more. Indeed, there is much in the East I find to be enticing and transformative. I am tilting Eastward. It most definitely is the case.

 

Plurality & India

Deep analysis, exhibits that India has a profound advantage over the west, thanks to more than a hundred years of theoretically objective education (initially forced by British Colonizers) along with a tradition of experiential science. Both the aforementioned have led to Indian Republic irrevocably becoming plural in continuation of its 3 millenia of existence.

Plurality is an unvoidably bold outcome of Indians’ subjective experiential understanding of the world. Indians do not try imposing objective realities. Most is experiential, verbal (shruti) and hence always with differences & deviations. Differences therefore, are innately accepted in Indic civilization as we consider deviation as the natural way of existence, development & progress. Irrespective of how much the western media (incl. NYT) raises alarms on threats to plurality in India, fact is, we are plural not by imposition of constitutional obligations or law (like the USA), derived by trials and tribulations of three centuries but by the gene that reproduces us.

Indians are heuristically & semiotically advanced. Western societies are good in objective rule-based approach. Indian vehicular traffic vis-a-vis western is an excellent representation of the heuristic (Indian traffic) vs rule-based (western) approach. A society in which heuristic outcomes are welcomed, plurality is an unavoidable spin-off. Heuristic outcomes are always different though they are easily recognizable as having the same meaning. Concomitantly, heuristic outcomes today are heuristic inputs tomorrow. Making the progression heuristic not rule based. It is like cooking. No one uses exactly same quantities of inputs, from the same vendor, or the produce of same agricultural field or same crop. All inputs vary, and so does the output. Yet, one can easily distinguish the foods cooked by a spouse and a parent, which means it’s taste is well-understood & recorded in memory.

In their foundation, western Abrahamic societies are non-plural. They start with one God, one right way, ideal inputs and — right or wrong, good or bad, moral or immoral outputs, with greyscales recognized only outside of religion. Plurality is a recent phenomenon in west, though the circumstances in America in recent months puts this assumption to doubt & stress test. Heuristically & semiotically advanced societies (like India) are plural because they neither have one God, nor one way, everything is in grey, morality and immorality are let to be described by the society in concurrence with time, laws & rules are interpreted in context. The last two salience — contextual laws & time sensitive morality actually are the keys to Indic civilization’s in continuum existence through 3+ millenia.

Giving benefit of doubt to western media complaints of an attack on Indian plurality, & introspecting it (Indian plurality), one realizes that a monolithic India is a figment of imagination of either those who have never known or visited India or those who are undertakers of a political propaganda. What can change the DNA of a people that governed their existence for last 3 millenia? Dislike of Muslims is what the western media accuses current Indian ruling party of. But Muslims are just one of hundreds of religious, linguistic, racial, regional minorities of India. How does that make India not plural? Since, I am neither an advocate not a critic of the ruling party, I refrain from projecting my view on how ruling party treats Muslim minority because my view has no place to be. Only the Muslims of India are the right source of response to such a question. But it is pertinent to inform my readers that a Muslim Party (Muslim League, though not a representative body of all Muslims of India) partitioned undivided India into current plural India and the Islamic States of Pakistan and Bangladesh. The partition was bloody with half a million dead on all three sides (India, Pakistan & Bangladesh). It also is a fact that thanks to incitement by Pakistan, minority Hindus in Kashmir Valley were forcefully evicted after 219 of them were killed in a single predominantly Muslim region of India (Kashmir) and are till date living as refugees (internally displaced) in their own country. Local sporadic riots & acrimony have existed before partition in 1947 and fact is deaths due to religious acrimony have reduced substantially in average in last last few years of the current ruling party. But, there is a reality beyond statistics, and some reset in assertiveness of all minorities taken together vis-a-vis Muslim minority seems evident. Having said that I have no hesitation is saying that we are a proud plural nation, which undeniably is dealing with its wounds of past in a much mature fashion no worse than that of France, Europe or America. Though none of them (except America are as multicultural as India). Having said that, bad examples are not sensible to be followed or quoted as justification of one’s own under-performance. I personally bet, India is and will remain plural, where all minorities accommodate each other because we are all different, heuristic and semiotically plural. And while religion separates Indian Muslims from other minorities their shared culture in a specified region unites them with locals. Pakistan is a contrarian case, where different cultures were neglected in favour of one religion. Result — it is in an endless war with itself. I believe culture to be a much stronger & dominant gene vis-a-vis religion. The French have no problems with those of their Muslim brethren, who are culturally French, though religiously they might follow Islam in their personal lives. Irrespective of the concept of Ummah, Islam remained a religion, at best — a religious-political identity, but never became a single culture throughout its existence, though it seemed to be desired by its founding fathers. In the meanwhile, India has innumerable instances of Hindu Muslim marriages and at least the differences are now on the table to discuss and resolve. In a veiled manner for 70 years the Indian Republic disfavoured Muslims by letting them live their lives somewhat disjoined from mainstream and to be really honest no different from how similar 10% Muslims were treated in Europe — left to live in their own areas as in France. And no one in India talked about this isolation of Muslims from the mainstream, as it was ‘politically incorrect’, leaving innocent populations at the mercy of clergy, which let no social progress and modernization happen. Muslims in India were left to sort out their problems by themselves, which for me as a patriot, who keeps ‘Indianness’ above any religion (whether mine or someone else’s) is unpalatable. Why can’t the Republic enable social progress of a community by giving voice to moderate and progressive Muslims? Unfortunately, media portrays the trouble making clergy as representatives of Muslims; not Muslim professors, thinkers, artists, scientists & professionals, who could be in reality, the intellectual backbone of a progressing community and ensure a tandem with other communities of India. And I suspect the media purposefully does that as it serves good for divisive politics. An important caveat — my preceding statements in no manner should be construed as a justification for any discrimination that anyone, even a single Muslim undergoes in the multi-coloured, multi-ethnic, multi-racial Republic of India. We are a Republic of all Bharatiye (Indians) barring none, living together on basis of a constitution & rule of law. And I would encourage every minority community, Muslim or other, to approach Indian Courts of law for any discrimination that is forced upon them whether on basis of caste, community, religion or race.

And what is the problem that Muslim minority has with current ruling party — they (ruling party & their ideologues) claim that most Muslims in India are Hindus, using the term ‘Hindu’ for a cultural identity, which etymologically is correct as Hindu seems to have been derived from the word Sindhu (river on the western periphery of India and Pakistan) and was for 2 millenia never used for religion. ‘India’ even till date is called ‘Al Hind’ in Arabic, which means the ‘other side of Sindhu river’. Quite similarly, the predominant language of the Indian heartland is Hindi !

Many believe that the explanation of etymology is an alibi of the current right wing ruling elite, of their tacit desire to force inferiority among Muslims by asking them to be included in the cultural ‘Hindu’ identity. I fail to understand what kind of an inferiority is enforced by someone claiming another person of different community, of being a part of his community or family or category. “You belong to us” — how can such an attitude or statement be termed discriminatory or violative of rights? Until and unless, the included party abhors inclusion.

Discrimination is that which Jewish people and many other had to undergo or the Black community underwent (undergoes) in America and indeed the lower castes rampantly undergo in India even today or the non-Muslims underwent (by having to pay Jiziya — a tax for being non-Muslim) ! Discrimination happens when minorities are forced to live in ghettos outside the city limits or are not treated at par by law and the majority community shuns the minority away! The Indian ruling ideologues on the contrary are pushing for a unification, while clearly recognizing that Islam followed by Muslims is a separate religion. And I tend to believe that beyond the politics of the word ‘Hindu’, the subsumption of Muslim identity into the subcontinent’s identity is a undeniable fact. ‘Indian Muslim’ is an identity in itself. Indian Muslims have nothing in common with Turkish or Indonesian Muslims. To avoid the constant unneeded friction of egos; why can’t we settle on ‘Hindi’ or ‘Hindustani’ as the names for the culture identities? Could the Indian heartland Muslims be called Hindi Muslims instead of Indian Muslims. Or else the ruling party ideologues settle on Hindustani Muslims & Hindustani Hindus, making Hindustani the commonality for this family reunion!?

My moot point is — how can my friend’s family be accused of being discriminating, if it emphasizes that I am a part of their family? India is an aggregated nation of minorities, co-existing with different Gods & rituals, different languages (22 at last count), different foods (39 regional cuisines of Indian origin & a similar number adopted into India), different marriages (all marriages as per local customs, which are thousands are held valid in law), different races & looks (seven at the last count), different traditions, different thought, different education (while there are English Medium schools all over, yet every state has its local language medium school education, which is predominant). India survived the British divide & rule policy and Churchill’s foxiness and gracefully carries Pakistan as a visible birthmark of the Indian Republic. It needs to be specially underlined that while Pakistan is a sovereign state, it is still Indian in nature (to avoid heartburn of Paki friends, “please call yourself as habitants of Bada Sageer — the Indian Subcontinent). The repulsion among Pakistanis to call themselves Indians and constantly try deriving themselves as the spin-offs of Arabs or Turks (both of who are intertwined into Indian culture, but not its hallmark) is a political enterprise of the Pakistani militant establishment. It will die a natural death as the wounds of partition heal. It merits mention that India(ns) not only adopted Islam, when it came knocking in 7th Century, but it also tempered & blunted it, leading to much softer & tolerant versions, east of India in Malaysia and Indonesia. India created innumerable versions & schools of Islamic thought — The Barelvis, the Deobandis, the Bohra İsmayıllı (too prospered in India though non-Indian in origin), Khojas, Twelver Shi’ism, Sufism (non-Indian origin, but mainly propagated in India, becoming almost mainstream in certain pockets), Ahmadiyya, the Quranists & many more. Not to forget that India is the proud habitat of Jewish people & Parsis (Zoroastrianism) without any persecution. India has its own way of working upon everything that is brought from anywhere in the world, to finally make it Indian. And how did we temper theoretical, objective, only in print, Islam — again by adding the experiential to it, by adopting & propagating Sufism.

India is probably the only nation invaded & settled into, so often for its riches, that ‘different’ no more scared it ever. Without a hitch India has been a home to Parsis (Iranians), Tibetians, Bangladeshis (before 1971 & after), Afghans (which in turn includes Tajiks, Uzbeks, Pashtuns). Undeniably, some of the invaders plundered & butchered the habitants, while others, smarter ones, embraced her and adopted its value system. It is because of this that Indians always focused on themselves as the subject of experience, Yoga and meditation developed & thrived here, Buddhism and Jainism happened here. Few in the west know that India is the only nation to give the world atheistic & agnostic religions (Jainism & Buddhism). For most in the west — religion and atheism are oxymorons, but not for India (& Indians).

Having said the aforementioned, and recognizing that there still are real differences to be resolved among Indian Muslims & all other Indian minorities (because India is a nation of minorities), this really does not make India non-plural and monolithic that western media has sometimes accused India of. I am a very usual, average, common, infinitesimally minute of India. I’m plural, non-discriminating, appreciating equality and equity, in love of Sufi music, in love of Hindustani food, speaking few different languages, loving the finesse of Urdu, though loyal to my mother -tongue ‘ Punjabi’, with Muslim friends and happy to welcome anyone into my house and share my meals. So, it is completely unacceptable for me (a small, average part of India) to be accused of being anti-Muslim by a Western columnist, because I am not. And I am the majority of India. Yes, it is true that like any other nation India too has a small deranged community of professional haters or soul sellers, but they do not represent India. India is us — Hindu, Muslims Sikhs, Jains, Parsis, Buddhists, Christians, Jews. Yes, with some differences that we will handle and resolve by ourselves.

India always was, and will remain a land of mystics & Gods, the land of the experiential science as much as objective modern science and hence a land of plurality

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