Deepak Chopra and Michael Shermer: Ultimate Reality

good evening everybody Welcome to Chapman University and thank you for being here tonight it's spectacular to see such a crowd for this event uh let me Begin by thanking the three de who have coordinated this event Minas and Patrick and Bob thank you for coming together and across the different colleges put together an event of this of this caliber uh I would like to begin by giving a little bit of the background rules for how we're going to do it and some rules for you as well rule number one if you could please turn off your cell phones I want to see all the cell phones come out and being turned off especially you especially on the panel on the panel I've just got un vibrate so I can do a little texting tweet also there should be ushers going up and down the stairs during the event if you questions you should write them down pass them along the aisle to the Usher they will bring them to me and then at the end of the event uh we will try to answer as many questions as possible um I also like to mention that if you'd like to share further thoughts or responses to the conversation of tonight uh we have cameras that stand by at the exit of the theater and you can do their short interviews for an an online continuation of this dialogue uh I think it's the topics that we're going to be discussed tonight are exciting controversial and so I I ask all of you to respect the position of the panelist they may be different they may be sometimes objectionable to some of us and so it's important that we allow the flourishing of the conversation which I think is the most important thing in a intellectual environment uh as for us the way we're going to run this we're going to have every panelist will make a five minutes statement we will begin from my to the extreme left there with Jim Walsh and we're going to go around I will introduce the speakers one at the time uh I will give only a very brief introduction because you all have a full description of the speakers in your in your booklet at the end of the first round we're going to go back and we're going to go a second round of five minutes I have a watch here which I will used to castigate those who violate the rules and of course dapat will not speak because he already spoke for his five minutes oops and then at the end I will have question and I will moderate the Q&A phase and I will try to make sure that all the question are from the same person we get some degree of variety in the kind of question that people uh are asking uh two words about the topic what are we going to talk about tonight this morning one of my students called me and said what what do you mean the nature of reality what is there to talk about about the nature of reality well uh the first question is whether reality exists and uh there are as as silly the question may look like there are several possible an to this question you may have an idealist philosophy that say well reality really doesn't exist there is no such thing as reality everything is illusion everything is appearances and the only thing you have is what your Consciousness create but there is no reality besides that on the other hand you have the hardcore scientist position of course there is a reality and that's what science is is designed to discover we've been doing this for 3,000 years and that's what we keep doing uh And Then There are a variety of nuance position tonight what you'll hear is some of this variety uh for example uh my position would be that yeah there is a reality and and science is a fundamental tool to discover such reality but there may be aspect of reality may be unknowable we may get very close to the big bang for example and we perfect our understanding our theoretical understanding we perfect our Machinery so that we can smash particles and recreate what happen very shortly after the big bang but we may not be able to actually get to the Big Bang just like we can get very close to the absolute zero and not being able to get there so as you see the question is much deeper than it appears there are a variety of position and what I hope that we're going to have tonight is really a an exposition of this position and some degree of debate about them and now let me introduce our first Speaker as I said is Jim Walsh to my left Jim is the co-founder and chairman of a human Energy System Alliance Institute which is a research and development company devoted to unlocking the potential of the human Energy System he's also the chairman of the Mind matter Research Foundation is a nonprofit Foundation that is interested in issues of consciousness serves on the board for a center for investigating healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin medicon medical school so ladies and gentlemen Jim Walsh Than [Applause] You When U Minos first asked me to come and attend this I wondered why because I'm the generalist here amongst all these Specialists and I realized that it probably be informative for the students to see how a generalist goes about um solving this problem so that the way I looked at this was we had two questions here one was is there an Ultimate Reality and second can we measure it and for me science is a useful discipline to measure the patterns of our world make sense from it and ultimately harness them into something useful whereas reality to me anyway is our perception of what is knowable so given those two definitions for me I thought we had two choices and by the way excuse me for using the notes but my daughter told me I had to make notes otherwise I'd run much longer than five minutes so but the Ultimate Reality for is really we really have two choices one is we can say the Ultimate Reality as Danielle just said is what we perceive and the limits of our perception defines the limit of reality um or we can take the position that the Ultimate Reality is ultimately unknowable and unknowable in the sense that it's beyond the realm of our Consciousness that the avatars who have actually gone to this place say that it's beyond words that it can't be explained or understood except in the context of actually having that experience that it's the Ultimate Reality it's Universal it's Eternal and it's the it's the point of transcendence of Consciousness so if we took that position I wouldn't have anything more to say because I've never been there I'm not an avatar uh I'd only be speculating so I kind of wanted take position number one which is in line with what we're doing at our Research Institute which is taking a look at this as an evolving model of Consciousness and let me give you an example what I mean by evolving model starting in about the 1600s to the 1900s we had a classic period of Science in that Newton in his study of matter and then the laws that governed the motion of matter gave mankind a very good foundation for reality matter energy where the foundation of reality everything else is built off of that the sciences that came out of that chemistry for instance which is a study how that matter comes together in particles how biology how those particles come together form a living system then neurology how those living systems form a nervous system and ultimately the experience of the Mind in a system like that the Mind actually is just simply matter and and feelings and thoughts come out of the complexity of that mind that was a very solid platform great advances in mankind came out of it and it was very pleasing to the church at the time too because the church at the at the time was very concerned about this investigation and they often say d cart for instance in the 1600s had negotiated a truce with the church saying that science could investigate matter as long as it was being able to be touched with all the sense is seen measured that was fine but don't go into the realm of spirit or Consciousness as Henry will tell you and some of the other people that started the change in the early 1900s where quantum physics gave us an entirely new paradigm of what reality was all of a sudden matter was a just another level of reality no longer the foundation and underneath it was a field of potential and that potential seems to be linked directly to this idea of consciousness so you know you can see now we have this evolving model of reality and science changes with that model of reality it seems that we could say that when our paradigms change we change and science is is is the means by which we go from Mythic imagination to something that's usable repeatable and productive in our lives so now we're starting to see right now sort of a shift happening again in science but this is emerging sense of Consciousness as an essence of reality so you know as as we follow this model of of U evolution of reality we we get to back to the ultimate question what is there an Ultimate Reality and I I love what Danielle had to say is that as we evolve closer and closer and closer to perhaps the Ultimate Reality um it's a process it's a process of Being Human you know know at my research institute right now we're we've put an alliance together of universities researchers um private institutions studying this idea of Consciousness trying to make trying to discover the pathways um the techniques that can harness this in useful ways for human beings and you know the whole point of this at least for us is the question of does the mind or Consciousness have a place in the physical world and if it does Everything Changes including consensus reality is it the Ultimate Reality well given that history probably not it's probably one more step along the way but what it does point out is that science is a faithful companion to our shifting paradigms that it provides us something very useful along the way until we get to that spot of Enlightenment to that place where words and me methods and are no longer important than we simply are so that's the sort of the as a generalist that's how I look at at this question is that it's a process and and one that is very actively evolving as we speak let me move to the second speaker our second speaker is Henry sta hry is an old friend of Chapman University a frequent visitor here he a professor of physics at Lawrence lab National Laboratory in up in Berkeley he's well known for the development of a theoretical framework for the analysis of the scattering of the polarized protons and for his development of a relativistic framework for axiomatic s Matrix Theory more recently studies on the quantum measurement problem have led into a rational understanding of the effects of our conscious thoughts upon the physical processes that occur in our brain have it thank you so we have two questions here that we've been asked one is uh is there an Ultimate Reality and um uh I must confess I do not know whether there's an Ultimate Reality and exactly even what that means but I would say that uh given that we don't know I think it's worthwhile trying to find it at least uh not getting up saying it's impossible so I would say let's try to find it if there is one and uh so the second question is uh I can answer in more detail um says if there is one U does science play a role in accommodating or accounting for it and um now as a Quantum physicist the uh answer is uh fixed by Orthodox quantum theory and the answer is no because the Orthodox philosophy of quantum theory says that what science is about and in particular once we come to Quantum Theory we realize we that this makes great good sense what science is about is relationships between experiences that Science is based on empirical phenomena empirical data and empirical data uh means things that are experienced by people science is a human endeavor which we human beings in uh create for ourselves in order to to uh be able to predict for example what's going to happen if we do something and uh so the official answer given by quantum theory is uh no uh science is not U about and it's not uh designed to search for the uh Ultimate Reality science is this useful human endeavor which is based upon empirical evidence and U so an empirical evidence of course um means things that we human beings experience so you have to bring uh Human Experience into the picture because that's what science is about it's about relationships between human experiences that's the official uh Doctrine official philosophy of of quantum theory and um I was just congratulating my colleague here uh on his recent book he said it very clearly uh much better than I said it in a number of books that you can't get the people you cannot remove people from the uh from the scheme of things because people are the things that are having the experiences and if it's about empirical data then you've got to have the people in their brains because they're brains are very closely connected to what our experiences are so the um so the bottom line the official line in quantum mechanics is is no it's not about Ultimate Reality at all it's about human experiences and uh so now why did quantum theory and Quantum theorists uh move to this position as uh you've just heard from U Professor Walsh um we had a very wonderful theory that seemed to be a theory of reality itself these particles moving around and bouncing around and uh the theory that we had up until the N up until around 1900 was uh seemed to be a theory of reality itself a very satisfying uh idea that we were able to comprehend actually the Ultimate Reality in a pretty simple form in fact um so to introduce uh the problem I'm going to um um tell you about um what Neils bore said uh in relation to what was going on at the salve Conference of 1926 that was the conference where quantum theory was more or less invented and put uh on the table for display he says that um during the conference a discussion arose between Heisenberg and dur two of the principal founders of quantum mechanics and the issue was in this uh quantum mechanical world where you only have statistical predictions um what do we say about uh uh uh how these uh the actual situation comes about and uh on the one hand Heisenberg said we have to do with choices on the part of The Observers and uh direct said what we're dealing with here is choices on the part of nature now it turns out that those in the way quantum theory was is finally understood both both were absolutely correct here the uh the structure of quantum theory basically has three levels it has a level which you call the physical level and this is the level that is a direct mathematical generalization of classical mechanics it's all about things that mathemat about um properties that are assigned to SpaceTime points and how they evolve according to certain mathematical laws um but um the uh the problem is that if you just look at that level alone that uh the world seems to evolve into this huge smear of possible worlds of the kind that we experience so how do you get from this huge smear that the equations are giving you to the things that we human beings experience and the way it finally worked out is that you need both of these ideas of of uh that I just mentioned and uh John Wheeler a famous uh physicist who was also involved with the creation uh drew the analogy to the game of 20 questions he said that the way the university evolves according to Quantum Mechanics is like the game of 20 questions and uh the questions get answered by The Observers The Observers have to pose some question they probe they ask a question is nature such and such is this property of nature uh something that can be experienced because if the question and the ansers to make sense to him then the question is is got to be answered in a way that uh he can experience the answer and distinguish yes from no so the first phase of getting Beyond this smear is for an observer to ask a question of of nature does nature have this such and such a property a something like an experience the answer yes or no and then the next uh phase is in the words of direct nature makes the choice and uh so now if you look at quantum mechanics these two parts have very different uh entries into the structure of the theory the question asked by the uh Observer uh in ways that I won't go into but in very well defined ways is a local process it has to do with where the human being that's making the question or the Observer that's making question it's located uh on the other hand the uh choice on the part of nature which is answering the question yes or no um um is not like this it has a global reach in the sense that um somehow the answer that nature gives to some questions posed over here depends on Nature's knowing being being able to know what some question asked far away at the same instant of time in some sense is so you have this local okay so you have the local part and you have Nature's part and nature Has This Global aspect so let's not talk about God but if you talk about nature then there is something in quantum mechanics that uh has something um that goes beyond it looks like maybe you're reaching something a deeper level of understanding of what's going on by virtue of the fact that nature this sort of Nature has to become involved in the process according to the rules of or of Orthodox Quantum theor thank you I'm using a relativistic watch which means that time dilates a little bit cuz I hate to interrupt in the middle of a very good argument um our third speaker is leard malinov he's a professor of physic at Caltech authors of of course numerous Publications in the field of physics but uh also five major books that have been very successful in the popular press in particular ukids window the story of geometry from parallel lines to hyperspace fman rainbow search for beauty in physics and life a briefer history of time cter with Steven Hawking the drer walk story of the randomness and its role in our lives and then the very recent Grand Design also cter with stepen hawy then so I uh first of all agree with um a lot of what Henry said uh so thanks for uh helping you helping me along so I'll try and uh condense the time um but I think the uh first we should answer the second question so the second question uh is how how do we can we know about reality and I I don't think we can uh and again I think the reasons are somewhat um obvious uh the reasons I'm going to give and they've been stated through through history that you know we have our senses we filter everything through our uh senses I think uh today we're much more aware that we also have a a brain that that uh is very important in in what we think and what we experience uh of reality so you know with modern Neuroscience learning a lot about how we think we realize more and more that uh our peculiar pecul ities or specific uh aspects of our brain shapes uh what we perceive on the outside in a very deep sense so um you know when I when you see a table or a chair your your idea of that concept the shape not just the shape the experience of the color but you know all that isn't necessarily property of the molecules as much as the molecules and all the data that's coming in plus the way your brain thinks about things so uh as a physicist as we try and look deeper and you know Henry said that we um it's about experiences or observations it's not really about reality what we're trying to explain we're trying to make predictions about the future and we come up with mathematical theories and for physicists and uh in modern times since we write books for a lot of people who aren't physicists the theories of physics tend to Define what we think of as as reality uh whe whether it's um you know the model of the atom with the electrons swirling around or The Cloud of the electrons around the atom or however you think about um about reality on a deeper level than just tabl and chairs comes from the theories of physics but we have to understand that aliens on another planet with brains that function differently uh uh uh or computers that are in eventually coming up with theories of reality could could have uh ideas uh that are totally different from uh the ideas that we have uh they would have to have the same uh they would all agree on the results of the predictions but the concepts that they use be it an atom or forces uh could be quite different to get them to the same place at the end and you know you can even see this and if you look at different theories of physics uh that um that are formulated today that you know either say general relativity Einstein's theory of gravity versus Newton's theory of gravity and the way you look at a quantum theory they all have different ways of looking at things but in experiments where they can all be applied in some way they all they will all agree uh so um so in that sense uh but based on our the way our mind works and the way our senses work I say that we can't really know anything about any uh external objective real reality all we can do is what we can as as human beings uh now added to that some of the things that Henry said that our current theories of physics even call into question whether certain properties that we uh expect things to have such as position and velocity even exist but I won't even go into that but um so all that said let's go to question one which is um is there an external reality but now that I've answered question too you know my answer is who knows I mean we don't know so that's it for me Michael take it from [Applause] there so Michael Shermer he's the executive director and founding publisher of skeptic magazine I think you received some copies as you walked in he also a monthly Colony for a Scientific American and J Professor Claremont Graduate University and hopefully a Chapman in the near future uh he a latest book is the mind of the market about evolutionary economics he also wrote why Darwin mat Evolution and the case against intelligent design and the signs of Good and Evil and why people believe weird things and his next book is going to be the believing brain M thank you I will try to stick to a classical clock instead of a relativistic clock so uh is there an Ultimate Reality just out of curiosity how many of you here in the audience think the answer is no there is not an Ultimate Reality if I could just see a show of hands okay great because um after the event tonight uh we're going to run an experiment because this I claim is a testable hypothesis we're going to go to the roof we have cameras to record the experiment we have uh data recorders to record this and we're going to push you off one by one and if you truly believe there's no Ultimate Reality your non-existing atoms will pass mysteriously through the non-existing atoms of the ground and you will not be hurt end of story so I checked they're calling me from risk management risk management yes they they approved the experiment so we won't be able to do that sorry how's your insurance policy I'm trying to do firewalks at institutions they don't want to do that either anyway so uh um okay so I'm a materialist a monist I'm not a duelist I think humans are by Nature Duelists that we think that they're is an an extra substance a soul a spirit an agent a hidden Force some kind of energy a god a God's whatever uh but that's a product of our brains uh misperceiving the world and and infusing into it these hidden invisible uh agents that we think are there that aren't really there uh and you know I'm right because because I'm a publish skeptic anyway so um if you get a brain injury if you get a stroke particularly dramatically um Alzheimer's or cility or dementia as the neurons die one by one so does your mind there is no mind the mind is just one of these fuzzy words that gets thrown about that if we try to operationally Define it carefully we find we're just describing what the brain does so mind is just a a word to describe what the brain does the soul is just a word word a fuzzy word to describe our pattern of information our memories and our our Essence and our being which dies when we die and so forth it's no more mysterious by the way where you go after you die than where you were before you were born why does nobody get all fussed up about well where was I before I was born I think deep does well actually that's right he does you're right anyway so uh I've had this argument with him in previous lifetimes I won those too anyway so so I and I think um as the brain dies cell by cell so does your mind your essence your being your soul and you all know that that that's absolutely right so if you're right Deepu um that somehow the Mind exists somewhere else where where did you know Aunt Millie's brain mind go when her brain died or whatever it's is it out there in some substrate some Quant some computer in some other alien Universe I mean this just gets to be Just Pure Fantasy now I think um there's much to be said about this quantum mechanics and the Observer I guess what bothers me and when I say deepo I mean team deepo anybody that's what bothers me about it is two things that bother me about it first is it's it's putting us back in the center of the universe it's like cernus toppled us off the pedestal and then Darwin toppled us off the pedestal and then uh uh Freud and then Einstein and so on and now we you know here it is we want to pull them pull us back in we are the center of the whole thing in quantum mechanics you have to have an observer and and why is the Observer always us of course it doesn't have to be us it's any observation it's the machine the camera doesn't have to be us but that's always what everybody's talking about I am back in the center of the universe I'm the most important thing there's no reality without me how convenient right it just feels so good I'm put right back in there so let's run a thought experiment humans went extinct 150,000 years ago and the Ander tals now run the show it does reality still exists with neander tals as The Observers or wipe out all the hominids and it's just a bunch of dinosaurs running around Wipe Out the mammals whatever still does reality exist did they count as observers right so and this idea that with the Observer like something like reality doesn't exist without the Observer therefore the moon doesn't exist without an observer if you don't see it it it isn't really there uh well to quote Bill O'Reilly tides come in Tides go up never a Miss communication therefore there's a God right so the tides work because of the Moon it doesn't matter whether they're observed or not they happen anyway and they will without us finally I think what's really going on here is quantum mechanics is spooky and weird and Consciousness is spooky and weird so what I mean that doesn't mean they're connected Charlie Sheen is spooky and weird but you don't need quantum physics to explain the tiger blood it's just brain chemistry are you sure thank you CNN was wrong I guess thank you Michael you certainly raise the temperature in the room which is good our next speaker super enough is Deepak Chopra uh he's an internationally renowned bestselling author of more than 50 books on spirituality and wellbeing he's the founder of the choa foundation senior scientist with the Gallup organization chairman and co-founder of the choa center for wellbeing Dr Cho is the fellow of the American College of physician and member of the American Association of clinical and endocrinologist and an agent professor of executive program at a Kell School of Management at Northwestern so I'm going to be a little more affirmative than less ambiguous because I'm not an academic and I can risk my reputation he's already called me Dr Woo in many occasions and he's already spoken of my language as the quantum flap doodle so yeah I'm I'm On The Fringe and I don't mind being but when I see him saying I'm a professional skeptic and he wears a label on his lapel by the way which says skeptic my first response is I don't believe you I think there's a deeper question than being asked right now than re what is Ultimate Reality what he's speaking about is perceptual reality okay which is which is a very legitimate way of looking at things but there's no question and there's a neuroscientist here in our audience and I think you'll agree that what we experience as reality is a is actually an activity of the brain and the Brain in different species is quite different for example a honeybee's eye cells don't respond to ultraviolet uh respond to ultraviolet not to the usual wavelengths of light that you and I see what does a honeybee see when it looks at a flower uh a bat experiences the world as ultrasound what's that experience like uh a chameleon's eyeball swivel on two different axes I don't think anyone in this room can remotely imagine what the world looks like to a chameleon so the nervous system and what we call external reality correspond to each other but there are many kinds of nervous systems and also nervous systems are actually created through culture through history through relationships through uh interactions through storytelling nervous systems are not fixed we now know the new science of neuroplasticity I just met a month ago I met with Elizabeth Blackburn who won the Nobel Prize for discovering T Tas many years ago she just published a paper in the Academy of Sciences that within 4 months of meditative and contemplative practices there are distinct changes in the so-called Tas activity Tas is an enzyme and for an enzyme to go up 30% there's got to be Gene mediation you've got to have transcription and translation so the whole field of neuroplasticity of genetic indeterminism I don't know if you know but within four months of Lifestyle Changes including exercise good sleep good relationships uh Peace of Mind loving relationships you can turn on 500 genes that actually influence things like autoimmune disease inflammation and so on so except for the 5% of people who have really mutated genes like say Alzheimer's specific or Huntington scoria most of our genes can be turned on and off right now as I'm speaking to you I'm influencing your neural networks and I'm causing po iation between neurons just through this interaction and in order to do that I have to go through your neuronal genes I have to actually translate and transcribe certain genetic information we're influencing each other's genes right now in our interaction we are influencing our neural networks there's a lot of plasticity and what we call perceptual reality is an experience dependent on what the nervous system is doing doing at that moment and our nervous system is very flexible you know we can we can change it through our interactions in fact we're doing it right now through Twitter and through Facebook and through social networks we're seeing that our minds are entangled our minds are what we call embodied as well as relational processes that regulate the flow of energy and information not only in our bodies but in our interactions so is there an Ultimate Reality the answer for me is yes that Ultimate Reality is the ground of existence which many Eastern wisdom Traditions have called Consciousness now there's an argument what is consciousness you'll hear different opinions of what is consciousness here's my definition of Consciousness Consciousness is the ground of existence and now by the way when I say existence I'm not meaning anything esoteric I'm meaning that which exists conscious is the ground of existence that differentiates into everything we CAU reality our thoughts can you be cons can you have thoughts without Consciousness answer is no our cognition our perception our Behavior our speech our biology our social interactions our personal relationships our environment our interaction with the forces of nature these are differentiated aspects of this very fundamental reality which we cannot conceive of because it is the source of our conception which we cannot perceive because it's the source of our perception see when we say is there an Ultimate Reality in the SC will science will ever be able to dis disclose it I will say no science will never be able to disclose it because science is an activity in Consciousness science mathematics these are activities in Consciousness can you imagine a world without outside of Consciousness you can't because you have no way of stepping out of Consciousness okay so you are being you're experiencing me in your Consciousness I'm experiencing you in my Consciousness I'm experiencing body in my Consciousness and even my scientific methodologies are in Consciousness now you know very elegant book that mardar wrote with Steven Hawking it says U the universe came out of nothing but at least I'm quoting accurately what I heard from Steven the universe came out of nothing will continue to come out of nothing and then he prefaced it even prefaced it anyway because of a law called gravity okay I am saying to you today that I hope by this evening not with his thought experiment but just through certain logic here we will see the ultimate and climactic overthrow of the Superstition of materialism because everything you call matter is non-material everything that you call physical is non-physical if you go down to the most fundamental levels of nature you go beyond forget the observer effect which is ridiculous by the way the way he describes it because according to him The Observers of the universe were created by the objects of the universe okay so if you are there an observer which he says is a fiction okay but then he's using his mind to uh Express his arguments my brain his brain yeah so we don't even have to address him it's a brain okay it's a braid we are all zombies we have no free will we have no Insight we have no intuition we have no creativity we have no imagination we have no choice these are all the my synaptic networks you know when in fact even the synaptic networks are made out of atoms the atoms are subatomic particles and the particles are not things the essential nature of the material world is that it's not Material the essential nature of the physical world is it's not physical the essential stuff of the universe is non stuff okay now the question is what is this non stuff from where we all come is it just an empty void or could it be the womb of creation does nature go to exactly the same place to create a galaxy of stars a cluster of nebulas a rainforest a human body or a thought so the question is let us figure out today what is the relationship between Consciousness Energy Information and matter could they all be the same thing in different disguises our next speaker is our own Dean Min escafos Fletcher Jones and DOW professor of computational physics at Chapman University and also Dino theid college and vice Chancellor for special project um he's a physicist but he has also written uh numerous books that address these issues of Consciousness in particular the conscious Universe the non-local universe and principles of Integrative science thank you Daniel I will take some pragmatic uh approach to the two questions uh being a scientist um I heard so far that uh actually there's quite a bit of an agreement I heard um at least two sides agree that there's monis I heard Mike say that he's a monist and so did Deepa so I would say also that I'm a monist um uh what I mean by that is that we as scientists uh could not do science we could not Practice Science unless really we had a deep belief it does have to be belief that it's a dogmatic belief but a sense the kind of a sense that Einstein talked about that there is something that can be a study with science can be understood um and of course in physics we call them laws of nature uh today we know Al though that those laws of nature are not Eternal they certainly did not exist prior to the Big Bang whatever that meant and we have some other uh issues in physics today such as the concepts of nature um which can vary depending on what U field Theory you assume or whether you you you espouse the uh great uh developments of the recent developments of strength Theory um so we do Practice Science because we believe that we can get closer and closer and closer to it however um to say that there is a reality that it is out there I would say that what I've heard so far we're probably most of us are not going to subscribe to the view that there is um um no external reality U there is an external reality but we are part of it so the challenge for us as scientist today is how do we extend the wonderful bottom up approach that we have now working for about 400 years that is so successful in terms of explaining phenomena uh according to uh prescriptions that we we discover we call them laws of physics laws of biology or perhaps laws of psychology uh how do we go closer and closer to that um we in in an innate way we assume that it is reality um I don't believe that such a reality exists without us now I don't I'm not saying does not exist without me particularly or Deepak or Mike Sher or Danielle stuer no that would be too suptic that's not what really we're talking about it's not that ex the the moon does not exist if CFOs drops dead or you know or prodig of Kos dropped dead or whatever they all disappear that's not the point but they we can not unentangled the process of measurement from what we're trying to measure I wish folks I wish really that there was an absolute external reality that was out there and me to discover it all of us to discover it it doesn't seem to work that way it just does not seem to work that way we need to think of a science that allows us as observers to be an integral part of what trying to study it's not easy because we as scientists have to separate our subjective experience but understand also that ultimately the subjective experience may be driving the whole thing so in terms of practical steps what um several of us are are discussing is I believe that ultimately we need to go deeper into the mathematical structure of uh the language of nature which is mathematical and in fact Eugene Winer one of the great um physicist of quantum Revolution um talked about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics so um it's it has to be mathematics that goes beyond the Dynamics that you have in general relativity that you have in neonian physics beyond the Dynamics that you have even in string theory uh to really address the qualitative aspects the the the things that we know that are there but we cannot describe mathematics so we need to be working more and more into the mathematical langu anguage and as we do that what reality we're going to discover is more or less the reality we have been building on now for several hundred years or in fact if you like 2,000 years that we're getting closer and closer to something but whether it is the complete picture um I don't believe that will happen anytime soon thank you thank you Min uh now I think a change of pace our next speaker is actually professor of religious stud Michael Peters is the director of our University honors program and professor of R of studies teaches courses in Buddhism comparative religion philosophic hermeneutics philosophical political theology so thank you uh I'm going to stick to my notes because uh there is a time limit that danieli kept telling me about all week and when I told him that I was going to run over he suggested that I remove the Articles and adjectives from my presentation and that should help if this appears incomprehensible it's because I have removed the Articles and adjectives um the questions upon which this public conversation on the nature of reality focuses uh are is there an Ultimate Reality and if so can science can it be accounted for by science in other words if Ultimate Reality exists is it harmoniously related to the realities of our material Universe if the response to the first question is a categorical denial of the possibility of the existence of Ultimate Reality then there seems little or no point to this evening's exercise except probably a nice dinner later on if however the existence of Ultimate Reality is an alive question then its possible nature as well as as its possible relationship with our world become existentially important given uh the limits of time permitted I'm going to restrict my remarks to the consideration of two basic understandings of the relationship of Ultimate Reality with our world one extrinsic the other intrinsic and in this way I hope to address the second of our questions can Ultimate Reality be accounted for for by science uh in the spirit of Christianity an article from his Frankfurt manuscripts the German philosopher Hegel identifies an extrinsic interpretation of the experience of Ultimate Reality as the effect of and response to the god out there the god outside and independent of the natural and historical worlds Gregory bom describes this God as the almighty Supreme Being in heaven who while having no communion with the cosmos and human history graciously enters the lives of men and women to help them in their predicaments yet even then this God remains the totally other the Divine stranger the infinite object it is difficult to imagine how a consistent development of this understanding would allow for the totally strange and separate God the infinite and perfect object on high to be experienced in such a way that the natural and historical orders participate necessarily in its reality even if some participation were conceivable it would have to involve such a miraculous suspension of the laws of nature and the effects of his history that there could only be radical discontinuity between the moment before and the moment after according to this interpretive understanding an unavoidable and unbridgeable Chasm divides Ultimate Reality from this world and there appears to be just two ways to account for this Chasm either it was there from the very beginning because of an original ontological dualism or it is a subsequent development which resulted from some kind of primordial fall in either case Ultimate Reality is understood essentially as a meta empirical reality can science which deals primarily with the empirical realities of our material Universe account for Ultimate Reality understood as meta empirical in certain Traditions it has been claimed that solid knowledge of the matter empirical cannot be gained through human sense perception or through the natural operations of human reason but only through the miracle of Revelation if such traditional claims were granted then the best that science could do with the meta empirical would be to make inferences about it based upon empirical observations back in the day when such uh traditional claims held cultural and political sway it was expected that if scientific inferences ever came into conflict with the imparted truths of Revelation scientists would give way to the authority of Revelation the failure to do so the failure of scientists to genuflect before the authority of Revelation by conforming their conclusions to its ordained truths always came with serious consequences such as the loss of freedom and for some even the loss of life an alternative to this extrinsic understanding of the relationship of Ultimate Reality and and with our world has dawned for some like sedara Gama and Albert Einstein who have dared to contemplate the intricacies of human life and of our immense Universe without dogmatically subscribing beforehand to any pre-ordained conclusions such open-ended inquiry has led some to experience themselves as always already encompassed and permeated by that which is greater by that which the human will cannot fully control nor which the human intellect can fully grasp various interpretations of these kinds of experiences have led to a nondualistic construal of Ultimate Reality as the fullness or depth of all things such as they are it is not at all difficult to see how a consistent development of such an understanding allows for no separation whatsoever between ultimate reality and this material universe so where the earlier dualistic understanding assumes a Chasm so radical that it posits only the possibility of an extrinsic and miraculous relationship between Ultimate Reality and our world this non-dualistic understanding assumes an intimacy so radical that it posits only the possibility of an intrinsic and necessary relationship between them ultimate reality and this universe are experienced and understood as constituting an organic hole in which identity and difference harmoniously into play from the perspective of this Nono dualistic understanding it is hard to imagine how disciplined inquirers into the depths of Human Experience do not eventually awaken to the fact that reality as a whole always exhausts our understanding with remainder Albert Einstein claims that to awaken to this fact is to awaken to the mysterious which he calls the fearest thing we can experience he goes on to say that the experience of the mysterious stands at the Cradle of true art and true science and that those who know it not can no and no longer can experience Wonder no longer feel amazement are as good as dead for those who find themselves AED by the incredible beauty and coherence of reality as a whole and at the same time find themselves intellectually humbled by its infinite intelligibility for them the line which marks where science ends and the Arts and spirituality begin is not always all that clear if if this non-dualistic understanding has Merit then the question is not can science account for Ultimate Reality but rather how can science avoid doing so thank you Michael I I think you would agree with me that we could have removed a few articles here our next speaker is uh Stuart hamov Dr hamov is an anesthesiologist and professor at the University of Arizona medical center in tuen he's known for his promotion of the scientific study of Consciousness and his theories of the mechanism of Consciousness he's a cter with sir Roger Penrose of a theory that proposed Consciousness is the result of quantum computation mediated by quantum gravity effects he also directs the center for Consciousness studies at University of Arizona thank you hello everybody um I take this question literally and by that I mean uh I look at the fundamental level of the universe if you go down in scale below the level of atoms uh 20 uh 25 orders of magnitude smaller you get to the plank scale uh where there's information embedded and at that level there's something going on now uh this debate dispute about whether there's an Ultimate Reality or not goes back to Bor and Einstein we've heard that that bore was making Quantum measurements giving beautiful results uh but it seemed to indicate that that underneath those Quantum measurements reality was ambiguous or unclear or or random or chaotic and that was fine with bore he was happy to make his measurements and and do great things Einstein wasn't pleased he thought there was an underlying reality he didn't know what it was but you believe that underneath all all those Quantum measurements something was was there and was real and had information now the their modern counterparts of of those two giants in some sense are stepen Hawking and Roger Penrose Hawking follows bore in that there's no uh it's okay uh Hawking uh and Leonard LNO follow boore and that they're kind of ambiguous or vague about whether there's a reality if there is isn't well no big deal and they take uh of course they apply String Theory to the plank scale where the strings are vibrating but they don't say or can't account for what the strings are vibrating in now Penrose on the other hand says that at this plank scale at this very fundamental level of the universe is geometry uh quantum gravity Quantum geometry spin networks twister Theory there's various approaches but some kind of pattern or information that that is encoded and he goes on to say that encoded at that level are values platonic values mathematical truth perhaps even aesthetic and ethical values and the precursors of Consciousness as well as perhaps the the forces and constants that give rise to our universe uh you know about the anthropic principle the fact that the 25 or so constants and forces have to be precisely right to give life uh Starlight life and Consciousness and uh the The View that you you must take that Hawking and madal for example take is that there must be a gazillion universes and we just happen to be in the one that has all the right constants the Goldilocks principle just right for life and all those other ones there's nobody conscious to worry about now that necessitates an infinite a near infinite multitude of of universes that are untestable and unknowable uh a bit messy uh penro says that this information is there's a cosmic blueprint if you will embedded at this fundamental level and it includes the precursors of Consciousness this implies that Consciousness didn't emerge happen stance during the course of evolution as kind of an after Thea epiphenomenon uh and in fact what Michael said about the mind and Consciousness is completely wrong we can we can explain what the brain does in terms of non-conscious processing but when it comes to Consciousness there's really no good explanation there's other things like backward time effects uh free will perfect synchrony across the brain which seem to imply some kind of quantum mechanism now penr and I have have come up with a theory that makes a connection between Quantum process in the brain and this fundamental level of the universe to access these platonic values and protoc conscious entities built into the universe and by the way Penrose also has a new idea it's in a book called cycles of time that the Universe was preceded by another Universe which was preceded perhaps by another one and each cycle uh and big bang rebirth the the these values may may evolve and mutate so we have serial evolving mut uh universes reincarnation if you will of universes as opposed to multiple universes so I like the idea of Serial rather than parallel universes now our idea that conscious the brain processes Quantum biology connect to this fundamental level uh gets into deac territory because it's very consistent with a lot of viic and Buddhist ideas that Consciousness and spirituality uh and and and at this fundamental level there's non-locality which mean things repeat over time o over space and time and in some sense holographic uh at different scales so they they can percolate up and be accessed and selected by conscious processes in the brain and this is the fundamental uh idea of the of the uh theory that uh that Penrose and I have come up with so uh I don't believe that that the mind is an emergent property uh or doesn't exist at all as Michael was saying and nor do I quite go quite as far as deac that Consciousness is everything but I think this stuff at the bottom this fundamental SpaceTime geometry includes all this information not the blueprint of the universe including the precursors of Consciousness so that our brains have evolved to the point where we can access and select and even be influenced and guided by information embedded in the fundamental level of the universe and I think that's kind of a a bridge a potential Bridge uh and I should say Roger doesn't doesn't go into spiritual questions he leaves that to me uh and I have nothing to lose either because I make my living passing gas as an anesthesiologist but I think that I seriously think that Quantum processes in the brain connected to this fundamental level and that's a potential bridge between science and spirituality thank you and now to close this first round we have another colleague from Chapman University Professor Bill Wright is's a professor of biology he's a marine biologist and also a cellular neurophysiologist who investigate the neurophysiological basis of and evolution of learning and memory he has included more than 50 undergraduate colleagues as he called them which I really like the terminology in his research and has been supporting cons by the National Science Foundation so I this the uh eight panelists beforehand have sort of floated me off the off the floor and I have to come back down again because my my uh my comments are much more anchored here I you know I'm not a a philosopher and I'm not I don't study history of science science and and I'm definitely not a quantum mechanics uh student but uh what I study instead in this this um you say why why are you here well the the title of this this uh conversation is the nature of reality and and I study nature and and that's what science does and I think it's important that we you know talk a little bit about science since that's the actual question that we have here and so uh I um study science I I study a lot things but one thing I study is the evolution of learning and memory in se- slugs and I do that because SE slugs have a really nervous simp nervous simple nervous system that's easily accessible by electrodes and and we can figure it out and during the course of my studies I found a sea slug that doesn't learn at all it's just a completely non-learning species of sea slug and uh I figured out what was missing in its brain to make it so it couldn't learn this sort of like Consciousness I guess but uh in in eventually uh a student a Chapman approached me and said well what how does the animal get along without being able to learn and uh we hypothesized that learning was about avoiding predation in in in nature for these uh slugs without without very much evidence but Kimmy took it one step further and said are you here by the way Kim if you're here raise your hand no okay um uh that you know well maybe if these slugs aren't learning and this learning is all about avoiding predation maybe then they can compensate for not learning by having lots of nasty chemicals in their body and slugs do this slugs put chemicals in their tissue so that they uh deter predators and so it was a good hypothesis that there'd be a trade-off between the cognitive equipment and this chemical equipment and I was very excited and we we went after it and we actually had to spend some money to get a freeze dryer at Chapman and you know to make these very uh um special pellets that were quite precise and would powerfully test this um hypothesis so we tried first to we put these pellets in front of crabs and we let the crabs eat the pellets when we uh made the pellets out of shrimp which is very palatable the crabs ate them just fine and then when we made it the the pets out of the smart slug the the uh the one that learns the U the crabs ate it about half as much and there was no there was no um overlap at all it was a very powerful method and it was at this time that we started to be afraid and uh you said scientists being afraid what we were afraid that our hypothesis would be disproven and that I've learned actually over the years is exactly what a scientist has to do the scientist has to take their hypothesis and make them vulnerable and so that's what we were doing here and we didn't know what was going to happen we knew we had a powerful test and so uh then a few weeks later the slug came in and we had to do the experiment and so we did the experiment remember the the idea was the smart slug eats this much I'm sorry the the crabs eat this much of the smart slug the crabs eat this much of the uh of the of the shrimp and we expected this guy to be even less palatable and have the crabs wouldn't eat them virtually at all what we found instead was that the crabs ate them like crazy like they were candy so they crabs ate them like they were they were scri so we were really chasing by this because it took our hypothesis and not only disproved it but it was actually we actually discovered the opposite of what we predicted and uh we were you know really crestfallen we were pretty upset and uh you know we sort of gathered ourselves together and said well we did find something right yeah yeah we did find something so here we have this slug that doesn't think and it doesn't put chemicals into its its uh tissue it doesn't even bother with predators and so we we presented this at a chemical ecology venue and they loved it right they didn't know that our hypothesis had been disproven they had no idea how Crest falling they were so uh the the take home message from this Parable it is very different from the rest of the people in the panel is that uh there's really important thing about science that I think everyone in the audience should keep track of and I hope that the the panel comes back to a little bit is what can I do to test my hypothesis making a test of a hypothesis is in a way a more noble Enterprise than the hypothesis itself Bravo so uh I guess that's the the challenge to the to the uh to the panel for the next round if you would all right well thank you to the panel now we are ready for round two now almost everybody went above their 5 minutes they promised me they were going to be shorter on the second time round can I just um being empirical I've observed the amount of time we took and um an hour projecting I I don't know how long we're supposed to go but we could try to do a three minutes each and this time really hold do that but I kept them my by minutes Jim 3 minutes three minutes all I'm I'm on yeah this sort of reminds me listening to everybody of that great painting by Raphael where he's got the older Plato the idealist pointing to the heavens he's got the younger Aristotle the realist pointing to the Earth and that kind of reminds me of this this panel is that we were're split between people pointing to the heavens and pointing to the Earth and from my standpoint as a research institute that is looking for practical Solutions which gets back to what bill was saying which which is testing hypothesis making products that actually benefit people and are useful what we have to do is create a big enough tent it creates not only deo's Mythic spiritual imagination but also Mike's reduction of Science in a in a way that because if you think about science every advancement in science came from a new Audacity Of imagination you know Einstein said it best he said we know one 1,000 of 1% of what is revealed to us so keeping that humility in mind taking a look at at our particular spot and the holographic universe and how we're viewing science and reality in that moment my view depending on where I am in that could be entirely different than Henry's View and he might think I'm crazy but in reality it's the same holographic universe that we're talking about so the Mind itself if it has any humility has to realize it can't perceive reality because if you perceive real reality it would dissolve itself knowing it's illusionary so I what I'd like to propose is we have a Little Bit of Sympathy for the human process we forgive each other our imperfect view of reality and recognize as part of the human process and that part of that human process is as we go along we change our view we evolve and ultimately we get to the point where perhaps we don't need a method and perhaps we don't need words it is is it in fact being this that is reality and so what I'd like to from our standpoint from research St Institute is our goal is to investigate reality and Consciousness in a way that helps people get to the point we don't have to do that anymore so that'll turn the thank you and that was great job thank you andry three um well I first want to um say a word about this idea that uh um that's often stated that uh well quantum mechanics is a mystery and Consciousness is a mystery therefore I mean like somebody who doesn't understand Consciousness and doesn't understand quantum mechanics says well therefore they must be related and uh you hear that often but uh I don't think it's quite accurate because uh this I Association of Consciousness with quantum theory uh was really an an essential part of the development of quantum theory itself I mean these issues are brought together by the quantum theorists and there are thousands of Papers written by very serious Quantum physicists and they are putting these two things together so it's not just the two things are Mysteries therefore they're related the conscious the quantum theorists themselves are putting these two things together and trying to figure out uh how they how they mesh U now the second thing is we heard it talk down there about uh um backward and time effect and uh by the way most of the panelists probably know there's been a very recent experiment by Cornell physicist B which seems to indicate there is some sort of mysterious backward and time effect maybe it'll go away it's a new experiment but uh an essential part of uh quantum theory as it's understood is something called um Wheeler's delayed Choice experiment and I can't describe it in three minutes but the main point is it's what you choose now uh determines what happened much earlier at can and these experiments have actually been done what what you choose to do now determines what happened in the past and in fact in Leonard's book with uh uh Hawking uh they say it uh because of this effect the the choice the observer's choice by his choice of what to do now creates the history not the history creates The Observer and uh so this is a very funny part of quantum mechanics and um the point is Quant theory is a mystery and uh but the Observer seems to be as far as we can understand an essential part of it so I don't think it you can wave wave this thing off and just say there are both Mysteries there or some they're connected thank [Applause] you w lost 10 seconds feel like I know that's all right you know how how you you clutch up sometimes when you go to a buffet and there's so much to eat and you don't know what to go first and you have one little plate this big how am I going even do that so I just want to say one thing uh since we had such a wonderful story about um um hypothesis and testing uh you know that that looking to to see if you're right is the important thing um I want I just I'll just add as a as a another facet of that that precision and being not vague but you know really precise mathematically uh phrasing your your your questions which you know we not going to do on the stage here but in general is very important in science and if you relax that require and you um allow um wombs of creation and and um and uh platonic values in the plank time space time then I I think that um it's very hard to um come to any conclusion about what they mean or or um uh or you know what what value those ideas have I think in in the case of deo's uh uh womb um you know I sure in physics we have the same thing we you know the vacuum State and so but what we do is we take it and it's it's a mathematical uh we Define it mathematically and put it into a theory and derive consequences from it and um so it has a certain very specific meaning that you have to study a lot to understand exactly what it means but but it is defined very precisely and I I guess I'll just issue a warning that that we should require that of um the concept being discussed thank you yeah Michael okay deepo when you use phrases like womb of creation this is what I'm talking about with the Dr woooo stuff um it's not precise and I have a feeling you don't mean it metaphorically poetically Etc which would be fine but I have a feeling that's not how you're using it so that that's a problem Consciousness is in the same category it it's not clearly defined so you said at the basis at the base of reality is consciousness and then you ventured a definition of Consciousness it's the ground of existence at the base of reality is the ground of existence reality is existence existence is existence you've explained nothing that's tautological this is like saying gravity is the tendency for objects to attract to one another why do objects attract to one another because of gravity see it doesn't explain anything see we have to have operationally defined uh testable hypothesis about these things like let's take the se- slug yay finally okay something to work with why don't you conscious guys talk about the sea slug in quantum mechanics why don't we see any papers on Consciousness in the sea slug and quantum mechanics because it isn't us right it's not our our you know evolved Super Brain and um and so that's what bothers me about that now steuart you still what I would like to know if I'd like you to answer this question where is Aunt Millie's mind when her brain is disintegrating in Alzheimer's or cility where did it go if it if it still exists somewhere where is it and can we test it because that would be indistinguishable from it not existing at all if you just say we can't access it you want to know now or you well you can do it you can do it when you get there um and by the way I think I think you're not a holist she right there man Millie's there I think you're not a holess you guys are not holess you're ultimately reductionist 25 orders of magnitude smaller all the way down to the plon scale that's reductionism you don't have to go that far you can start at the neural level that's the atom of the thought okay so one last thing um this backward time thing I just I just wrote an analysis of this for Scientific American okay this is a deeply flawed in my opinion experiment this so here it is college students are looking at a computer screen and they have to guess uh whether the image is going to appear on the left side of the screen or the right side of the screen there's a little curtain there and behind one of them are neutral images behind the other are erotic images college students thinking about you know erotica okay and for some reason they were able to pick the erotica ones more than the neutral ones uh and that and Steven colar called this extra sensory pornception or time Tri to time traveling uh pornography anyway so only if they saw them later at a later time yeah that's right yeah yeah so um you know okay anyway so it's being published okay whatever uh I mean you know something like more or more than 50% of peer-reviewed papers turn out not to be true I I I promise you this will be one of them uh it's just it doesn't match the way we know that the world Works anyway so I just think the key word here on Quantum Consciousness is baloney thank you just three minutes three minutes so Michael uh whenever he doesn't understand anything uses words like balone woo Etc you you have a g being in the presence of physicists who were colleagues of Heisenberg and Wolf Gang POI to say Quantum Consciousness baloney Observer balone you have real that's just an aror now I'm just going to do an experiment with you right now can you imagine a sunset right now do you see it is there a picture where is it if I looked inside your brain I'd see electromet my turn if I looked inside your brain I'll see neurotransmitters and synaptic firings you're seeing a picture where is that picture that's called the hard question right now nobody knows nobody has a theory of it okay when you see this bottle what's coming from here is a colorless photon is setting electrical firings to your brain and there are synaptic firings and chemicals nobody has a picture nobody has the vaguest idea how you see this bottle it's called the hard question and it is a wellknown dilemma because there's no Theory your brain which is inside your head has no experience of the external world the brain cells respond to pH electrolytes hormones body temperature and ultimately electrical ionic shifts how does it create the experience of the external world there's no Theory the scientists say we'll have a theory it's a promisory note and in this economic in this economic environment we're not accepting promisory notes okay so the question is we have no idea how the Big Bang occurred we have no idea what happened in the first 10 the^ of - 43 seconds not even the theory we have we have no idea why the constants are as they are unless we postulate 10 the^ of 500 universes we have no idea how inanimate matter became animate we have no idea how the human nervous system which is an activity of the universe is self-referential we have too many questions that we don't know so is there an Ultimate Reality if there is science is not going to be able to answer it because science is also an expression of that ultimate reality your nervous system is not a material object your nervous system is an activity of the universe okay and there are people in this audience there are who can talk about time symmetric uh mechanics how the information in the future leaks into the present resolves indeterminacies and they're very well published forget about pure review journals they are very well published with very high credentials there's a lot we don't know about backward time delayed Choice time symmetric there's a lot we don't know about non-locality which is a given now in physics how does a realm of existence exist where everything is correlated how does your body function as an integrated hole you know how does a human body think thoughts play a piano kill germs remove toxins and make a baby all at the same time while tracking the movement of stars and planets because your biological rhythms are tied to the Symphony of the universe we have to go beyond this mechanistic reductionist obsolete science which is Frozen in an obsolete worldview it that obsolete worldview looks only at the universe out there at the objects totally ignoring the Observer which is a myth so I'm not arguing with Michael I'm arguing with the synaptic networks [Applause] okay fores thank you uh I come from a Greek background and we have a a religion in Greece that we call Orthodox Orthodox Church uh I have always been um against Orthodoxy not not against the Orthodox church but against Orthodoxy we have to be very careful as scientists not to be dismissive of what we don't understand not to laugh at something that is we don't capture with our limited imagination or limited understanding and but really to look forward because in fact science has progressed all the time by this lips of of understanding that a few people including lbert Einstein you know when he wrote his theory of relativity especially the relativity everybody was laughing you know they were dismissing him and it was not in fact until um Sir Arthur Edington uh went and observed the the staright the deflection of staright during a total solar eclipse in 195 that Einstein became instantly famous and people paid attention because of the effort that U that Edington put into this thing so because we don't understand something today it doesn't mean that that's it that's it the the game is over uh I want also to give another historical example it was um Kelvin Lord Kelvin who had the uh more or less the 10th of the 19th century predicted that the end of physics was at hand there were only really two little clouds that hung in the Horizon and one was uh the um namely the uh Laurence the what eventually became L transformation special activity namely the Michaelson morle experiment I won't go into that too much and the other one was the behavior of of photons in So-Cal black body radiation well one the first one gave the theory of relativity and the second one gave quantum Theory within a few years after Lord Kelvin had spoken those words so science is against Orthodoxy we as scientists have to be very careful not to be dismissive just because we don't capture with our current understanding and the last point I want to say in terms of what bill was saying a bit while ago of course yes we always have to test our hypothesis Einstein and again I'll example of Einstein when they ask him well how come you how do you what do you come with the tensor idea of the general theory of relativity there was really no there was absolutely no laboratory experiment at the time that could have predicted that and he said um because it is right and said how do you know it's right because he said if God existed who have to be to make it that way so there was his deep mathematical understanding which eventually gave birth to the laboratory experiments the astronomical observations he was so sure about it he was right so we have to be very careful not to be dismissive of the other side so to speak just because we don't understand it currently Micha um if I could say something about Orthodoxy uh um I would agree that uh we have to be careful in every field about Orthodoxy but I would use the word dogmatism rather than Orthodoxy uh um and if I uh when when I was reading Einstein he talked about the experience of the mysterious he wasn't talking about some parallel universe with you know some mystical thing but I think he was pointing to a datum of Human Experience uh that we our universe we experience it as a mystery and he didn't mean by that that which cannot be understood but rather that which is infinitely intelligible and and I think that understanding of mystery is important for uh intellectual humility and an undermining of dogmatism thank you thank you so let me respond to a couple things Michael said uh Consciousness is vague not to me Consciousness is what goes away with anesthesia and comes uh comes back when I turn off the vaporizer and while my while my patients are under anesthesia uh their brains are quite active we do evoke potentials they have slower EEG they process information we do that for spine surgery to measure the Integrity of the spinal cord their brains are active all that's missing is consciousness and the anesthetic gases act strictly by Quantum London forces they don't form chemical or ionic bonds so they erase Consciousness everything uh continues he called Quantum Consciousness baloney in an article a few years ago in Scientific American uh he criticized me and Roger and uh he cited the fact that Quantum biology is impossible uh from a by a guy named Victor Stanger who had an idea that mass times velocity time distance can't exceed the plank scale well that's been uh that's been proven wrong a thousandfold by uh uh ferine molecules porin in superposition by Zyer and the quantum tuning fork actually nanoscale but but still zillions of atoms so the argument that he used in that in that piece which he referred to a Quantum quackery which I resent as a physician by the way so I think you're you're full of baloney um and finally uh experiments in in Japan uh by Honor Bon bipa have now shown uh Quantum States and microtubules lasting at least point1 millisecond over uh 21 microns and uh uh for uh for1 millisecond so it exceeds it shows uh it shows that Mac at least mesoscopic microtubules which is where we think Consciousness residing can be Quantum now reduction is going to the plank scales reduction is yes but when you get to the quantum you get non ality so everything changes so you call it reductionist but it's not materialist um backward time uh darl bm's paper was one in a the most recent a long Series going back to Ben liit showing backward time effects in the brain uh Beerman and Raiden Raiden showed it in uh in emotional experiments uh at the upcoming toris science of Consciousness in Stockholm uh next month uh in early May there'll be a number of papers uh from uh monkey uh talks monkey amydala with back backward time humans with implanted electrodes showing backward time uh looking at faces uh it's a fact it's it's hard to in fact uh conventional mainstream neuroscientists find in their data but they they ignore it and you say yeah we saw that but we can't talk about that so it's there and if you want to be scientific about it you have to you have to address that um Aunt Millie okay so um I've been asked this a number of times uh you know about near-death experience aob body experiences and most recently a TV show on about reincarnation and they had this kid who had memories of a World War II uh fighter pilot who died there was no way the kid could know these these details and they asked me well how do you explain that wise guy and uh I said well you know I don't know for sure and I can't validate this this is true but there certainly are a lot of anecdotal stories about about this it seem hard to explain so I said in our view that Consciousness is happening uh in the brain in the microtubules in the neurons but going down to the plank scale geometry still there going down to the plank scale geometry between the ears now when when the blood stops flowing the heart stops the brain becomes acidotic uh es schic uh there's no blood flow the quantum information the micro microt Tu will stop Co being coherent but the quantum information in the plank scale isn't loss but can uh delize or dissipate to the Universe At Large and remain in the plank scale non-locally so uh it's conceivable I I you know I'm not saying that I don't claim evidence but I'm claiming a scientific plausibility for Consciousness out of the body after death that could even in the plank scale non-locally distributed but remaining as a soul if you will a Quantum Soul by entanglement which could in principle go back inside another zygo embryo and the micr tube bus inside another zyg zygo embryo so I think that's that's scientifically uh possible Stuart time that's it yep that's it thank you okay I guess I'm going to close this off I um I think that uh I want to come back to testing hypotheses and and manasu said of course we test hypothesis and uh but I do think that the general public at large is not so aware of the importance of testing hypothesis how many of you have U heard of Einstein inventing general relativity raise your hand okay so now how many of those that raised your hand uh know what the empirical test of that general relativity is much smaller percentage most of people here do but it was a really it was a it was a watershed moment when they they saw a star behind a solar eclipse and it brought General relative general relativity to the citizens it brought us it brought us humility so the the testing the hypotheses bring science humility without it you just have another arrogant [Applause] science okay okay while they bring me some of the question I don't know if they're coming from there I I'd like to ask you to please thank our panelist especially for their being so good thank you we actually recuperated quite a bit of time so we have about 20 minutes to go with a few questions okay this is a for question for Deepak what happens with psyche sleep body rests with a heart always beating always or your mind goes to sleep I don't I don't understand the question but I can say that your mind your emotions your breath your autonomic nervous system your lyic system your brain and your body are an integrated process and one is not separate from the other if I give you information right now that you know you have a terminal disease that will affect every biological response in your body instantly so you metabolize information into biological response if I tell you on the other hand that you won the lottery or you know that this lovely girl is in love with you you might have a different biological response so we cannot separate mind from body or Consciousness their mind body and Consciousness are an integral whole period there an interesting question from one of our MBA students how does language affect what we understand and how do we Define the nature of reality it doesn't say who should be answering anybody wants to pick this up yeah I I could pick it up um sure it was actually Nils Bor who uh wrote extensively about the importance of language uh and um brought out the the problems with understanding quantum theory that really had to do with uh uh the language that we are used to Everyday experience and that language does not translate into into Quantum phenomenon so we have to we have to think of the of the importance of language and uh maybe a dollar with linguist and physicist is very very important at this point but you see this is an example here where Stuart said he was going to define consciousness so language matters but he didn't he just said it's what goes away when I give him anesthesia that's not a definition ofous just tell us what you think it is it's a self- collapse of the wave function objective reduction is defined by penrose's super position reaches a threshold has a moment of Consciousness that happens roughly 40 times a second in our brains it acts it connects brain processes including the cognitive information to the fundamental level of the universe where the protoc conscious uh qualia are and that's what Consciousness is but he doesn't get that Stuart you know I have to say wait to a physicist the physics that you spoke there sounds like Greek spoken backwards yeah because biologist what bi the qu the collapse of the W fun what are you talking about well okay let me answer okay okay okay guys this where the action is you're using the physics terminology it's not the observer effect okay you don't need what you let's just take one thing I I understand the collapse of a wave function can you tell me what you're talking about it's a self collapse of the wave function what does that mean sleep me what's a p sleep I don't know second S I don't know what you're can I can I answer his question Penrose okay it Penrose objective reduction which he uh postulated in ' 89 as the mechanism for Consciousness means when you have a superp position that avoids decoherence by eal H over t e equals the is the superposition separation and gravitational self energy H is Plank's constant over 2 pi T is the time at which you will reach self collapse is subjective reduction when that happens it's a moment of Consciousness uh something like a whitehead occasion of experience like a a Buddhist moment of awareness it's a moment of consciousness it happens 40 roughly 40 times a second at Gamma synchron rates or or higher faster if you're in an excited state and that's how we have 40 or more Moments Of Consciousness per second what is a wave function steuart okay it's a super it's a Well I think I think these are just terms being strung together with some from biology some from physics and they don't have this is the moment for the audience start can I ask the audience a question from the audience can can I text one to somebody you can bring it up hopefully not from one of our students the question is Alter States due to chemical drugs is that a separate reality or is part of the same reality how do they affect our think can I answer that no if anybody has want an anesthesiologist all right anesthesiologist well anesthetics reduce the quantum mobility in these hydrophobic Pockets inside proteins uh psychedelic drugs were shown in the 1970s by kangy and green and Sal Snider and others uh in in in these assays that when they mix them put them with the receptors the more potent the Psychedelic compound was the more it promoted the more electron resonance energy it donated to the receptor which means in my view that these these psychedelic compounds push the system more into the quantum State more into uh what does that mean that means deep interconnectedness hidden meanings more Quantum non-locality and I think enlightened uh enlightened States through meditation or drugs we go deeper uh faster rates of of of Consciousness maybe from 40 to to hundreds uh uh moments per second greater intensity it's like shifting on the electromagnetic spectrum from infrared to ultra violet or even higher so we have higher higher intensity more conscious moments which means the perceived world slows down and we're more in touch with the underlying protoconsciousness in the universe a comment from deac and then have another question just one comment like right now you're all listening to me right now just turn your attention to who's listening okay so be aware of who's listening okay that's Consciousness okay it's not a thought which might be I wish I'd gone to the bathroom before I went to this lecture a thought is a is a fluctuation in that awareness that's experiential now one more thing there are physicist here published physicist here who can give you information on non-locality which is a term that these guys totally avoid because it's the white elephant in the room what is nonlocality what is that domain outside of space and time which is where everything is correlated what is what is non locality Jeff you're a physicist here we're going to get we're going to get somebody from the audience now that's audience action Jeff do you want to come up Jeff Texon is a professor of physics here at Chapman University and uh he has often lectured about the issue of non locality so since that's something has been mentioned and it's probably not a household terms we'll ask you to say a couple of words about non locality okay so I have what 20 minutes no you have to stick with it four minutes four minutes time while you're at it all right well um niche of reality uh well in short I don't know I don't know about the UL can you hear me okay no is it better okay okay um ultimate nature reality of course non locality non locality non-locality okay um so this um this is the discovery that comes out of Orthodox Quantum mechanic mechanics what is Quant mechanics it's a theory it's about 80 years old it's regarded as the most successful uh theory in the whole history of of human civilization and um non-locality I Henry I think you've characteriz it as one of the most profound discoveries of science um true it's really dramatic I don't really know how to express it to you more profoundly I mean it's you want to know what it is have two minutes left so don't keep them in this Su explain with tell us okay everybody go to the bathroom now and come back um it's uh there are two aspects to it there's an aspect um that was really um started by a question that Einstein posed he was very very uh uh worried about one of these um profound changes about the nature of reality that came about through quantum mechanics this uh seemed to be the throwing out of something called determinism and before that uh from our you know Newton s Isaac Newton it looked like we could understand you know if we had understood the state of the universe at one time we understood how things evolved we could understand everything everything could in principle be understood about the nature of the universe so this this business called uh non-locality suggests that there are connections across vast distances in space and time which you can never put together according to the classical way ofing things seem to be connected in in very strange ways now there's a real restriction to how this happens because you can't use this to send signals faster than light you know the thing that that Einstein said there's a maximum speed limit speed of light um so uh but so don't use it for that turns out it's a incredibly useful thing in physics all kinds of useful discoveries come out of all kinds of useful new technologies new understandings and so on and so forth so this is really I guess my point is that there's just tremendous number of very very exciting new discoveries coming out all the time in science and U it's kind of an indication that maybe we don't have a deep intuition we don't really even know where to begin to answer that question but I can tell you that there are are in my opinion three pillars uh as to how where some of the most exciting research has happened one is the business of non-locality and this shows up not only in the way things are connected across vast distances in space and time but and also the way things interact this is I mean this is incredibly dramatic I can't emphasize it enough this is amazing aspect of the Grandeur of the universe and the other aspect is very strange relationships in time the whole business of the nature of the flow of time which seems to be you know very fundamental in our experience this is you know there's a lot of new research on this and there's some very exciting new discoveries in this this as than there's going to be a quiz at the exit about so you better make sure you understand can I take can I take give me two minutes there is a question foral okay non just very simply okay in normal experience if two things are to affect each other they have to have contact so if Michael's going to throw you off the roof you has to be there with you and throw you off the roof or deac and so they have to have contact in space that's called locality something that affects something else has to be local even if there's a force between two objects there's a force field that makes it happen it doesn't just happen across space so in quantum theory there's an effect where um something can be kind of in two places at one time in a way which I won't get into because I don't want to go over the two minutes but but as a result when you do something at one side to one of the locations the the other location which is not in contact which is could be at the other side of the universe light years away is affected by what you did here that's nonlocality the something that is not locally not in the same place doesn't touch it doesn't communicate with it can affect something that happens elsewhere where okay so that's just in a in a basic level what non-locality means but it's important to know that that it's a subtle thing and you can't use it say to communicate faster than light or anything like that but I I you know I won't go into the details but in quantum theory that is what non-locality is can I have 30 seconds I have a followup question actually for for L the C from the can I have 30 seconds just to say should we give you 30 seconds please um the way quantum theory works you have questions that are posed by experimenters or observers and nature gives an answer in this situation uh you have questions being posed by uh observers and various parts of the universe and what happens is that in order to give the answer here you cannot assume that it is unaware of all the questions that are asked over here so the question for you is I don't understand exactly what he means but do you envision that's why it's for you do you envision a time when humans can perceive directly any of the 11 dimensions of M Theory oh do do I well first of all let me say that that that I don't make Lord kelvin's mistake and make predictions about what the future of science is and I think that that's a mistake that's been made actually not just by him but by many many many people through many famous people through history in fact a famous uh scientist I forget who it was about two years before the right Brothers said we'll never have airplanes that's another good one um so I you know I won't really I won't predict but um current the current M Theory as it currently is and you know it is a work in progress and we know very little about it if it's correct then then these Dimensions seem to be too small to ever be observed so is that a testable hypothesis yes it is a testable hypothesis testable if you I'll tell you how so um a a theory must be testable to be valid in science it must make predictions that are falsifiable like the like the sea slugs but a theory can also have elements not every the not every element of the theory needs to be testable the theory needs to have testable predictions but it can also have elements in it that aren't testable that that's perfectly valid as long as there's a way to falsify the theory you don't have to be able to test every element and then then you know sometime you might be able to come up with the test of those elements if you don't know how to test them now but all that all that we demand of a theory is that it makes some testable predictions and the more testable predictions that that survive the experiment the more faith we have in the theory 10 the^ 500 un versus testable the theory the theory first of all let me let me say again M Theory is still being worked out okay but the theory in in theory the theory is testable okay people will not will not stay with the theory if they think it's not testable so um now whether or not the other the other universes are according to the theory causally disconnected from ours so we can't go there we can't observe them and in a sense it's just uh philosophical speculation to talk about them well but as I I said for a theory to be accepted in science all the all the predictions all the elements of the theory don't have to themselves be testable it just has to make that M Theory is totally inelegant as far as Sciences well that's your mathematical um assessment and other people have studied mathematics have other feelings about that okay let me let me close we have one more question for four people so I think that I read this question the four people are Stewart Michael Deepak and Henry so and the question is where Eisenberg was quoted as saying what we see is not nature around us but nature exposed to our method of questioning can you tell us whether you agree disagree and explain why maybe we start with Stewart yeah Heisenberg was stopped by a a cop for speeding and he said you know how fast are we going and he says no but I know exactly where I am I'm not I'm I'm not sure actually I didn't quite follow the question but but let me just make the point that that you don't need a conscious Observer outside science that as bour and wigner and a lot of the Copenhagen in our view Consciousness is intrinsic in the universe it's on the edge between the quantum and classical worlds it's related to something that's been there all along you don't you don't we don't want to put it outside science I'll just leave it at that de do you want me to read again or no I get the question I'm very familiar with the quote in Heisenberg is exactly correct we do not see nature as it is but we see nature as it is exposed to a method of questioning the scientific method of questioning is a particular method which is based on a fundamental subject object split so you know that I am the subject and there's the object and nature is the object but my question is how do you get outside of nature to observe you know how do you measure the Universe from inside the universe because you're as much an activity of the universe so science is a method for exploring a particular map of the truth but it's not a method for exploring Ultimate Reality thank you Michael yeah this quote is in Deep's paper uh co-author with Professor kados that he asked me to read and comment on tonight and I wrote it by the way this paper is called how Consciousness becomes the physical Universe it's the second word in the title and they don't even Define it we will sidestep any precise definition of Consciousness limiting ourselves for now to willful actions on the part of the Observer so what can it possibly mean for the universe to be conscious its willful actions it's an observer um anyway this is the problem with this that without precise operationally defined terms we can't really sink our teeth into it experimentally and say whether there's any sense made in this so so with the Heisenberg quote I just wrote this would no this would imply that any anyone's method of questioning is just as valid as anyone else's the astrologers questions about the universe are just as valid as the astronomers well maybe in some philosophical drinking Club but if you want to get a spacecraft to Mars you use astronomy the questions those guys ask are way better than the astrologers by any objective standard Amy you care to comment on this yeah um so I've already uh I'm just reiterating what I already said really but let me say it again the U the way that quantum theory at least works and I think Heisenberg was uh referring now to Quantum Theory uh specifically although viewed from a general philosophical perspective the way it works is that you actually have three processes going on you have the physical process which is the generalization of the uh classical mechanical deterministic processes described in terms of mathematical and physical variables and then you have to but that generates this gigantic world of possibilities which doesn't agree with experiment now the way quantum theory works at least and and this is tied exactly into quantum theory is that in order to uh eventually get your theory to agree with experience uh you have to have what turns out that to be two more stages that bring you up to uh uh agreement with experience the first of these stages is the Observer has to pose a specific question and uh in fact in the book of Leonard and uh uh Hawkings U they talk about this top down approach uh the in order to make sense of this uh Theory this m function Theory you basically say well uh you some sort of experience happens and the question is well what causes that particular experience to come into being and the way that quantum theory deals with that question is to say that in order this is at least a a procedure and the procedure that's taught in your quantum mechanics courses and uh is that the experimenter has to pose a particular question this is the we're talking about science we're talking about physics we're talking about how quantum physics is taught the quantum The Observer experimenter has to ask a question of Nature and then nature responds in this non-global way and uh so that's what he was referring to in order to to go to make uh an understanding of nature as it was revealed to us by the uh uh uh experiments that uh overthrew classical mechanics and move on to a new understanding of nature uh uh the understanding provided by quantum mechanics did involve the three stages and one stage was uh somehow a question and the point is this question was not determined in any way by the underlying deterministic Laws of Motion the Shiner equation the uh deterministic law of motion does not determine the qu the question and uh so that's the essential core of this whole discussion uh you have this question that seems to be needed in order to make quantum mechanics work and you don't have a real understanding of where it comes from and uh so the quote says well it's nature exposed to our questioning of it thank you well ladies and gentlemen thank you very much I thank again our thank you thank you to all of us that all the staff that has helped with this humongous event thank you yeah thank you you made it

Channel: Chapman University

Views: 177,127

Keywords: Deepak Chopra, Chopra Center, Chopra Foundation, Menas Kafatos, Bill Wright, Jim Walsh, Stuart Hameroff, Leonard Mlodinow, Daniele Struppa, Henry Stapp, Carmichael Peters, Michael Shermer, Jim Doti, Chopra Center for Well Being, computational physics, anesthesiologist, skeptic magazine, human energy system, alliance, religious studies

Id: 7WA76VTq3O8

Length: 115min 22sec (6922 seconds)

Published: Fri May 06 2011