Sutra 2:4:11 of Brihadaranayka Upanisad on Body/Mind as jada/inert

 

All the informational pathways that are taken together and experienced as a unified field are mentioned.  They are resolved into their common denominator i.e. consciousness.  This is a progressive form of meditation or a detaching from the particularity of each stage to move on to the next finally ending in the state of absorption in pure consciousness, your fundamental natural state.

When through these successive steps sound and

the rest, together with their receiving organs, are

merged in Pure Intelligence, there are no more limiting

adjuncts, and only Brahman, which is Pure Intelli-

gence, comparable to a lump of salt, homogeneous,

infinite, boundless and without a break, remains.

Therefore the Self alone must be regarded as one with-

out a second.

 

Yes, it might be said, consciousness is one thing but the organs are material, do they just evanesce?

 

"Objection : In everyone of those instances the

mergence of the objects only has been spoken of, but

not that of the organs. What is the motive of this?

Reply: True, but the Sruti considers the organs

to be of the same category as the objects, not of a

-different category. The organs are but modes of the

objects in order to perceive them, as a light, which is

but a mode of colour, is an instrument for revealing all

colours. Similarly the organs are but modes of all

particular objects in order to perceive them, as is the

case with a lamp. Hence no special care is to be taken

to indicate the dissolution of the organs ; for these being

the same as objects in general, their dissolution is

implied by that of the objects.”

 

This is deeply important aspect of Advaitic ontology which has not been extensively commented on due to empirical psychology which regards the brain as the secretor of consciousness. For Advaita the body-mind is not conscious as such.  It is jada or inert until it is pervaded by SatChit or BeingConsciousness.

The ‘organs’ i.e. the body including the senses, is a material entity.  The objects are material entities.  The interaction of both of these is a material interaction which being pervaded by consciousness places itself on the side of the subject.  That is the basic pre-theoretic condition.  ‘The organs are the same as the objects in general’.  There is no event in the brain creating consciousness.  Defects in either the ‘organs’ or the ‘objects’ change the result of the interaction which is taken to be veridical until it fails to confirm our expectations.

The concept of the brain/mind/body as jada/inert or by nature unconscious is a profound one and requires a shift away from the standard dualistic model.

The Mind as Inert (Jada) in Vedanta

 A point I've made before. Here I put it in a compressed form as a reply to a youtube video sketching some differences between Eastern and Western philosophy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWcHlB7mG2w&t=251s

A  good succinct talk, thank you.

Another major difference in my view is that the mind is inert or unconscious or to put it another way the mind is really the body pervaded by pure consciousness and limiting that pure consciousness or expressing that pure consciousness according to its structure.  The impersonal pure consciousness is rendered personal by pervading the individual entity.  Instead of the body/mind problem you have bodymind.  This is the metaphysics behind the Yogic symbolism of the Cakras or centres of awareness throughout the body.  The whole body is minded so to speak.

Can we solve the Mind-Body problem? with Colin McGinn (1983)

If you want to feel the force of the body/mind problem as classically posed Colin McGinn is your only man. He’s the mystery man and though he elaborates his central insight into many pages of very clear and distinct prose it may be expressed as the insuperable difficulty of discovering the property that turns the cerebral events into concomitant consciousness. Unless that property is available as data then all the clever hypotheses such as identity, consciousness as epiphenomenal, as divinely tuned, etc cannot be tested. We are beached on this island of consciousness and we cannot discover how the extended and the unextended interact. This is a brute fact and there is no getting away from it. What he presents (Can we solve the Body/Mind problem ‘1983) is a problem that arises out of a classic Cartesian presentation i.e. Causal closure between the extended and the unextended). Other non-dualistic ways of cutting this knot are dismissed. In a typical footnote:

“I would also classify panpsychism as a constructive solution, since it attempts to explain consciousness in terms of properties of the brain that are as natural as consciousness itself. Attributing specks of proto-consciousness to the constituents of matter is not supernatural in the way postulating immaterial substances or divine interventions is; it is merely extravagant. I shall here be assuming that panpsychism, like all other extant constructive solutions, is inadequate as an answer to the mind-body problem-as (of course) are the supernatural 'solutions'. “

The mystery slays all solutions. Yes fine but there are data points from which to throw out the putlocks to support a transcendental hypothesis. First: we all come from rocks and gas. Second: increase is complexity and diverse capacity of the brain is linked to the evolution of the human mind. Let me just state my point in a nutshell: The human being can talk into his own ear. That is what allows one to raise the problem of the self, the mind and the body. The advaitins cut through what they call the chit jada granthi or the knot between the conscious and the inert by suggesting that the mind is itself inert and that instead of a yoked mind and body we have a bodymind that is pervaded by consciousness. The effect of this pervasion is to give us awareness that is reflective of the level of complexity of the bodymind. The interaction conundrum is obviated and awareness is somatically distributed. Vestigial centres of awareness are the relics of evolutionary development. We are aware in our guts etc because in our passage to our present refined state it was the chief organ connecting us to the world. Find this classic paper here

mystery