Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth – The Buddha.

Although I do not yet know the Truth, but I have embarked on a journey to do so. I also don’t know how long the “long” in Buddha’s quote is but that is the essence of a journey. The culmination of a journey makes sense only if it remains unknown throughout the journey. The Truth in Buddha’s quote simply means the reality of existence, from physical reality surrounding us to the metaphysical realities like our own consciousness. Science begins by investigating the objective realities, the realities that are constant irrespective of an observer. If Newton says that a ball will fall on the ground if you drop it from a building, it will be true no matter where on earth you perform this experiment. Although Newton’s law arose form empirical consideration, but it is an objective reality nonetheless. All of theoretical physics tries to model these objective relities of nature. But model is just a model. It can be far from truth. Bohr’s model of an atom perfectly modeled the atom and produced empirical results that were verified. Infact Bohr was awarded the Nobel prize in physics 1922 for this discovery. But now quantum mechanics tells us that the model was incorrect. Infact it gives a more precise picture of what is actually happening. Both of the theories remain a model at best and not reality itself. Pure Mathematics on the other hand does not bother about modelling. Once a firm ground of logic and a language of expression has been developed, pure mathematics begins its pursuit and goes on uncovering the facts of nature in a language that humans can undertand - the mathematical language. In a sense, pure mathematics only contains a core of Truth (although objective) in the sense of Buddha, all other sciences are models of truth. But it is pertinent even to understand the Truth even via a model as on its own, nature is abstract and unintelligible to the human animal.

Objective realities closer to our own beings are bodily activities, mechanisms and processes, well understood in context of human anatomy. Everybody knows the superficial realities of the human body, the metabolic activities, life processes. Biologists present to us an overwhelmingly detailed account of bodily activities. Another step forward and we are on shaky grounds. The pursuit of science is always to comprehend and explain objective realities. Once we enter the domain of brain, we immediately have a distinction. Its physical structure, response to external factors (including neuronal signals from other parts) can always be recorded using tech, but nobody knows whats actually happening. Indeed neuroscientists have developed sophisticated models to explain the neuronal activities as the Nobel laureate Eric Kandel explains in his book “In Search of Memory” a book for pedestrians like me. Everybody knows how we percieve objects, see, taste, touch, smell or feel. Do we? Consider the process of seeing, physics tells us that light is reflected from the objects and image is formed at the retina by the reflected light passing the lenses in our eyes. Here comes the problem: How does that image gets converted to electrical signals? The signals then reach the brain and the brain “sees” the objects. How indeed? This is called the “Easy Problem of Consciousness”. Get ready for the hard one! Consider the experiences that we have when we taste a cup of tea. These experiences are percieved “directly” in the sense that it is not based on some inference. Such experiences are called “First Person Experiences”. You know when you are thirsty, you dont need a doctor to perform a full body check up and then tell you that you are thristy (infact it is terribly hard for the doctor!). These questions are not at all easy to answer but the existence of first person experiences is easy to establish as we just did. Infact there is a complete branch called “Epistemology” to answer such questions. Now comes the hard problem: How do we have first person experiences? This is called the “The Hard Problem of Consciousness”. It is remarkable that cognitive science has come to appreciate this problem only recently while philosophers all over the world have been busy finding a plethora of answers.

My endeavor is to find answers to these questions. My scientific pursuit involves understanding the objective realities of the universe. Although a lifetime is not enough to understand the objective realities, the inner world remains closest of our reach although difficult to understand. We only have our five senses and an entirely unknown object above our necks to look for answers. It is up to an individual to decide a journey and walk on it. Personally, I have a feeling that only sciences cannot resolve all these questions. One needs to apply intellect at these questions because a slight shift in the domain leaves us clueless as to what approach should we take to find answers. That is why I started looking at other options to get answers. People across the globe have tried to solve these conundrums since time immemorial. In the words of Hank Green, “what is philosophy - Somebody puts forth an idea and others respond and sometimes it takes centuries for a response to come”. In other cases somebody puts forth an idea along with a practical way to test the validity of the idea. This is the essence of Eastern philosophy. Take the Buddha for example - He puts forth the Truth of human existence in the famous “Four Nobel Truths”, explains them in the “Mahasatipatthan Sutta” and gives a practical way called “Vipassana” to test the validity of his statements. The problem is - it is not immediate to apply the way and it takes a lifelong effort to verify. Even if somebody succeeds in his endeavour, he can in no way establish this for the general folks. The upshot again is the hard problem of consciousness. Nobody knows how to convert first person experiences to objective facts. Western philosophy on the other hand is all about ideas and arguments. It is more accessible to the general public. People in the west have come up with a variety of ideas about life in general and others have responded to it. Take for example the idea of “Essentialism” propounded by Plato and Aristotle in sixteenth century. Aristotle explains that every entity has a distinctive feature that makes it what it is. For example - a knife would still be a knife without the handle but it looses its “essense” if we remove its blade. If this idea is applied to the human animal then it becomes complicated. What is the essence of a human being? Aristotle would say that humans are born with a purpose, an essense given presumably by God. Philosophers in the nineteenth century most notably Jean Paul Satre and Soren Kierkegaard criticised these ideas and put forth the idea of what is called “Existentialism” which is consisely contained in the aphorism - “Existence preceeds Essence”. This means that a human being first “exists” and then chooses his essence or purpose. It also implicitly implies that humans are born with no purpose an idea which is scary for people to accept.

It goes on and on, in the end it depends on a person’s pursuits in life to decide what interests them and what they would like to explore. I also think that asking the relavant questions, whose answers are worth spending our lives on, is of utmost importance in life and people need to decide for themselves what they think to be their relavant questions. For example, what is the fundamental object of the universe can be a relavant question for physicists while the hard problem of consciousness can be a relavant question for a philosopher as well as a neuroscientist. Keep searching for your relavant question and I hope that you also find the answers in this life itself, not to mention that I don’t know if there is another life!!