By Deepak Chopra, M.D., FACP, Murali Doraiswamy, MD, Professor of Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina, Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D., Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University, and Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH); Menas Kafatos, Ph.D., Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor in Computational Physics, Chapman University<\/p>\n
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When you give a red rose to your beloved on Valentine\u2019s Day, you have every right to say, \u201cI made this for you.\u201d\u00a0 All the qualities that a rose possesses \u2013 its velvety texture, lush red color, even its thorns \u2013 are real to us because our perception makes them real. \u00a0Photons of light have no color, only frequencies and wavelengths. The point of a thorn has no sharpness. The scent of a rose isn\u2019t sweet when seen merely as airborne molecules. The reality of these specific qualities is tied to us. The brain processes electrochemical signals sent from photoreceptors in the eye to \u201ccreate\u201d the color red. Skin encapsulated mechanosensory receptors send electrochemical signals that reassure us of a solid \u201cmaterial\u201d world, but the prick of a thorn is created by our brain.\u00a0 Indeed we now know that the brain takes into account a number of factors to choose how much pain to create; varying any one of these factors can affect how prickly the same thorn is.<\/p>\n
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There is no provable link between \u201cThis is what I see\u201d and \u201cThis is real.\u201d With a different brain comes a shift of perception, and everything about a rose would change. \u00a0Roses exist in the world of snails who chew the leaves, aphids who suck the sap, moths who lay eggs in hidden crevices, and cats who lurk underneath to wait for a bird to alight.\u00a0 But what these organisms experience is certainly not the rose for Valentine\u2019s Day. As humans we have no conceivable way of entering the perceptual world of those creatures. We can only imagine a link, and then we take\u00a0our imagined similarities for granted.<\/p>\n
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Recent research has revealed that birds may migrate by translating the lines of the Earth\u2019s magnetic field into visual information. Their retinas possess magnetic-sensitive cells (cryptochromes) that may do the trick.\u00a0 Bird migration has long been a mystery to science, and this theory can now be added to rival theories about navigation through smell, the sighting of landmarks, following food trails, and guidance through the pattern of stars or the sun and moon.\u00a0 In fact, the migration can be argued to be more closely tied to quantum rather than to everyday phenomena. All of these theories depend on extrapolating from our sensory experience, yet there is no proof that the world our brains bring us is the norm.<\/p>\n
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Instead, the evidence leads entirely in the other direction. Humans, in general, \u00a0five broadly defined senses that operate within a limited band of reception (e.g., we can\u2019t hear frequencies that bats and dogs hear or see ultraviolet light as some spiders do). If that were the only obstacle, there would be no problem deciphering reality. Some creatures would be better at certain things (the way a vulture can smell rotting carrion from miles away) and worse than others (like the blind cave fish who have lost the sense of sight). Even the lowly fruit fly can smell a glass of red wine from over ten football fields away!<\/p>\n
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But this misses the crucial point. If we cannot conceive of how other creatures perceive the world, that\u2019s the same as saying that their world is inconceivable.\u00a0 A chameleon lizard has two eyes that rotate independently of each other.\u00a0 One can look up while the other looks down.\u00a0 Try using your finger tip to push one of your eyes out of alignment. The result is wiggly confusion, because without two eyeballs held in alignment, we cannot make a coherent picture of the world.\u00a0 So the chameleon is turning the inconceivable into the conceivable, but not in a way that we can grasp. Two swivel eyes are outside our realm of perception.<\/p>\n
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Most scientists would have no objection going this far, but now the trickiest bit enters.\u00a0 If other creatures are doing something inconceivable when they make their reality picture, so are we.\u00a0 Humans are perceptual agents, like any other creature. Our brains evolved to present reality in one way only \u2013 the human way, not the amoeba, frog, bird, or cat way \u2013 and we cannot step out of our brains.\u00a0 Trapped by our perceptual mechanism, we have no measure of reality outside the prison walls, as it were. Why is our perception more \u201creal\u201d than every other creature\u2019s?<\/p>\n
Again, many scientists would have no problem with this statement.\u00a0 Stephen Hawking belongs to the camp of physicists that believe that reality exists \u201cout there\u201d as a material fact, but he concedes, as did Einstein before him, that science doesn\u2019t claim to know what reality is. Believing in reality \u201cout there\u201d is an assumption, the biggest one in science, and Einstein called it \u201cmy religion\u201d to denote that this was an article of faith. Many other quantum pioneers, like Bohr and Heisenberg, abandoned this article of faith, declaring that if atoms and molecules had no definite position in time and space and no solidity (i.e., all matter can be reduced to energy clouds),\u00a0 the reality perceived through the five senses has no privileged truth behind it. \u00a0What you see is what you get, but that doesn\u2019t make it real. As such, the world of quanta is made of \u201chaps\u201d (events) rather than \u201chard\u201d particles that bounce around.<\/p>\n
We are all engaged in the process of reality-making, but it\u2019s a mistake to believe that we do this through the brain.\u00a0 Here is where materialists (the vast majority of scientists) draw a line in the sand. For them, the brain, as the processor of sense information, must be the place where reality is created out of raw data.\u00a0 Such a position is na\u00efve, because it begs the question of how the brain acquired its reality-making ability.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 Claiming that the brain is the source of everything we perceive (sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts) is like claiming that a radio composes music or a TV writes the script for a show A processor looks a lot like a creator. The brain is doing lots and lots of things at the atomic and even quantum level, as is a radio. But none of these activities turns the inconceivable into the conceivable.\u00a0 A rose has no color until the visual cortex processes the information from photons striking the retina. That is indisputable. But nobody can spot how a neuron in the visual cortex suddenly \u201csees\u201d red. All one can measure is chemical activity and tiny bursts of electricity. There\u2019s no seeing in that. Likewise, a neuron can\u2019t \u201cfeel\u201d the hardness of a desk or \u201csmell\u201d a rose, yet we can. .<\/p>\n
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The transformation of the inconceivable into the conceivable can be mapped; it isn\u2019t entirely opaque.\u00a0 There is a chain of events to follow, Sherlock Holmes-like, from the red rose you gave your beloved, beginning with everyday reality and reducing it step by step to get to the source:<\/p>\n
1.\u00a0 The sight, smell, and texture of a rose (i.e., the experience).<\/p>\n
Reduces to<\/p>\n
2. \u00a0The brain assembling the picture of a rose from various regions dedicated to sight, smell, and touch.<\/p>\n
Reduces to<\/p>\n
3. Neurons in each region specifically processing raw data into the qualities of a rose (known technically as qualia).<\/p>\n
Reduces to<\/p>\n
4. The supporting molecular structure that keeps a neuron alive.<\/p>\n
Reduces to<\/p>\n
5. The atoms that compose those molecules, which in turn are composed of atoms.<\/p>\n
Reduces to<\/p>\n
6. The subatomic particles (quanta) that structure atoms.<\/p>\n
Reduces to<\/p>\n
7. The quantum field that gives rise to quanta.<\/p>\n
But then<\/p>\n
DEAD END<\/p>\n
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Nobody really can object to this cascade of events, which obeys the reductionist method of science, and nobody seriously questions the dead end that we reach when we try to discover where the quantum field comes from. But this dead end, as it turns out, demolishes materialism and its faith in reality \u201cout there.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s bad enough that the quantum field is invisible, without location, and only measured through probabilities. Not knowing where this field comes from is fatal to the rest of the story. In the next post we\u2019ll discuss how to get past the dead end so that the story of reality doesn\u2019t die just when it\u2019s getting interesting.<\/p>\n
(To be cont.)<\/p>\n
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Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of more than 70 books with twenty-one New York Times bestsellers and co-author with Rudolph Tanzi of Super Brain: Unleashing the Explosive Power of Your Mind to Maximize Health, Happiness, and Spiritual Well-being. (Harmony)<\/p>\n
Murali Doraiswamy, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina and a leading physician scientist in the area of mental health, cognitive neuroscience and mind-body\u00a0medicine.<\/p>\n
Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D., Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University, and Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), co author with Deepak Chopra of Super Brain: Unleashing the Explosive Power of Your Mind to Maximize Health, Happiness, and Spiritual Well-being. (Harmony)<\/p>\n
Menas Kafatos, Ph.D., Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor in Computational Physics, Chapman University, co-author with Deepak Chopra of the forthcoming book, Who Made God and Other Cosmic Riddles. (Harmony)<\/p>\n
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