Dr. N.L. Kachhara
Modern biology now admits that living organisms are dynamically complex functional entities that are not reducible to simple mechanical or chemical descriptions. Barbara McClintock[1] demonstrated that organisms can engineer their own DNA. Shapiro[2] claims that the whole organism engineers the modification of its own genetic structure in response to stress or to achieve a goal. He concludes that cognitive intelligence is necessary to properly explain the behavior of cellular and genetic processes. It can, therefore, be deduced philosophically from the Science of Logic that cognition, consciousness or sentience is the immediate existential Concept of life, and that intelligence is a necessary feature of organisms. Jainism distinguishes between the body of a living organism, sachita, and the body of a dead organism, achita, indicating that the sachita body has consciousness or intelligence-like features while the achita does not.
It is generally accepted by many scientists that matter, the constituent of the body, does not possess intelligence. The question, then, is: what is the source of intelligence in the body of an organism? Jainism propounds that intelligence is a property of the soul and not matter. How is the intelligence of the soul transferred to the matter, the body? Here I present a possible model in which the intelligence of the soul is induced in the karma, which then becomes an intelligent force and an agent for the intelligent accomplishment of the psychical, biological and physiological processes in the body. I propose the concept of soul faculties, which will facilitate the scientific study of the empirical soul. In the dictionary, "faculty" is defined as the psychical or soul capacity for any natural function. The soul's activities, such as knowledge, feeling, volition, intelligent endowment or gift, and power are recognized as the faculties of the soul.
In the end of this chapter, biological structures are classified on the basis of applied intelligence; it is argued that all such structures, both natural and artificial, are the result of the application of soul intelligence to matter.
