Consciousness - The Chopra Foundation

Sonima’s Wisdom and Me

By Deepak Chopra, MD

The cutting-edge programs of the Sonima Foundation are based on an ancient wisdom principle. True wisdom occurs spontaneously, and in this case, I remember the story of how one child discovered it very early. Alfred Stieglitz, who became one of the greatest photographers of the twentie Screen Shot 2014-10-03 at 1.48.38 PM

th century, grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey. His father had fought for three years in the Union army before buying himself out so that he could be home to see his first child grow up.

One winter the boy was seen slipping out the back door, which at first seemed only a bit odd. It was the dead of winter and freezing cold. But when he kept doing it, his parents investigated. It turned out that Alfred was slipping money to a bedraggled vagrant without telling anyone.

The family wasn’t rich, and his father rebuked him. “Why are you giving your money to a stranger?”

“Don’t you see?” Alfred replied. “I’m doing it for myself.”

The same wisdom principle, that in helping others we help ourselves, could change the world. That’s why I feel so dedicated to the Sonima foundation, because they have taken an idea close to my heart—the wellbeing of children—and expanded it. Through a groundbreaking health and wellness program, the foundation is creating the leaders of the future who will be healthy in body, mind, and spirit.

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Can Sam Harris Wake Us Up? (Part 2)

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Most of us recognized ourselves in the mirror this morning. The person looking back at us has a familiar name, a family, a job. He (or she) carries around a long menu of likes and dislikes, along with a personal history from the moment we emerged from the womb. It would amaze the vast majority of the human race to be told that this person in the mirror is an illusion. Sam Harris’s new book, Waking Up, delivers this startling notion loud and clear, and his aim, in a nutshell, is to debunk the illusion of the personal self, which he says is the key to becoming real.

No one can predict if the message will stick. “No self” has been around for centuries as a basic tenet of Buddhism. (Refer to Part 1 of this post for more details.) Harris dresses it up in brain science, but looking for Buddha in the brain is as futile as looking for Mozart in a piano. It’s obviously specious reasoning, but in Harris’s profession of neuroscience, everything comes down to the brain. Devout Christians find sermons in the stones; brain scientists find them in the anterior cingulate.
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Naïve Realism, Or the Strange Case of Physics and Fake Philosophers (Part 2)

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Menas Kafatos,PhD

Scientists have assigned the role of Mister Answer to science, the source of knowledge on every subject. This is peculiar because science does not accept a complete body of knowledge at any one time as final, therefore no answer can be final. This is how science progresses. Scientists though often forget that and they go on as if their current knowledge is all there is to know. By the very nature of science, some subjects are beyond science. Does this mean they are beyond knowing? That’s a tricky and at times disturbing question. Doubts arise on many fronts. Can science tell us what it means to be human, or how molecules developed the ability to think, as they seem to do in the brain? These are questions that science was never meant to be able to answer. It does not mean they are not valid and fundamental. However, the most troubling issue is whether science can continue to perform its most basic function, describing the nature of reality. As we saw in the first post of this series, there’s every indication that reality is becoming more mysterious, not less, as one probes deeper into it.

Some leading scientists are on record dismissing philosophy as “junk,” “useless,” and “an obstacle to progress,” because philosophy consists purely of thinking while science produces hard facts, experiments, and provable findings. Yet in its disdain for so-called “metaphysics,” these scientists have become over confident. It turns out that there are three areas where philosophy is likely to resurge in a new guise, bringing answers about reality that all of us need to know, including the most advanced scientists.

The first area has to do with how we know what we know, which is called epistemology. How do you know a rock is hard and heavy, the sun is hot, and a red rose is red? You use the five senses, which seem to be trustworthy in the everyday world. This trust is called naïve realism, and as the first post revealed, the five senses are totally untrustworthy in the quantum domain. The fact that a rock can be reduced to a cloud of vibrating energy that in turn is only describable as a smear of probabilities knocks naïve realism off its pedestal. Even more devastating is the fact that the brain, which we rely on to know everything about the world, isn’t a privileged object. Like a rock, it too can also ultimately be reduced to a smear of probabilities, undercutting our assumption that what the brain reports is true knowledge.

Neuroscience is entirely based on the premise that the brain can do things a rock cannot do, yet if the brain and a rock are embedded in the same quantum domain, where did the brain acquire its ability to know anything? What is the difference between the elementary particles in a rock from the elementary particles in a brain? None whatsoever. Brain scientists would argue that it is the incredible complexity of the brain that makes it different but incredible complexity in machines created by man does not make them capable of even the tiniest of thought, or feeling for that matter. Science has offered no credible answer, and the vast majority of scientists would be baffled by the possibility that the brain doesn’t in fact know anything, any more than a rock does. Rather, it’s the mind, using the brain to express itself, that knows, just as Mozart, knowing music, used the piano to express himself. (more…)

Is a Mind-Element Needed to Interpret Quantum Mechanics? Do physically undetermined choices enter into the evolution of the physical universe? Part 2

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Henry Stapp, PhD

The time is ripe for a theory of cosmic mind to be seen by all scientists, not as a speculative notion that conflicts with basic scientific principles, but as a necessary part of a rational science- based understanding of ourselves and nature. The earlier idea, cemented into science by the work of Isaac Newton, was that mind belongs to subjective reality “in here” while physics deals with objective physical reality “out there” and that latter by itself was the proper subject of physical science. The undoing of this separation is one of the fascinating sagas of modern quantum theory. Yet even if you are an outsider to the intricate mathematics of quantum mechanics, you can sympathize with the frustration of scientists who use their minds every day without really knowing what the mind is or where it came from.

Some physicists attempted to bypass the thorny issue of mind by dividing Nature into two physical realms, the microscopic (the small scale where quantum mechanics has been triumphant) and the macroscopic (the large scale where everyday objects obey the laws of classical physics). The microscopic description is designed to include all of the micro-physical elements from which all physical things are made. To assert that this description fails for large things and is replaced by another needs careful explaining. The standard answer, in brief, is that the macro-description is not a description of physical reality itself, but is rather a description of our perceptions of that reality, and that the laws of nature entail that the act of perceiving it not only informs us, but also alters the world itself in a way that brings it into concordance with our collective experience. These alterations are the famous quantum “collapses”.

But these reactions of the world of physically described micro-elements to our acts of perceiving mean that the micro-physical (quantum) part of nature is more mind-like in its behavior than matter-like. When new information is acquired, or appears in an observer’s stream of consciousness, the world of micro elements makes a sudden global jump to a new structure compatible with the new information. But that kind of jump is how “ideas” behave: they suddenly acquire a new form compatible with the new information. Thus the physically described micro-structure is fundamentally “idea-like” in character.

This sudden jump is “global”: it extends in principle over all of physical space at an instant of time. The behavior of the micro world is therefore more “idea-like” than matter-like also in this global sense. In the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics this sudden change in the physical state is due to an action made by “nature”. It is as if the global micro-world is an idea in nature’s mind, and that nature, in response to the observer’s probing of the physical world, changes her mind.
A second problem pertains to another “instantaneous” aspect of quantum mechanics. Within that theory one can consider a class of well defined and often actually performed experiments in which two experimenters working in far-apart labs can each arrange to have last minute choices made as to which of two alternative possible measurements will be made in their respective labs. It can rationally argued that these choices of what to measure can be considered “free”, in the sense of not depending upon the system being measured. The two experiments are performed at the same time in the two far-apart labs. Then it can then be proved that the truth of these empirically verified predictions of quantum mechanics cannot be reconciled with the demand that, for each of the two regions, the outcome there cannot depend on the free choice made at essentially the same instant in the faraway region about which experiment will be performed in that faraway region.

This conclusion is incompatible with the idea that the physically described systems are essentially matter-like, with the velocity of transfer of information therefore limited to less than or equal to the speed of light. Once again the behavior of the quantum mechanical features of the physically described world is incompatible with the idea that that those physical features reside, in and are carried by, matter. These features behave is as if they were ideas in a globally cognizant mind that can instantly know, when choosing an empirical outcome in one region, which experiment is being performed at essentially the same instant in very far away region.

There is, of course, strong resistance in science to jumping from these “as ifs” to the serious alternative of building a contemporary-science-based theory of nature on a conjunction personal minds carrying our conscious experiences and an objective mind carrying the quantum mechanically described properties, with the detailed properties of these minds specifically tailored to explain empirical data. Such a theory is, in fact, apart from choice of words, what quantum mechanics already is!

Another problem with dividing Nature into microscopic quantum-physics parts and macroscopic classical-physics parts is that classical physics assumes the observer is passive. As you watch snow fall or a tree grow, your observation supposedly doesn’t influence those processes. Yet this seemingly simple assumption has a hidden dimension. How do you know that snow is falling or a tree is growing? Through your mind, which delivers the only version of reality that human beings can possibly know and experience. Trees and snow, along with everything else in the perceived macroscopic world, exist as experiences created mentally, although we don’t know how. We know only that the idea that our perceptions match an unperceived reality is unprovable. So unless physics includes a theory of mind it can’t declare some reality “out there” is somehow connected to our experience “in here.”

The dual aspect of quantum behavior, both physical and psychological, is included in the orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics devised by the brilliant Hungarian-American theorist John von Neumann. The fact that the known physical laws for the physical state of the particles can’t explain how they behave is critical here. Something beyond the physical state is involved.

Von Neumann’s quantum mechanics is explicitly dualistic. But the trouble with a conception of nature composed of two fundamentally different parts is the resulting impossibility of understanding the connection between the parts. The fact that in orthodox quantum mechanics the physical part turns out to be basically idea-like converts the nominal dualism into an idealistic monism. This conclusion, which has been reached by many if not most of the greatest philosophers of the past, but which had been hard to reconcile with science, now appears to be entailed by the orthodox principles of quantum physics.

(To be cont.)

Photo credit: www.veooz.com

Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of more than 80 books with twenty-two New York Times bestsellers including” Super Brain,” co-authored with Rudi Tanzi, PhD. He serves as the founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing. Join him at The Chopra Foundation Sages and Scientists Symposium 2014. www.choprafoundation.org

Henry Stapp is a theoretical physicist at the University of California’s Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, specializing in the conceptual and mathematical foundations of quantum theory, and in particular in the quantum aspects of the relationship between our streams of conscious experience and the physical processes occurring in our brains. Stapp worked closely with Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, and John Wheeler, and is author of two books on the quantum mechanical foundation of the connection between mind and matter: “Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics;” and “Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer.” These works lay the foundation for a science-based approach to the question of human free will.

Getting Zombies Excited (It Takes a Million-Dollar Challenge)

By Deepak Chopra, MD

In science, problems get solved faster when the pot begins to boil. Dormant questions need motivation, which is why I posed a million-dollar challenge to anyone in the materialist camp who could demonstrate how matter turns into mind. (Please see the two preceding posts, which set up this provocative issue.) In the wake of the challenge, a stir was indeed created. The general public isn’t aware that 99% of neuroscientists, biologists, and physicists interested in the mind-brain problem assume without question that the brain creates the mind. This is one of those assumptions that, once exploded, seems ridiculous in hindsight. It’s not exploded yet, but we’re getting closer. Consider what it means to say that your brain creates your mind. Somewhere in the fabric of time, floating molecules of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon, the basic elements in organic chemistry, organized a complex clump of molecules that learned to think, to take in the three-dimensional world, and finally to become aware of what they were doing. This seems like a totally untenable position to me, and to a growing body of scientists who are adopting a far different view, that mind came first, bringing with it the organizing power to evolve the structure of the human brain. (more…)