Science & Scientist 2022 Press Release
Krishna Keshava Dasa
Press Release
10th International Conference
Science and Scientist 2022: Difference between Artificial and Natural Intelligence
December 12-13, 2022
9:00 am - 08:00 pm IST [GMT/UTC+5:30]
Venue: Sri Chaitanya Saraswat Institute, Nabadwipa Road, Thakurtala, Nrisinghapur, Bishnupur, Nadia West Bengal, India
https://scienceandscientist.org/conference/2022
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The Sri Chaitanya Saraswat Institute of Spiritual Culture and Science, Narasimhapalli, Nabadwip Dham, is organizing the 10th international conference Science and Scientist 2022 in collaboration with the Bhakti Vedanta Institute of Spiritual Culture and Science, Princeton, New Jersey, USA. The conference is also being partially sponsored by the Indian Council for Philosophical Research, New Delhi, India.
The conference will be attended by many important scientists from top institutions across India such as various IITs and AIIMS, in addition to scientists and scholars from the USA, United Kingdom, and Spain. The theme is "Difference between Artificial Intelligence and Natural Intelligence." Questions such as "can computers think?" are considered very important in modern universities. In nature, however, we never observe thought emerging from matter or life coming from non-life. Indic traditions have always been favorable towards a rational and intelligent approach to understanding reality. It is based on a system of pramana and prameyas. Science also means the study of causes. All life forms are teleological and intelligent. But in dead matter, we do not find such problem-solving capacity. AI is doing a lot of good for mankind in terms of technology, but its ontological position is not clearly admitted. Advanced research has revealed that AI takes a very simplified view of the biological neuronal network, and some have developed the misconception that machines may develop consciousness in the future and even enslave human beings. Biological intelligence-producing systems have a holistic organicity that mechanical artificial neural networks do not have. The integration and simple logical processing of signals happens many times within a single neuron, making the computation several orders of magnitude more complex in biological neural networks. Sabine Hauert of the University of Bristol, UK, says "Robots are not going to replace humans". AI is only as good as the amount and quality of data it has. Humans design AI to achieve a goal, and AI can also make bad decisions. Thus, while biological intelligence is holistic, systemic, omnipresent, teleological, etc., AI is mechanistically constructed, lacks internal teleology, and is reductionistic.
The Vedantic School of Lord Sri Krishna Chaitanya Mahaprabhu is called the Brahma-Madhva-Gaudiya Sampradaya. Srila A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada taught that life comes from life. Matter comes from life. Life does not emerge from non-sentient mechanical systems. Life always comes from another life of the same species. This is the evident truth in nature. Srila Bhakti Rakshaka Sridhara Dev-Goswami Maharaja advised that scientists should think and inquire about what the source of this intelligence is. Srila Sridhara Maharaja asked Professor S. N. Bose, who developed the foundation for the famous Bose statistics, about the source of this consciousness that gives us so many mathematical expressions in physics. If we can study this, we will find something wonderful.
To highlight the substantial role of the conscious self, Sripad Bhakti Madhava Puri Maharaja, Ph.D., (Serving Director, Bhakti Vedanta Institute, Princeton, NJ, USA) who is the Conference Chair of Science and Scientist 2022, explains:
"From the reader’s perspective, a book is composed of alphabetical letters; but the book itself did not originate from these letters. Ultimately it is from the ideas of the author that the letters of the book come to be. In the same way, the molecules of a biological organism are the result, not the origin of life. This exemplifies the difference between the order in which we come to know things (Latin: ordo cognoscendi) and the order in which something comes to be (ordo essendi)."
Support and credence for these views come from the work of many scientists. Leading Nobel biologist Barbara McClintock and others have shown the incompleteness of the Central Dogma of Crick, which shook the foundations of molecular biology the hardest. DNA alone is not sufficient to explain the cell, and there is no dominant genomic unit. Rather, the cell is structurally and functionally a holistic unit of life that clearly demonstrates cognitive behavior. Cells and organisms sense their environment and transmit that information to their genomes. Evidence surprises the conventional biological mindset that still thinks that variations (mutations) are random. As explained by biologist James Shapiro, the genome is a read-write storage system, not a read-only system like Crick envisioned. Genome formatting and compaction, chromatin formatting, epigenetic regulation, and so on that were not possible in the Central Dogma are now regular features of standard molecular biology. In this way, transduction, natural genetic engineering, error recognition and repair, and controlled orchestrated goal-oriented structure-function integrity of the cell have challenged all mechanical views of the cell.
Life is a systemic web of all life, where all species are co-dependent and co-producing. There is a significant shift in modern biology. It is becoming less mechanistic, more sentient, holistic, systemic, and organically integrated ‘web of all life’. This conference is meant to contribute to such scientific progress by offering significant insights from the Bhagavat Vedantic conception of reality.
Science and Scientist 2022 proposes that modern scientific research and development seem to be leading to a detente between science and the more spiritual ideas of soul and God as found in all world religions. The positive and progressive movement of science continues to leave behind old and outworn ideas and embrace more comprehensive ones that may express life and its origin more adequately.