How to Stop Being a Biological Robot

Most people are too busy, or otherwise distracted, to think about how the mind works, much less about the vexed problem of connecting mind and brain. This includes neuroscientists. They run their experiments and publish new data without addressing the most fundamental questions. Their field runs nicely by simply assuming that the brain is the mind. After all, without a brain there cannot be any mental activity, QED. Why bother to go any deeper?

One reason is that human beings are clearly not brain-defined. We need the brain the way a musician needs a piano or TV news needs a television set–to carry the mind into the physical world. The belief held by 99% of neuroscientists is that with sophisticated enough brain scans and various other measurements, the mystery of thinking, feeling, sensing, and imagining will one day be solved. It’s a futile dream, however, because even the most basic issues, such as why the color red is red, how we hear sounds in a brain that is totally silent, and where a thought comes from are nowhere near being understood.

Leaving theory aside, there is a huge practical problem involved. What do we do when the brain makes us its victim? If we are brain-driven, this implies that the brain is in charge of daily habits, decisions, reflexes, and responses. In many cases this is clearly true. When you reach for ice cream at midnight telling yourself that it’s the wrong thing to do, who is making you act automatically, against your best interests, and without your ability to break the habit?

The answer is the conditioned brain. Conditioning is synonymous with training, and a conditioned brain is a tricky thing. Some of its training is voluntary and conscious, such as when a pilot is trained to fly a jumbo jet or any skill is learned. Some training is involuntary and unconscious, such as when children learn to be afraid of abusive parents. Some training is purely physical, as when addicts are conditioned to crave a drug because there is distorted functioning of opiate receptors in their neurons. The Mind

All of us walk around behaving as if we are not biological robots, and yet we live on the cusp of free will and determinism. In an era of triumphant neuroscience, determinism is no longer a religious or metaphysical issue. It’s the nitty-gritty of having a conditioned brain and what to do

about it. Can the brain get rid of its negative conditioning? Once a neural pathway is engraved deeply enough, can it be erased? No, the brain cannot uncondition itself any more than a dog can untrain itself to fetch a stick or a computer can write its own new operating system. There must be conscious mental intervention, and the evidence seems to be that new neural pathways can be established through many kinds of lifestyle interventions and new ways of thinking.

 

To stop being a biological robot is possible. The first step is to be aware of your robotic behaviors. The most common of these include:

— Having repetitive or obsessive thoughts.

— Being unable to control your impulses.

— Finding it difficult to impossible to change a bad habit.

— Relating to others with habitual responses; living in a ritualized relationship where the same issues persist year after year.

— Saying or thinking the same things day after day.

— Feeling empty, flat, or unfulfilled.

— Lacking new solutions to your problems.

— Feeling unable to get past ingrained fear and hostility.

— Being trapped in old memories, unable to get past emotional trauma from the past.

— Adopting second-hand opinions, either positive or negative.

— Feeling that you need to be fixed but not finding a way to accomplish this.

 

This is a long and perhaps discouraging list; certainly the items on it can’t be changed all at once. But at bottom there is a common link at work, which is lack of awareness. Freedom of choice comes down to having enough awareness to overcome your old conditioning, whatever form that takes. The mind is meant to tell the brain how to respond, not vice versa. There are gray areas here. The brain exists in layers that range from the lower brain, which controls automatic responses like fight or flight that evolved millions of years ago, to the middle brain, where emotions evolved, to the higher brain, the newest part, responsible for higher reasoning and decision-making.

To stop being a biological robot begins in the higher brain, since it involves conscious choice, but emotions play their part (as when someone with a weight problem “eats their feelings”), and the stubborn responses of the lower brain, such as feeling attacked, often enter the

negotiations. It takes negotiation between mind and brain to accomplish any change. You can get out of your car to change a flat tire. You can’t get out of your brain to change a bad habit.

Having become aware that you are being driven by a conditioned brain, the next step is to alter how your mind relates to your brain. for this step to succeed, you need more than awareness. You must develop self-awareness. Since this is a complicated process that involves mind and body, biology and psychology, positive and negative input–and much more–the whole topic needs a post of its own.

(To be cont.)

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are Super Genes co-authored with Rudolph Tanzi, PhD and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com

Why the Physical Universe Needs Mental Glue

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Jennifer Nielsen, PhD candidate

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Robber barons in the 19th century were so rich that they didn’t have to do things the way ordinary people do. If they wanted to live in a French chateau or an Italian palazzo, for example, they didn’t have to build one from scratch. Instead a chateau or palazzo could be dismantled in Europe, its parts carefully numbered and packed into crates, and then shipped to America to be reassembled on the spot.

If you wanted to ship the universe somewhere else, you could try to do something similar. You’d need four crates labeled time, space, matter, and energy—the basics for taking apart the universe. To save shipping costs, you could try to cut these down to their bare constituents at the quantum level. But when the Fed Ex man shows up, he would scratch his head. “I can’t ship this,” he’d says. “You squeezed everything down, too far. There’s no stuff in these crates.” This is a fanciful summary of the basic quandary created by the quantum revolution of a century ago. When space, time, matter and energy are studied at the very smallest level, they cease to behave as the familiar parts of reality that we think we know. (more…)

The Conversation at Deepak Homebase

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Deepak Satsang on 324_externalPlease join the Satsangh with Deepak Chopra and Eddie Stern on the Deeper Meaning of Yoga at Deepak Homebase

 7:00 pm, Thursday, March 24th, 2016

How to See the Whole Universe: Nonlocality and Acausality

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By Deepak Chopra, MD and Jennifer Nielsen

 

Whenever there’s a new breakthrough in science, a closer step is taken to seeing reality as a whole. Essentially science works on the jigsaw-puzzle principle: Having taken apart a picture of the Eiffel Tower or the Grand Canyon, reassembling the pieces gives you the whole picture again. Applied to science, cancer research pursues a hundred clues in the hope of discovering what makes a cell suddenly turn cancerous. The whole picture (a tumor) is being broken down in the hope that a view can be gained of cancer itself. In physics, most people have heard of the Theory of Everything (TOE), which would combine the four fundamental forces in nature into a single picture of the universe.

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If Science Is a Game, Here’s a Game-Changer

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By Deepak Chopra, MD, Menas C. Kafatos, PhD

 

The quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger was one of the best thinkers about philosophy in a generation of physicists, around a century ago, that was rich in philosophers (a very rare breed today). One of Schrödinger’s most intriguing statements has explosive implications for the future of science: “Science is a game—but a game with reality, a game with sharpened knives.”  It’s not immediately clear what he means, but the knives being referred to sit at the center of the scientific method, which Schrödinger compares to cutting a picture apart into a thousand pieces and then reassembling it again.

 

No one could argue that this is true. Big problems in science are solved by reducing them to smaller components that are more manageable, easier to quantify, and more available for experimentation. But why does Schrödinger call science a game? Being a mystic or an idealist (pick the term you prefer), he saw God as the player on the opposite side of the table, and he felt this was a necessary component because unlike a picture ready for cutting up into pieces, reality cannot be seen in advance as a whole. There is no look or shape to reality, no defined borders, no unnecessary elements that can be conveniently set aside or ignored.

 

What is God’s role in the game? “He has not only set the problem but also has devised the rules of the game. But they are not completely known; half of them are left for you to discover or to deduce.” Rationalists would balk at using God here, but if you substitute “nature” or “reality” instead, the game of science becomes clear.  It’s a game of deduction and inference where the ground rules are only half known, at best. Recent developments in physics have uncovered dark matter and energy that make the game even harder, since these obscure entities barely interact, if at all, with the visible universe and yet account for the vast majority of created matter and energy.

 

But more important, perhaps, than the darkness existing “out there” in the cosmos is the mental darkness science struggles with. To quote Schrödinger again: “The experiment is the tempered blade which you wield with success against the spirits of darkness,” by which he means the darkness of ignorance, the unknown, perhaps the unknowable. In the quantum revolution, experiments changed radically by becoming “thought experiments,” mental explorations in the absence of workable physical experiments. Einstein conjured up General Relativity as primarily a thought experiment that awaited validation afterwards, such as the bending of light when photons pass nearby a strong gravitational field or the most recent validation of Einstein’s theory, the existence of gravitational waves.

 

Yet at a certain point even thought experiments reach their limit, as physics nears the horizon where spacetime dissolves. This happens in the so-called quantum vacuum, the void from which matter, energy, space, and time emerge. The same horizon appears just before the Big Bang, when creation was something like immeasurable chaos (known technically as the Planck era). Even before this comes the actual origin of the universe, which is totally unknowable through experiments, measurement, or data collection. Much of cutting-edge physics depends on abstract mathematical theorizing rather than matching theories against observable, testable reality.

 

The fact, largely agreed upon, is that our empirical world is based on non-empirical origins, or as the far-seeing physicist John Archibald Wheeler declared, material objects are at bottom immaterial. Confronting this disparity, this gap in Nature, is a game-changer if scientists intend to catch up with the insights of Schrödinger and Wheeler. If you follow what they said to its logical conclusion, when spacetime dissolves, so does mental activity, because the human brain and everything that occurs inside it depends on space and time. Chemical and electrical activity are time-bound. In fact, any system that needs cause and effect to be linked obviously requires a “before” (cause) and an “after” (effect).

 

So the greatest challenge to science now is ultimately philosophical. What is reality like if we can’t think about it? Can a dimensionless void be accurately described by an observer standing in a four-dimensional universe? Where is the dividing line between the knowable and the unknowable? Many, probably most, scientists dislike or abhor such questions, because they are confident in their belief that science is vastly superior, and more real, than philosophy. But this is the defense of ignorance, and whoever holds such a blinkered view has forgotten Schrödinger’s declaration that science exists to win the game against the spirits of darkness.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are Super Genes co-authored with Rudolph Tanzi, PhD  and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

 

Menas C. Kafatos is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics at Chapman University. He is a quantum physicist, cosmologist, and climate change researcher and works extensively on consciousness. He holds seminars and workshops for individuals, groups and corporations on the natural laws that apply everywhere and are the foundations of the universe, for well-being and success. His doctoral thesis advisor was the renowned M.I.T. professor Philip Morrison who studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer. He has authored 310 articles, is author or editor of 15 books, including The Conscious Universe (Springer), Looking In, Seeing Out (Theosophical Publishing House), and is co-author with Deepak Chopra of the forthcoming book, You are the Universe (Harmony). He maintains a Huffington Post blog. You can learn more at http://www.menaskafatos.com