Skepticism and a Million Dollar Challenge (Part 2)

By Deepak Chopra, MD.


skeptics

When I made a video offering a million dollars to anyone who could explain how the brain produces the appearance of the three-dimensional world, I didn’t have a publicity stunt in mind. I wanted to draw attention to consciousness research, which has been burgeoning out of sight of the general public. For a long time consciousness has been taboo in the scientific community. The reasons aren’t hard to fathom. To explore consciousness means delving into subjectivity, the personal inner world. Science deals in objectivity, data, and hard facts.
There is no substantive reason why science shouldn’t go on a journey inward, but resistance was strong. All kinds of things occur in our inner world that scientists are reluctant to confront, including spirituality, art, morals, emotions, and so on. There’s a general assumption today that all of these activities can be reduced to brain functions, and only then will mind be subjugated to the scientific method and its demand for data and hard facts.
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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…)

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

400px-Naive_realism-2

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.

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Is the Universe Evolving?

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Crop WOW


Behind the mask of matter, something more mysterious is happening in the universe.

To get at the mystery, let’s follow the path a hydrogen atom might take over the thirteen billions years or so following its creation.  First it drifts out into space in a completely disorganized, random fashion, bouncing around like an infinitesimal feather on the cosmic wind. Some atoms keep on doing this until they form clouds of interstellar dust.  But this atom falls into a stronger gravitational field and becomes a building block for a star, which takes primitive atoms like hydrogen and helium and transforms them into heavier, more complex elements. Through a series of nuclear reactions our particular hydrogen atom becomes part of the element known as iron, the heaviest metal formed inside stars.

The life span of this star comes to an end in the dramatic death throe known as a supernova, an enormous explosion that scatters iron atoms throughout the nearby regions of the cosmos.  Our original hydrogen atom no longer exists as such, but its component parts are being drawn toward another star, hundreds of times smaller: the sun.

By this point in the history of the universe, the sun has already thrown off enough matter during its birth pangs that rings of dust have settled into orbit around it.  This dust is clumping into planets and our iron atom, pulled in by gravity, joins the planet Earth. At its core, the Earth is thought to be up to 70 percent molten iron, but our atom arrives late enough to settle onto the surface of the planet, which is around 10 percent iron.

Ten billion years have now passed. Many iron atoms have undergone random interactions with various chemicals, but ours is still intact. More time passes. It finds itself drawn into a spinach leaf, which gets eaten by a human being. Then our iron atom becomes part of a molecule thousands of times more complex than itself, a molecule that has the ability to pick up oxygen and throw it off at will: hemoglobin. Hemoglobin’s ability to perform this trick turns out to be crucial, because another molecule, this one millions of times more complex, has managed to create life. It is known as DNA, and around itself DNA is gathering the building blocks of life, known as organic chemicals, of which hemoglobin is one of the most necessary, since without it, animals cannot convert oxygen into cells.

In our story, one primal hydrogen atom has undergone incredible transformations to get to the point where it can contribute to life on Earth, and every step of the way involves evolution. Since all the iron on Earth was once part of a supernova (plus some iron deposited when meteorites collided with the early planet), the journey from the Big Bang can be observed and measured. Yet our iron atom has still another transformation to undergo. It has entered the bloodstream of a human being—you or me, perhaps—to become part of a sentient, thinking creature, one that is capable of looking back on its own evolution. In fact, this sentient creature created the notion of evolution in order to explain itself to itself. A primal atom has somehow become thoughtful.

Courtesy of War of the Worldviews by Deepak Chopra and Leonard Mlodinow. 

Deepak Chopra, MD, Founder of The Chopra Foundation, Co-Founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, coauthor of Super Brain with Rudolph Tanzi and for more information visit The Universe Within.  Come to the Chopra Foundation Sages and Scientists Symposium 2014.