Subhash Kak

Subhash Kak is Distinguished Academic Scholar at Chapman University in Orange, California and Regents Professor at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater who has worked on artificial intelligence, quantum information, and history of science. He is the author of twenty books that include Mind and Self, The Wishing Tree, and The Circle of Memory. He has written extensively on the social impacts of AI and he was a member of a committee set up by SRI International to determine if computers in the future will become conscious. He has served on academic advisory committees of the Smithsonian and NIST and on the advisory boards of several technology companies. He is a member of the Indian Prime Minister’s Science, Technology and Innovation Advisory Council (PM-STIAC) since 2018.

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Issue: 12:3 (The forty sixth issue)

This paper considers the matter of representation in Vedānta by examining key claims in the Ṛgveda and the Upaniṣads, which are some of its principal texts. Specifically, we consider the logic behind the paradoxical verses on creation and the conception of consciousness as the ground on which the physical universe exists. This also is the template that explains the logical structure underlying the principal affirmations of the Upaniṣads. The five elements and consciousness are taken to pervade each other, which explains how gross matter is taken to consist of all the four different kinds of atoms that get manifested in different states of the substance. The verses on creation are an example of the use of catuṣkoṭi in Indian philosophy prior to the use of it by Nāgārjuna in the Madhyamaka tradition. It also contrasts central ideas of Vedānta with the corresponding contemporary scientific ideas on consciousness.