Can Brain Science Explain Experience? Part 2


By Deepak Chopra MD, Menas Kafatos, PhD, Subhash Kak, PhD, 
Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD, and Neil Theise, MD

For at least two thousand years thinkers have tried to explain the human mind and disagreed heatedly, but a consensus has formed around one thing. When you try to figure out where the mind comes from, you find yourself in a strange domain filled with mirrors, illusions, and a shaky grasp on reality. The mind is harder to hunt down than the mythical unicorn, because the hunter and the hunted are the same.  This frustrating obstacle has led to speculation that swings between two extremes – at one extreme consciousness is pure illusion created by brain chemistry. At the other extreme consciousness is a given that defies exploration, much as water is a given to a fish. We can’t jump out of our minds to land on a place where objective observations could be made, just as a fish cannot land on dry land as a way to peer under the sea. Both are physically impossible.

Must the riddle of the mind remain a riddle? In the first post we looked at the currently dominant field of mind research, neuroscience, that provides one explanation of consciousness, as a manifestation of the brain. (You may want to read Part 1 first to get the basics of what brain science is trying to achieve.)  Our position is radically different from the vast majority of brain researchers, who attempt to unravel the intricacies of the mind by dissecting the intricacies of the human nervous system. We hold that mind doesn’t need the brain in order to exist. It precedes all living things by being fundamental to the universe. In other words, human beings inhabit a conscious universe. (more…)

Deepak coming to Australia

[youtube]http://youtu.be/-agvtJ9FOlw[/youtube]

Deepak will be visiting Australia  – Join him at the 2014 Hay House Australia Journey to Enlightenment

Journey to Enlightenment
How the convergence of Science and Spirituality can liberate us from the constraints of the Mind

Date: July 18-20, 2014
Presented by: Hay House Australia
Location: Palmer Coolum Resort, Warran Rd, Coolum,Sunshine Coast, QLD

Directions: Click Here

Can Brain Science Explain Experience?

By Deepak Chopra MD, Menas Kafatos, Ph.D., Subhash Kak, Ph.D., Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD., and Neil Theise, MD

For twenty years a conference bubbling with enthusiasm has taken place in Tucson to figure out the origins of the human mind.  Its title is Toward a Science of Consciousness. As you can imagine, it’s not an easy problem for science to solve. What moment of the day isn’t involved in the mind?  What this conference is really about is passing the crown from philosophers, who have had a couple of millennia to explain the human mind, to brain science specialists and laboratory technicians. They have solved so many other tough problems with great brilliance that they promise to solve this one too. (more…)

Why Robots Don’t Love Music

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Photo Credit: robsillustion.blogspot. Rob Mathieson

For more than a decade the media have been eagerly reporting on exciting advances in brain research and genetics, which arrive almost monthly.   These areas of science have become immensely confident and hopeful. They are the finger posts to a time when age-old mysteries about human nature will be explained once and for all. I recently saw a television report on neurologists investigating the mystery of music, for example, why it exists and how we respond to it.

 

My reaction to this report came in two parts: fascination at the ingenuity of the research and frustration that it’s taking knowledge down the wrong path. Let me fill in both.

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Can Current Science Give Us Access to Reality?

Can the Scientific Method as now practiced and based on naive realism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naïve_realism; give us access to the nature of Fundamental Reality  – the “stuff” or “essence” of the universe?

Deepak Chopra, MD, Menas Kafatos, PhD, and Neil Theise, MD

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Here are some of our thoughts, gleaned from our own contemplative practices, meditation, experiences of transcendence and conversations with other scientists who struggle with cosmic riddles:

 

  1. We have no access to fundamental reality — only to our perceptions and cognitions.
  2. “Empirical evidence” is a description of a species specific (human) mode of observation in a specific planetary system.
  3. The universe we describe in science is a human universe accessible through the perceptive capacities of the human organism (it’s not a bat or dolphin universe, etc.).
  4. The so called “hard problem” can be summarized as follows: We do not have an explanation for experience–any experience–mental or perceptual–how do photons going to the brain – become the experience of a 3D+1 reality in space and time or our own thoughts?
  5. Human knowledge is limited by the nature of human perceptive capacity and by the structure of language with several levels of abstraction by the time information gets to the brain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski
  6. The fine-tuning of the universe responsible for the manifestation of every phenomenon including our own brain body complex is unaccounted for.

(more…)