So are the 5 aggregates what science might call ‘consciousness’? Is it viññāṇa (I guess not?) Or is it the “mind” which is not within the 5 aggregates, is it the communication with the gandhabba? So what would be the closest thing in Buddha Dhamma that resembles “consciousness” in science?
This also made me thinking… I read that the gandhabba takes hold of a zygote or merges with it and for this to happen the gati of the gandhabba must be “similar” to that of the father and mother of the future child.
Does Tipitaka mention how this ‘similarity’ is determined? I.e. is the similarity ‘read’ from the genes of the zygote or is it information somehow taken from nāmagotta?
Since the leading principle in Buddha Dhamma is Paticca Sumppada the abstract view would be that the zygote provided the correct conditions for the gandhabba to start a jāti as a human being. So you’re saying that we would be never able to create a “conscious” robot. What if we created a very similar (if not the same) kind of conditions which the zygote provides and ‘trick’ gandhabbas? I know this sounds evil, but it might be what science would be doing sometime in the far future.