Written by Menas Kafatos, Fletcher Jones Professor of Computational Physics, Vice Chancellor for Special Projects at Chapman UniversitySusan Blackmore, Deepak Chopra, Leonard Mlodinow and myself participated in a panel during the “Towards the Science of Consciousness” conference in Tucson, Arizona on 10 April 2012. The idea behind the panel came from Chopra’s book with Mlodinow War of the World Views that inspired the title of the debate. The panel was to have a discussion about the two, broadly termed, views of spirituality and science. I would rather, personally, not have simplified what are complex arguments by using simple labels. Nevertheless, we were there to discuss in good spirit different points of view on the nature of reality, how humans fit in the general scheme of things and particularly what is consciousness. (more…)