Interview with Subhash Kak

On Artificial Intelligence, Fertility, Consciousness, India and more.

… stay devoted to truth, and stand up to authority if needed. It is not easy these days because many in the academia have embraced the belief that even scientific truths can be sacrificed at the altar of political correctness. But nothing is forever, and we should stay positive and focus on the larger issues of meaning and happiness for all of humanity. Doing so will not only make our individual lives fulfilling, but we will also be agents of change for the larger good.
Subhash Kak

I discovered Subhash Kak on Twitter long before it changed its name.

He has a large following and has been very supportive of my work over the last few years.

I finally decided to look him up to understand “who is this guy?”.

As you will soon see, Subhash is a polymath, with a breadth and depth of interests, knowledge, and expertise that is unique and quite breathtaking.

I’m grateful that he agreed to an interview and for the wonderfully interesting and informative exchange below.

Subhash is a reminder to me that with great gifts come great responsibility, and that their weight and power can be carried, used and directed with humility, humor, courage and care.

With thanks and appreciation to Subhash Kak.

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Introduction:

1. Your remarkable journey has taken you from Srinagar to becoming a world-renowned scientist and philosopher. Can you please tell us a bit about your childhood and growing up, and what inspired you to pursue such diverse fields, and how have your early experiences shaped your intellectual path?

Response: I grew up in small towns in Jammu and Kashmir as my father, a veterinarian, was in a transferable job. Until my 10^th grade I attended six schools including one in Leh, which is at an altitude of 11,500 ft.

As a boy, I read an enormous amount of world literature in translation: Greek, Latin, modern European, American, and Russian, in addition to Sanskrit and Hindi. After completing school, I did engineering, and then I was accepted into the Ph.D. program at IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) Delhi, where my work was on information theory. Then I was hired there as a faculty. In the mid-70s I spent a year at Imperial College, London as visiting fellow and a summer at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, which was the world’s premier research center for research in digital systems, communications, and computers. In 1979, I moved as a professor to the United States.

I was always interested in fundamental problems and my B.Tech. thesis was on general relativity. After my Ph.D., I started working on information in quantum theory, and on neural networks, which are models of the brain. I am a theorist, so it has been easy for me to move from one field to another. As a child my parents had impressed on me that in the world of ideas one had to be fearless. In my work, I have been mindful that it should go through the gauntlet of peer-reviewed journals. I should add that I have continued my interest in the arts and have written 9 books of poetry in English and Hindi.

Pioneering Research in AI and Quantum Cryptography:

2. Your pioneering work on instantaneously trained neural networks (ITNNs) and the three-stage quantum cryptography protocol has revolutionized AI and cryptography. What led you to these groundbreaking ideas, and how do you see these fields evolving in the near future?

Response: The idea of ITNNs came spontaneously in response to a question in an undergraduate class, and likewise the three-stage quantum computing protocol was a sudden insight.

This brings one to the question of how discoveries are made. Sometimes, scientific advance is the application of analogical ideas that have proven effective in other fields. But, in general, to find something new, one must think outside of the box, which is impossible so long as one is following the established framework and trying to be logical. Creative ideas come in dreams, in trances, or when one is dozing off, when the normal mind is not in control. During the creative act one is a conduit rather than an active agent, which is consistent with the testimony of artists and scientists. The French mathematician Jacques Hadamard surveyed 100 leading mathematicians of his time for the book Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field (1945) and concluded that many of them had obtained entire solutions spontaneously. This list included the claim by the great mathematician Henri Poincaré that he had arrived at the solution to a subtle mathematical problem as he was boarding a bus, and the discovery of the structure of benzene by Kekulé in a dream. My own discovery of a long-lost astronomy of the Vedic period occurred in a flash as I was reading an unrelated essay in the New Yorker Magazine by the American novelist John Updike.

I see a continuing growth in the application of neural networks to AI. Cryptography will also remain central to our networked society for it helps determine the identity of individuals and safeguards information transactions from the action of bad actors who want to steal secrets and cause mayhem.

Artificial Intelligence: Breakthroughs and Implications:

3. As a pioneer in AI, what do you consider the most significant breakthroughs in the field over the past decade, and what exciting developments do you anticipate in the coming years?

Response: Generative AI which can produce text, images, videos, or other data, often in response to prompts, is the most significant recent breakthrough in the field. This has led to chatbots such as ChatGPT and image generation systems such as Midjourney. It has potential uses in fields ranging from healthcare, finance, art and entertainment, fashion, sales and marketing, and product design. But it also creates new headaches for it can facilitate cybercrime, and fake news or deepfakes can deceive or manipulate people. It can also hasten the process of the replacement of human jobs.

Let me also speak of an important recent result in the Journal of AI and Consciousness (JAIC) in which I prove that consciousness cannot be produced by any machine, which is a relief for this means that humanity need not fear computers at an existential level. Imagine if machines were to be conscious, they would in most likelihood kill off us humans, for it is in our nature to be troublesome and we complain incessantly.

Future developments in the field of AI will be to enlarge the scope of generative AI and develop applications in medicine as in disease diagnosis and in surgery, in drug design, and in the development of robust autonomous vehicles.

4. With the rapid advancement of AI, there are growing concerns about privacy, job displacement, and the ethical implications of these technologies. How can we ensure that AI is developed and used responsibly, and what role do scientists and philosophers play in this process?

Response: Even though computers will not become conscious like us, they will increasingly displace humans from most jobs. This is because most of what we do is pattern recognition and classification that can be done faster and more reliably by a machine. It is sobering to realize that our lives are quite mechanical, and it is only in brief moments of epiphany or raised consciousness that we cease being machine-like.

But even as jobs have begun to disappear, populations in many countries have begun to fall due to the reduction of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the number of live children the average woman bears in her lifetime — to much below the figure of 2.1 (the “replacement rate,” to account for infant mortality and sex imbalances).

The decrease of the TFR below the replacement rate has proceeded for over half a century. In the US, the TFR fell below 2.0 in 1973, and in the UK, in 1974. In South Korea, TFR fell below 2.0 in 1984, and in China in 1991. It takes a generation after TFR falls below 2.1 for population to start tapering, and with another generation, the population collapse is in full swing. For example, the decrease in China’s population over the next eighty years is expected to be at least 700 million. AI machines and robots will be critical when the process of population decrease quickens all over the world.

Yes, there are dangers to AI, because the human mind latches on to stories as truth (this explains blind belief for centuries in prophetic miracles). Unlike false stories in the past which could only travel slowly by word of mouth, AI generated fake stories can go everywhere literally instantaneously. But I believe that it will be possible to develop mechanisms that help individuals spot false narratives.

Some have argued that the next decades will be a competition between the great powers for domination through AI, and hopefully philosophers and scientists will help in the development of ethical guardrails for its use.

Ancient Indian Wisdom and Modern Science:

5. In your books "The Nature of Physical Reality" and "The Architecture of Knowledge," you explore the profound connections between ancient Indian wisdom and modern science. How can these ancient philosophical insights inform our understanding of the universe and consciousness today?

Response: My books followed up on the great pioneers of modern physics like Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg who realized that to make sense of the world it was necessary to see the observer (consciousness) as being apart from materiality. Schrödinger claimed in his autobiography that the central idea of superposition of quantum theory came to him from the Vedic statement that the atman (self) mirrors the cosmos, which he interpreted as the self (consciousness) being in a superposition of all possibilities. The collapse of the quantum superposition upon observation is also inherent in the Vedic idea that at any moment the mind can access only one of these possibilities.

The Veda speaks of natural laws in life together with the transcendent consciousness that is the same within each living being, which we recognize as awareness associated with the senses. An analogy is that of electromagnetic (em) waves that bring images or sound to the smartphone; the difference with the brain is that unlike em waves which are material, consciousness is not. If it were a product of material processes, then one could produce it in a machine, which my theorem shows is impossible. Of course, the brain machine should be undamaged which is why a stroke or injury can alter awareness or one can be rendered unconscious.

That consciousness is one, that it is present within all, and it has freedom is the very heart of Indian wisdom. Without experiencing this freedom in our mind, we are stuck in the karmic chain, where what we do now is determined by the past and the forces acting upon us. This philosophical insight can help in self-understanding as well as in academic disciplines.

6. The ancient Indian concept of bandhu, or the interconnectedness of the microcosm and macrocosm, is a recurring theme in your work. How does this idea relate to modern scientific theories, and what can we learn from this holistic perspective?

Response: To understand it, just ask how the human mind makes sense of the universe, when it is a nebulous thing working inside the brain, a speck of dust on earth that itself is a speck of dust in the cosmos. The answer is that the mind (illuminated by consciousness) can know for it has the nature of reality coded into it. There are connections between the outer and the inner, which are the bandhu (English cognate is “binding”) that are the doorways to understanding.

Quantum theory shows that things that are far apart can be entangled. Reductionism is useful to obtain a rough understanding, but as we probe deeper, we must adopt a holistic view. The bandhu also show up in the recursive nature of reality, in that structures are repeated to different scales. For example, we see the spiral form in galaxies, shells, and the cochlea in the ear.

Bridging Cultures and Disciplines:

7. As a scholar who bridges Eastern and Western thought, as well as diverse disciplines like computer science, philosophy, and history, what challenges have you faced in communicating complex ideas across cultural and disciplinary boundaries, and how have you overcome them?

Response: I haven’t had any difficulty in publishing my work in scholarly journals. I try to speak directly, and maybe that has helped in building bridges of understanding. While there are disciplinary boundaries, there are also plenty of interdisciplinary journals. And then once you have published a couple of papers in a field, you become an insider.

C.P. Snow’s influential idea that in the modern world there is a split between the two cultures of science and humanities is not quite correct. It is true that in the arts and literature one deals with experience where one must reconcile opposites, whereas within each scientific framework one stays within a well-defined formal system. But there is tension across systems in science as well, and each explanatory framework used in the humanities has its own logical framework as in music or architecture.

A more useful way of looking at academic disciplines, whether in science or humanities, is that each is a unique set of narratives, with the difference that the narratives of hard sciences use mathematics whereas those of humanities don’t. Once you recognize that mathematics is just a special language that has emerged out of logic, you can see that creativity can work the same way across the fields. I speak here from personal experience for I know that behind abstruse mathematical theorems is an intuition that is not unlike the intuition of the artist and the composer.

Indian History:

8. India has a rich tapestry of historical narratives. How do you think the diverse historical experiences of India have shaped its modern identity and intellectual pursuits?

Response: India has always seen itself as a civilization devoted to knowledge. But it has endured two major colonizations that caused grievous wounds to its sense of self-worth. With the Islamic invasions came the physical destruction of its universities, and the British shut down its schools and disrupted local patronage networks in support of advancement of knowledge, creating a system of higher education in which the medium was English and where Indian history and culture were taught through the colonial lens.

When the British departed, the power was handed over to an English-speaking elite who were generally alienated from their culture and whose understanding of Indian civilization was quite flawed. India is in a state of ferment as it seeks to further its self-understanding in a way consistent with universal values and with the tradition of devotion to excellence as evident from the amazing architecture of its temples.

9. You have written extensively on the philosophical insights of ancient Indian texts. Can you discuss a particular historical period in India that you believe was pivotal in shaping its philosophical and scientific landscapes?

Response: One can look at the Vedic period for the texts that underlie Indian culture and civilization. The Vedic period is quite long, and it is in many layers. But let me speak here of the period of the Upanishads with philosophical texts such as those on Yoga and Vedanta, and scientific texts on physics, logic, music, art, and medicine. The primary texts in these fields are prior to the time of the Buddha (c. 500 BCE) for the Buddhist literature is aware of them. The dialogue with heterodox philosophies of Buddhism and Jainism helped advance many of the sciences, in particular medicine. The development of philosophical insights was mirrored in art and architecture and their remains are an excellent guide for understanding the evolution of ideas and new syntheses.

We can, for example, see the centrality of the Vedic era in the understanding of the workings of the mind in the Indian tradition. Kashmir Shaivism (c. 850 CE) is celebrated in philosophical circles for the clarity of its exposition of the phenomenon of consciousness and how its veiling and unveilings lead to various states of awareness. But if one examines the Kashmir Shaivism texts carefully, one sees that they restate in a systematic form what is already hinted in the Upanishads. Likewise, the vision of the Natya Shastra, a text on drama and music that many see as belonging to the Upanishadic era, was enlarged from time to time consistent with the original exposition.

Autochthonous Origin:

10. You have expressed views supporting the autochthonous origin of the Indo-Aryans in Punjab, often referred to as the "Indigenous Aryans" hypothesis. Could you elaborate on the key evidences and arguments that lead you to support this perspective?

Response: Let me first explain how I got into the study of ancient history. Nearly 40 years ago I was perplexed to read in history books that Panini’s grammar (c. 500 BCE) describing Sanskrit language in 4,000 algebraic rules together with rules about rules came about before Indians had writing. I couldn’t accept that someone would be able create such a complex system, which is equivalent to a computer program, without the aid of a script.

So, I decided to study the earliest Indian sciences in a systematic manner. First, I found that on structural grounds the historical Indian script of Brahmi was derived from the earlier Indus script that goes back to 2500 BCE in the so-called Harappan era. Scholars accept that is a continuity in art between the Harappan and the historical periods, and they have been aware that the knowledge of astronomy in the Vedic period goes to at least 3^rd millennium BCE. Since the Vedas don’t know any region outside of northwest India, I was compelled to reject the then prevailing view that the Aryans with their Vedas came to India in the second millennium BCE.

But is their origin autochthonous to Punjab? I haven’t addressed this in any of my writings and I try to confine myself to literary and scientific data. I am quite agnostic on the question of the original “homeland” of the Aryans, and all I am saying is that they were already in India about 5,000 years ago.

11. The debate between the Indigenous Aryans hypothesis and the Indo-Aryan migration theory is highly contentious. How do you respond to the academic consensus that supports migration, and what do you believe are the main flaws in this consensus?

Response: So long as one remains guided by data, one can hope to arrive at a nuanced resolution to this debate. It is indeed true that there was some movement of ancient people into India while at the same time Indian texts speak of the establishment of Indic states beyond the Himalayas in Central Asia, so we can be sure that Indians were present in the Eurasian steppe-lands as one of the ethnic groups.

The academic consensus on the origin of Indo-Europeans has been changing in recent years. In 2023, the respected journal “Science” published a new analysis arguing that their language was approximately 8,100 years old, and that five main branches had already split off around 7,000 years ago (Haggerty et al., Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languages, Science, vol. 381, July 2023). It argued for an early homeland immediately south of the Caucasus, to the west of Iran, which is not too far from northwest India and consistent with my analysis that shows the Vedic people in India for at least 5,000 years.

Here’s something that supports migration out of India. We take the example of just four words, “earth”, “sky”, “water”, and “divinity”. If we find differing cognates in various parts of Europe, which are all present in Sanskrit, that will point to these words going out of India at different times. For many more examples of vocabulary diversity associated with Sanskrit, see my book The Idea of India. This reasoning is similar to how we know that the potato was originally domesticated in Peru for there are over 4,000 varieties there and less than a dozen in Europe and Asia.

Earth: ardha (Sanskrit) — erde (German); dharā (Sanskrit) — terra (Italian); kṣamā (Sanskrit)— ziemia (Polish), zeme (Czech); go, gauh (Sanskrit)— gaia (Greek)

Sky: kha (Sanskrit)— sky (English); nabha (Sanskrit)— nebo (Croatian, Russian), nebe (Czech); aśman (Sanskrit) — āsmān (Farsi), sama (Arabic) => hama => himmel (German); keli (Sanskrit) — caelum (Latin), cielo (Spanish), ciel (French); varuṇa (Sanskrit) — ouranos (Greek)

Water: kah (Sanskrit)— aqua (Latin) => agua (Spanish); vāri (Sanskrit) — water (Dutch, English);

uda (Sanskrit)— voda (Slovak); āp (Sanskrit)— āb (Farsi), apă (Romanian); nīra (Sanskrit)— neró (Greek), dŵr (Welsh)

Divinity: deva (Sanskrit) — dio (Italian), theos (Greek), dios (Spanish); svatava (Sanskrit) — xwatāw (Avesta) , xudā, khudā (Farsi), Gott (German); bhaga (Sanskriit) — bog (Russian); iṣṭa (Sanskrit) — isten (Hungarian).

Consciousness and the Nature of Reality:

12. Your book "Mind and Self" delves into the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the physical world. What insights can you share about the interplay between mind and matter, and how can we reconcile the Eastern emphasis on unity with the Western focus on duality?

Response: Let me rephrase your question: If consciousness that illuminates the contents of the mind (stored in the brain, of course) is non-material, how does the mind interact with matter? The Indian tradition presented this puzzle in another way: If laws describe the physical universe, then what need for divinity? The answer that was given was that divinity creates the universe through observation, which is a subtle resolution of the puzzle of free will. Consistent with this, quantum mechanics has shown that one can change the state of the system by observation, and this is called the Quantum Zeno Effect, which has been demonstrated in the laboratory.

The Indian view is that behind the multiplicity of the embodied world is a unity that we perceive in consciousness. The duality view is true in the sense that our bodies are apart, yet behind that truth is the oneness of consciousness.

Padma Shri Award and Its Significance:

13. Congratulations on receiving the prestigious Padma Shri award for your outstanding contributions to science and engineering. How does it feel to be recognized by your country, and what impact do you hope this recognition will have on your future work?

Response: I am happy that my work has been recognized. It has had no impact on the direction of my research, but I am hoping that it will give confidence to others who want to tread their own path.

Shaping India's Scientific Policies and Initiatives:

14. As a member of the Indian Prime Minister's Science, Technology and Innovation Advisory Council (PM-STIAC), what role do you play in shaping India's scientific policies and initiatives, and how do you hope to contribute to the country's scientific advancement?

Response: PM-STIAC addresses the large science and technology questions that India needs to address and makes recommendations on policy. My contributions to the discussions in the Council are from the perspective of AI, quantum computing, and the interface of technology and society, which are relevant to a nation on a fast track to development. India is already the third largest economy in the world in terms of PPP (purchasing power parity) dollars, and it is soon to become the fourth largest economy in terms of nominal dollars. There is much investment in infrastructure development and India aspires to be a world leader in AI and manufacturing and develop in a harmonious manner.

Fortunately, India remains anchored to a robust commonsensical view of reality which has helped it avoid the excesses of Wokeism that have become quite problematic for the West.

Staying Connected and Final Thoughts:

15. For our readers who are inspired by your work, how can they stay connected with your latest research and insights, and what message would you like to leave them with as they embark on their own intellectual journeys?

Response: A new and perhaps potentially extremely important area that I am working on is the theory that physical space has e (= 2.71828..) dimensions. The basis of this idea is a theorem in mathematical logic according to which representation in e is most efficient. Since nature is optimal, space should be in accord with this logic. It provides a new view of many fundamental problems of physics and potentially solves several troubling problems of cosmology. Equally significantly, it suggests that the space of biological information should have a similar dimensionality that solves the old problem of the non-uniformity of the genetic code.

To stay connected to my history, art, and philosophy papers, visit my Academia page:

Subhash Kak - Academia.edu

where you can download papers as well as several published books. For scientific papers, one can find them by browsing through Google Scholar.

My message to young scholars is to have faith in their chosen path, stay devoted to truth, and stand up to authority if needed. It is not easy these days because many in the academia have embraced the belief that even scientific truths can be sacrificed at the altar of political correctness. But nothing is forever, and we should stay positive and focus on the larger issues of meaning and happiness for all of humanity. Doing so will not only make our individual lives fulfilling, but we will also be agents of change for the larger good.

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