Raman’s Cosmic Significance

Physicist and global philosopher Varadaraja Venkata (V. V.) Raman wonders about our relevance in the Universe. The importance of the human species is not obvious in terms of physical dimensions, he says. No star or galaxy, if it could judge, would attribute greater weight to puny earthlings than to mountains, icebergs, and volcanoes. The relative smallness of our frame is beyond question. As to physical power, our bodies are flimsy structures, susceptible to easy decimation by nature’s fury. Lightning can electrocute a human with a flash; earthquakes ruin cities without a moment’s warning; microbes and viruses can decimate civilizations. Our Earth itself, compared to the sun, is like a grain of sand to the Pacific Ocean (Raman, 2025).

When we reckon the age of our species, and reflect on the ephemeral nature of our lives, our putative significance shrinks even further. What is human longevity compared to the age of rocks, let alone of stars and galaxies? What are a few hundred thousand years of human culture compared to the almost fourteen billion years of our universe? If one evaluates significance in terms of size and strength, of longevity and persistence, Homo sapiens is all too frail, a very recent and vulnerable sprout in the grand arena of space in the endless tick of time. Bluntly said, it would seem that humans don’t mean a jot in a stupendously vast universe.

But Raman imagines the universe without anything like human consciousness. It would be dark, dreary, and dismal to unconscious entities, large or small. All the light and beauty of the universe are unraveled only in the tiny retinas of human beings (and their equivalents in other creatures here below), or yonder on other biogenetic planets. But for probing human brains, there would be no formulas for elliptical orbits, no reckoning of space or time or their intertwining, no inverse square law or indeterminacy principle.

Neither the golden sunset nor the patterned wings of butterflies, neither the fragrance of flowers nor the taste of honey can emerge as aspects of reality without complex neurons firing away within human brains. We may imagine a universe that has existed tirelessly since its cosmogenic emergence. But the pre-life universe was insipid and inert, with no music or melody, no poetry or philosophy, no humor, holiness, or humming.

Human consciousness computes age and speed, measures temperature and density. It conceptualizes symmetry and gravitation. The emergence of all these aspects of reality is somewhat like the unraveling of tracks of an invisible beast in a vast wilderness: for before the evolution of rods in the retina, there was no green grass, red rose, or blueberry. Only the responsive affirmations of noumenal states give meaning to the universe.

Nor have we been just passive observers, Raman continues. Consider nuclear fusion, which occurs nowhere in the universe save in the core of stars. But it has been brought about here on earth, achieved by human ingenuity. All through the eons, Mars and Jupiter and Venus had never been spied upon, nor their images captured, until the advent of human science and technology. The same is true of the immense galaxies receding indifferently in all directions. Without human devices, they would be like encyclopedias buried under the sea, undeciphered. All the stories of stellar birth and death, of galaxies and expansion, remained untold and unknown until humans transcribed them in words and equations. None of the glory and splendor of the universe would have become apparent if there had been only mute matter and no measuring mind in the cosmos.

Thus, Raman posits, the emergence of awareness was not an insignificant event in cosmic history. No one can deny that the Cosmic Big Bang was the critical event that generated our physical universe. The emergence of self-replicating dynamic molecules (Life) was the Second Big Bang. The spark of consciousness (awareness) was the radical Third Big Bang, becoming a magical screen on which countless simple and complex attributes of the physical universe came to be projected. Unlike the First Big Bang, the Second and Third have probably occurred elsewhere in the universe, too.

Raman ponders human consciousness, the outcome of the Third Big Bang. It injects or discerns meaning into or in a mindless mechanical cosmos, he says. It may be a passing flicker that will be extinguished in due course, or it may be a miniature replica of the Cosmic Totality that caused it all. Ancient Indic thinkers called it Brahman. In all cases, it is thanks to Consciousness that the Cosmos is lit up. Until its emergence, the universe was in stark, silent stillness, devoid of love or laughter, music or mathematics, not unlike a vibrant stage with no actors in a dark hall entirely empty (Raman, 2025).