{"id":20563,"date":"2015-10-19T14:05:28","date_gmt":"2015-10-19T14:05:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/?p=20563"},"modified":"2015-10-19T14:06:00","modified_gmt":"2015-10-19T14:06:00","slug":"life-comes-from-life-and-matter-comes-from-life-discussed-in-a-peer-reviewed-paper-in-journal-communicative-integrative-biology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/?p=20563","title":{"rendered":"‘Life comes from Life’ and ‘Matter comes from Life’ discussed in a Peer Reviewed Paper in Journal ‘Communicative & Integrative Biology’"},"content":{"rendered":"
A recent paper entitled “Life and Consciousness – The Ved\u0101ntic View<\/b>” has been published in the Journal Communicative & Integrative Biology<\/i><\/b>. <\/div>\n
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Life and Consciousness – The Ved\u0101ntic View<\/b> <\/span>
(DOI:http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.1080\/19420889.2015.1085138<\/a>)<\/span><\/p>\n
Journal: Communicative & Integrative Biology (Read Paper as: HTML<\/a> || PDF<\/a>) 
Publication date – 09 Oct 2015 (Online) 
Author:  Bhakti Niskama Shanta (ORCID-0000-0002-2039-3249<\/a>)<\/div>\n

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Summary (<\/b>Bhakti Niskama Shanta (2015) Life and consciousness \u2013 The Ved\u0101ntic view<\/span>,Communicative & Integrative Biology, <\/i>8:5, e1085138; DOI: <\/span>10.1080\/19420889.2015.1085138<\/span><\/a>):<\/b><\/span>
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This paper serves as a critique to the ontological view of the organism as a complex machine. In the seventeenth century, the French philosopher Ren\u00e9 Descartes claimed that only the human body has a soul, and all other organisms are mere automatons made of meat and bones. Influenced by such a line of thought, most of the scientists were also thinking that only humans are conscious and all other creatures are not. Based on empirical evidence, our published paper presents a case for ubiquity of consciousness in all living organisms. Not only the unicellular organisms (say, bacteria) display cognitive behavior, but that even individual cells in the multicellular organisms exhibit individual cognitive behavior. The scientific confirmation of the existence of consciousness in unicellular organisms and plants certainly establishes that the brain is not the source of consciousness. In modern science, it is generally assumed that matter existed before the universe came to be. However, the dominant materialistic or reductionistic view in modern science cannot explain how matter acquired cognitive features like thinking, feeling and willing. A reductionistic analysis is just a pretension to study life, but in actuality it only deals with the study of dead matter, which is devoid of consciousness. In our paper we termed such types of studies in science as abiology<\/i>, because a study devoid of cognitive analysis of reality is not a biology proper. On the other hand, the Ved\u0101ntic view states that the origin of everything material and non material is sentient and absolute (unconditioned). Thus, sentient life is primitive and reproductive of itself \u2013 omne vivum ex vivo<\/i> \u2013 life comes from life. This is the scientifically verified law of experience. Life is essentially cognitive and conscious. And, consciousness, which is fundamental, manifests itself in the gradational forms of all sentient and insentient nature.
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Even though in both artifacts (machines) and living organisms, the ends are determined by purpose (a cognitive act), the difference is that in the case of artifacts, the purpose (designer) is outside the system (external teleology), and in the case of a living organism, the purpose is within (internal teleology). Following a linear logic in the case of artifacts, parts are produced and combined into a whole by the designer. On the other hand, following a circular logic, the body of the living organism appears from another living organism by a developmental process (cell division) and not by the linear accumulation of parts \u2013 design. Therefore, proposals like \u201cartificial life\u201d, \u201cartificial intelligence\u201d, \u201csentient machines\u201d and so on are only fairytales because no designer can produce an artifact with the properties like internal teleology (Naturzweck<\/i>) and formative force (bildende Kraft<\/i>). In other words, a machine will never do things for its own internal purpose and it cannot build itself. Although the attempt towards mechanization of nature served as an important driving force behind the scientific revolution, it also unfortunately created an image of a clockwork universe set in motion by an intelligent first cause. Such machine analogy is also applied to living organisms. However, the view that a supernatural being, God, is external to living organisms and that He imposes form on matter from the outside (intelligent design) is also reductionistic, and shows a logical fallacy. The logic of extrinsically<\/i> purposive systems (machines) cannot be applied to intrinsically<\/i> purposive systems (living organisms). The Ved\u0101ntic view offers a scientific alternative (The invocation of \u015ar\u012b \u012a\u015bopani\u1e63ad<\/i> provides the concept of \u2018Organic Wholism\u2019: om\u0301 p\u016brn\u0323am adah\u0323 p\u016brn\u0323am idam\u0301 p\u016brn\u0323\u0101t p\u016brn\u0323am udacyate p\u016brn\u0323asya p\u016brn\u0323am \u0101d\u0101ya p\u016brn\u0323am ev\u0101va\u015bis\u0323yate<\/i>): \u201c\u2018Organic Wholes\u2019 produces \u2018organic wholes\u2019 and an \u2018organic whole\u2019 cannot arise from parts that have to be mechanically assembled. The process of externally assembling parts can only produce inorganic, mechanical machines or chemical processes, not living organisms.\u201d Empirical evidence shows that every living cell comes from a living cell and there is no single evidence that shows a case where a living cell appears from the external assembly\/accumulation of biomolecules. According to Ved\u0101nta: \u201cjanm\u0101dy asya yata\u1e25<\/i>\u201d \u2013 the origin of everything is \u201cabhij\u00f1a\u1e25 svar\u0101\u1e6d<\/i>\u201d \u2013 the unitary Supreme Cognizant Being. Twenty first century biology teaches us that we should not inflict our ideas on nature; let nature reveal herself to us.<\/div>\n

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The rapid progress in molecular and cellular biology is becoming more and more incompatible to Darwinian line of thinking and thus offering challenges from various angles to refute the core of Darwinism. In Darwinism, organisms are often assumed as optimally designed machines blindly engineered by natural selection. However, the cognitive view of life in 21st Century offers a significant challenge to this blind presumption. Living organisms exhibit many overtly noticeable goal-oriented or teleological activities (self-determination, self-formation, self-preservation, self-reproduction, self-restitution and so on), which make them distinct from insentient mechanical and chemical systems. Darwin\u2019s Origin of Species <\/i>invokes natural selection to explain the goal-driven activities of the living organisms, but the Darwinist insists that random mutations are exclusively responsible for the gradual but steady appearance of more complicated organisms. This irrational inability to scientifically explain how novel body types arise in study of life and its evolution is the major deficiency of Darwinism. In contrast to the idea of objective evolution of bodies, as envisioned by Darwin and followers, Ved\u0101nta advocates the idea of subjective evolution of consciousness as the developing principle of the world. In Ved\u0101nta, the reincarnation theory is based on the subjective evolution of consciousness and the Darwinian objective evolution theory of bodies is a perverted representation of this ancient wisdom. In Darwinism, evolution means transformation of bodies, and in Ved\u0101ntic view evolution means transformation of consciousness. In this paper, an attempt has been made to highlight a few relevant developments supporting a sentient view of life in scientific research, which has caused a paradigm shift in our understanding of life and its origin.<\/div>\n

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\"HareBy Tilak Krishna Das<\/strong><\/p>\n

This paper serves as a critique to the ontological view of the organism as a complex machine. In the seventeenth century, the French philosopher Ren\u00e9 Descartes claimed that only the human body has a soul, and all other organisms are mere automatons made of meat and bones. Influenced by such a line of thought, most of the scientists were also thinking that only humans are conscious and all other creatures are not. Based on empirical evidence, our published paper presents a case for ubiquity of consciousness in all living organisms. Not only the unicellular organisms (say, bacteria) display cognitive behavior, but that even individual cells in the multicellular organisms exhibit individual cognitive behavior. The scientific confirmation of the existence of consciousness in unicellular organisms and plants certainly establishes that the brain is not the source of consciousness. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20563"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20568,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20563\/revisions\/20568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}