Hidden Truths: Going Beyond Common-Sense Reality (Part 1)
Monday, March 3, 2014
By Deepak Chopra, MD, Menas Kafatos, Ph.D., and Subhash Kak, Ph.D.
Despite their many divergences, science and philosophy are both led forward by reality. This is inevitable if facts, concepts, axioms, and other mental models are to be reliable. There are two ongoing projects, thousands of years old by now, that sprang from a different response to reality and where it leads. Roughly speaking, they are materialism and idealism. Materialism is fact-based, data driven, and wedded to the notion that “reality as given” is essentially trustworthy. Idealism cannot accept “reality as given” but looks to a hidden intelligence or level of Nature (if not God or the gods) that invisibly originates the physical universe.
To anyone who isn’t a professional scientist or philosopher, this divergence is mystifying, as if reality was a Chinese menu offering Platonism, Christianity, and Buddhism in column A and Aristotelianism, Einstein, and the Higgs boson in column B. As a practical matter, however, the ordinary person, including ordinary scientists, lead common-sense lives that depend implicitly on trusting the five senses and accepting “reality as given.” A quantum physicist drives his Honda Civic to work, not the ambiguous cloud of subatomic particles that he knows, professionally speaking, to be the substrate of every physical object, including automobiles.
Yet reality cannot be approached as Solomon’s choice. It isn’t tenable to divide it between materialism and idealism, each getting half. (For the moment, we’ll set aside the obvious disparity by which materialism got the whole baby while idealism was left with a teething ring and hints of a soul.) Understanding the nature of reality is too important to be left to specialists; the ordinary person deserves to know that certain first principles are true, applicable to reality itself, not a model of reality that exists to satisfy one stream of intellectual curiosity or the other.
The problem for the “matter first” position is that no one has credibly described the point at which unconscious particles acquire consciousness. That they somehow did is simply an unproven assumption. The problem for the “mind first” position is exactly the reverse: how to describe the mechanism by which consciousness morphs into physicality. These matching dilemmas would be of purely academic interest to ordinary people except for their practical implications, if any. If reality is leading us to see it in a different, more comprehensive way, there can’t help but be practical outcomes. But that’s a secondary issue, which we will address in our conclusion.
In the early quantum era, a number of seminal thinkers suspected that the link between materialism and idealism could only be found by exploring the role of consciousness. A handful of notable quotes summarizes their suspicions:
Erwin Schrödinger: “To divide or multiply consciousness is something meaningless.”
“There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousness…. [I]n truth there is only one mind.”
Max Planck: "I regard consciousness as fundamental. We cannot get behind consciousness. "
Werner Heisenberg: “The atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.”
It has taken a long time for these intimations to be recognized as profound insights. The lag time was due to various things – consciousness wasn’t considered a valid scientific subject; quantum theory had other fish to fry (for example, reconciling quantum mechanics with relativity); and in general the excitement of the quantum era was being generated by a complex set of new facts. Consciousness could be conveniently relegated to metaphysics and ignored. The triumph of one monism, the “matter first” worldview, seemed inevitable.
Yet at bottom the common-sense world of solid tangible objects fixed in space and time had been fatally undermined by quantum theory. This changed the status of facts per se. A fact could be accepted as a certainty in the classical Newtonian model, deriving from Aristotelian mechanics. Quantum facts were entirely different, taking into account the uncertainty principle and Schrödinger’s equation. It was valid to describe quantum behavior as a field of possibilities governed by mathematical probabilities. Thus a fact became a mental calculation first and foremost, with experimentalists struggling at great expenditure of time and money to gather fleeting evidence that a set of mathematical predictions was supported by data.
With startling speed, skipping over myriad complexities, we arrive at the present situation, where despite the astonishing accuracy of quantum mechanics (touted as the most accurate scientific theory ever developed), there is more doubt than ever about the nature of reality. By definition reality is more complex than any model can portray, and once a model runs into phenomena it cannot explain, we are compelled to follow wherever reality leads next.
It’s been well said that theories are right about what they include and wrong about what they exclude. We take that as axiomatic. To follow reality’s next hints, it is necessary for materialism and idealism to both abandon their prejudices, the chief of which is to protect the ground they’ve already won. Science has no reason to abandon its demand for data. The upholders of idealism (found in a loose aggregation of religion and spirituality, with a sprinkling of outlying philosophers, perhaps) have no reason for abandoning the inner world of subjective experience, with its remarkable capacity for insight, intuition, art, etc.
Since science dominates the current view of reality, we are more or less forced, as a provisional measure, to accept its demand for data, even though facts as such have been seriously undermined. There are some new hypotheses that bridge the gap between the quantum and classical worlds, making it possible to glimpse an underlying connection. Such a connection would justify seeing reality as a unity, after which we can decide which unity, the materialistic or the idealistic, is more credible. If reality’s hidden dimension is actually open to us, everyday life will be radically transformed, as we’ll discuss in the next post.
- To make a long story short: By just looking at my reality I can change it. This is what Schrödinger`s cat example is all about. The newest way of looking at things in the business world is called: process mining. This is something quite different from data mining. Mining a process will enable a person to change the process on the go........ Am doing exactly this by designing objects for a 3D printer. Soon now such a printer can print all kinds of objects that really matter because whatever one fancies can be printed out. New exciting times are awaiting us.......idealism and materialism united indeed! ~:D~heartphone // 8 days ago //
- Long before science and materialism blended into scientism and became the predominate world view embraced by both skeptics and religious folks, Lord Buddha had to contend with attachment to intellect as the most highly "evolved" medium for understanding "reality."“Lord Buddha’s general attitude to barren Metaphysical problems may be illustrated by his attitude to the problems of (i) the existence of God and (ii) the existence of the individual soul. He is said to have refused to answer the question, ‘Does God exist or not?’ Even when he was repeatedly asked that question, he scrupulously maintained inviolable silence on that point, because for the Pandits of his age God was merely an idea to play with. They had encountered upon some descriptions of God in their extensive study and they had turned these descriptions into tools for carrying on their unending controversies. God was for them not a living reality, but merely a possible hypothesis. And although they played with the idea they did not have any genuine desire for knowing him. It is true that the Upanishads had declared that God was unapproachable through the intellect alone. In spite of these declarations these Pandits wanted to prove or disprove the existence of God merely through intellectual debates. Whenever, therefore, Lord Buddha was invited to give his opinion about God he emphatically said that the belief or disbelief in the existence of God is of very little importance so long as the everyday life of man remains unchanged.” --from Meher Baba Journal, Vol I, No.11, p. 64-65 by Dr. C.D. DeshmukhRon Greenstein // 7 days ago //
March 10 2014
Hidden Truths: Going Beyond Common-Sense Reality (Part 2)
Although everyone as a practical matter accepts "reality as given" - the world presented by the five senses - that common-sense version of the world was radically undermined over a century ago with the advent of relativity and quantum theory. Equally dramatically, results from neuroscience show that mind creates representations of reality as in the phantom limb phenomenon. The trail from this ongoing revolution leads to current theories about a conscious universe, one that displays all the attributes of mind. In other words, mind precedes matter. The first post in this series introduced this concept, which if true would revolutionize everyday life. Reality itself, as explored by cutting-edge theories in physics, cosmology, and neuroscience, is giving us hints that we should look at the world through fresh eyes.
Some of the most intriguing thinking about the universe can be gathered under two rubrics: veiled non-locality and cosmic censorship. Veiled non-locality describes how the universe -- and the human brain -- disguises its wholeness in order to produce specific (i.e., local) events. This filtering process allows for specific observations and thoughts in a classical world of everyday experience, while keeping quantum and general relativistic processes out of sight. Cosmic censorship, on the other hand, describes the inability of distant observers to directly observe the center of a black hole, or "naked singularity." The center of the black hole is presumed to be the same as the quantum vacuum, which exhibits no behavior of matter or energy. This gives us a zero point – invisible, intangible, unlocatable in spacetime – that is the origin of the visible cosmos.
Between them, these two hypotheses remove a substantial amount of prejudice and unsupported belief. There is no longer a need to defend crude materialism in terms of subatomic “building blocks” as the basis for reality. Reductionism is the foundation of any “bottom up” model, and the base of the pyramid, like it or not, isn’t solid things or even stuff. At bottom the universe is emergent from the quantum vacuum, a “nothing” that contains the potential not just for our universe but for multiple, perhaps even infinite universes. Decades ago the noted physicist John Archibald wheeler of Princeton declared that all of physics is based on the quantum vacuum, and time has borne him out.
At the same time, an opening has been made for a “top down” interpretation of the universe based on a single holistic foundation, from which individual events spring. But what should the foundational principle be? If the materialistic monism is to survive, everything must be derived from the quantum vacuum. Cosmic censorship and veiled non-locality provide a prop for materialism, because it can be taken as axiomatic that some aspects of reality will never be observable; this removes the onus for finding data that support the emergence of consciousness. In brief, the materialistic position becomes “We have found all the data that can be found, and from our findings the conjecture that mind arose from matter is as reliable as it can be. The rest is hidden, not from any flaw in our position but due to the nature of things.”
The idealist monism can claim stronger support, however. Its great obstacle, as we mentioned, is to describe how mind creates matter. At its basis, any creative agency must be overarching and separate from its creation (otherwise, one is left with the self-contradiction of asking who made the creator). Cosmic censorship can be interpreted as an invisible creative agency that organizes reality but permits human observers only a glimpse of it, just enough to fit the limited mechanics of the human brain. With veiled non-locality, one can point to something beyond spacetime, and this something gives rise to everything local in the cosmos – from the Bing Bang to neutrinos, from a single hydrogen atom to DNA - without revealing itself. The theological dictum that God’s ways are not justified to man now has its scientific correlate. The whole doesn’t have to justify itself to the parts.
If both styles of monism are supported by these new hypotheses, we are obliged to settle on which is right. This age-old contest is no longer the same. The balance has discernibly shifted in favor of idealism, but since that’s an outmoded term, let’s call it consciousness-based reality. More than a century after Planck, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger had their insights, physicists have begun to take consciousness seriously again. If a demand for parsimony matters, it is simpler and more elegant to derive matter form mind than vice versa.
In the next post we'll build a bridge from scientific thinking to everyday life. If, as we believe, reality has been hinting at a conscious universe, the same hints should be detectable at the human level. The cosmic mind should have impacts on the brain, as indeed it does.
Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of more than 75 books with twenty-two New York Times bestsellers includingSuper Brain. Join the weightlessproject.org to eradicate obesity and malnutrition. For more interesting articles visitThe Universe Within
Menas C. Kafatos is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics at Chapman University. He is a quantum physicist, cosmologist, climate change researcher and works extensively on consciousness and the above fields. His doctoral thesis advisor was noted M.I.T. professor Philip Morrison who studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer. Kafatos' studies involved quantum physicists Hans Bethe, Victor Weisskopf and cosmologist Thomas Gold. He is co-author with Deepak Chopra of the forthcoming book, Who Made God and Other Cosmic Riddles. (Harmony)
Subhash Kak, Ph.D., Regents Professor of Computer Science, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater
Comment
The first reply to the above that comes up in me is: why not just experience this as ones own truth instead of trying to prove something that cannot be proven. I watch my reality and can change my perception of it, which means I am the only one who can find suitable creative solutions to my own reality. This means that consciousness as such can be manipulated to suit anybody`s needs. That`s why dictators still have so much power in this world! But maybe that`s your only intention: to make people become aware of their own power. Well, chaos will be the result as there is no true reality left anymore. Before that happens am luckily not among the living anymore.....
heartphone // about one day agohttps://www.deepakchopra.com/blog/view/1512/hidden_truths:_going_beyond_commonsense_reality_(part_2)
https://www.deepakchopra.com/blog/view/1505/hidden_truths:_going_beyond_commonsense_reality_(part_1)